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Guidelines To Designing A Training Diary

A training diary is a daily record of your program. Here are some guidelines to helping you create a training diary. Map your success with a training diary.

A daily record of your program

You training diary is your daily record of your program progress, successes and failures. In your daily training diary you will track your physical conditioning such as your waking and activity heart rates sleep patterns, morning body weight, your physical feelings during your training and racing and your competition performance. You can buy pre-printed training diaries through catalogs, from the internet or bookstores.

Diary guidelines

In your diary, you will want to:

  • Record your training sessions in detail. What distances you worked on, the interval types, your riding partner, if any, the route rode and the environmental and weather condition.
  • Record your bedtime and wake time and the time you laid down and woke up from any naps. If you are going to bed late, sleeping less and waking up tired you may be overtraining.
  • After you go to the bathroom in the morning, weigh yourself. If you have lost several pounds since the morning before you may be dehydrated and it is important to drink many fluids before you train again. If you continue to lose weight this way over several weeks, it is a strong sign you are over training.
  • When you wake up measure your heart rate for 15 seconds and multiply by 4 then write this number down in your diary. If your pulse has raised more than five or six beats per minute in the early morning, you may not have yet recovered from the previous day or you may be getting sick. Do not train hard that day. If your pulse is five or six beats per minute higher in the morning for several days, you may be experiencing a very serious form of overtraining. Take a few days off until your waking pulse rate returns to normal.
  • Write down how you feel physically each morning when you wake up. Create a rating scale that will reflect how you feel from, “feeling great and cannot wait to train” to “feeling horrible and do not even want to see a bike”.
  • Do not only record your physical feelings but also your mental and emotional feelings and more importantly your goals, focusing on your motivation level. Your goals are an important part of your program and most riders lose sight of their goals. Reaching your goals is a great confidence booster.
  • Create a comments area in your training diary. In the comments area you will write down any and all illnesses that you experience, state of well-being, enthusiasm level, motivation level at various points (i.e. practice or competition) in your training, arousal and psych-up levels, race and training conditions and any physical, mental or psychological testing.

Map your success
As with any activity in your life, you cannot know where you are without knowing where you have been. By designing a training diary, you are creating a map that shows where you have been and where you desire to be. Maybe every week or every so many days your training diary should have an occasional summary.

Written by alastair · Filed Under Plans