Tracking your progress - Workout

As they say in the software world, Microsoft Excel is your first competition, it is a very powerful tool with little knowledge required, if you don't find the "There's an app for that", then you can take a few hours and build it how it fits your needs and requirements. That's how my first gym tracking was born, actually a Google Sheets document.

I have bought the 1200+ pages of Arnold's body building bible and used one of the plans from it, which was a 2 day split for beginners.

It's nice and important to see the progress.

This attached sample is from August 2019.

Let's see my progress, what I have reached so far in 2023:

*Chin-Ups was out of question due to my body weight, so as the picture shows I replaced that with lateral pulldowns, as most of the machines top out at 100kg, I could increase the reps to 8-10, but didn't try to build much further.
**Bent-Over Rows, the image shows dumbbells, nowadays I do it with a barbell, 100x10, then above that I shift to deadlifting, which now I can do 160x5 and have a PR with 210kg.
***Abs: for me the most likely to get cramps if I'm not doing it regularly with step-by-step increments. Cramps are lasting 10 minutes, last one was a 8/10 on the pain scale, not quite fun and it takes like 3-4 days to recover, that's quite a hard exercise.

I have around a year of this Google Sheets doc, then I started to try applications, which provide better diagrams, graphing, progress and personal records tracking, totals and statistics, but you don't need all that to start.

Choose exercises and tracking that's easy to do, add reps and/or extra weight every week, the results will come. 💪