You Have to Monitor and Track your Progress – Part 1

How do you train? Are you a devotee of Westside, HIT, Dogcrapp or old school Rippetoe? A cursory flick through the pages of Muscular Development and Iron Man magazine reveal a multitude of routines and systems. Point of fact there are as many systems as there are trainees. How then do you choose?

Forget the routine for a minute it is the method used to measure its efficacy that is important. Like most of you my goals are elegantly simple, gain muscle, lose fat and get stronger.  The achievement of these goals requires the management of many modalities. You must train hard, increase weight on a session by session basis, sleep well and recover. However these are the “what” the key things you must do to gain. How “well” you execute them is revealed by the progress you make. Therefore measuring your performance during your training cycle is fundamental to success.

The physical manifestation of a successful program is borne out in the changes to your physique. You must measure these numbers regularly and be rigorous in your approach. This adherence to measurement was drilled into me by my coach and is the most important adjunct in your training program.

My own approach is simple and might illustrate how easy it is to drive real improvement in your own program. Firstly at the commencement of each cycle I have a Dexa scan performed at my local health facility. Dexa scans are the gold standard in measurement of body mass. For $100 and ten minutes of my time I receive a highly accurate measure of fat mass, muscle mass and bone density. This scan begins a training cycle and becomes the baseline against which all of my progress will be measured. On a weekly basis I will monitor my weight fluctuation via the scale and two weekly via electronic callipers. Ultimately, it is the comparison of numbers on a second scan performed at the end of a quarterly training cycle that will prove the efficacy of my routine.

An adherence to numbers mitigates the typical human response to overestimate changes to the body and underestimate the effort required to effect those changes.

Too often do I see guys in my gym performing random movements based purely on how they feel or worse what the "think" needs work. They never change their routine because they simply don’t realise it isn’t working and they don’t realise it’s not working because they don’t measure and they don’t monitor. Before you ask jumping on the scales won’t cut it. Too often fat gain from loose diets is mistaken for progress and justified by the old chestnut “bulking up”! What is the net result? These guys don’t gain and they don’t know they aren’t gaining because they never measure accurately their response to training.  

Accurately measuring performance yields results. I have gained 7.5 kilo's of pure muscle and made great increases in my deadlift, squat and bench during  my last training cycle. Importantly I have continued to learn what works for me in the gym and what is extraneous to my quest for progress none of which would be evident without accurate tracking.

In this post I have focussed only on one outcome measure: tracking body mass. The same rigour must be applied to your routine, sets, reps and weight. In part 2 I will outline how I manage these modalities and the benefits of old school full body training.

Thomo