Do you know how much you deadlifted February 19, 2006? You should.
Many of you who know me know that i do everything in my power to not track a fucking thing.
It is to my detriment and i am working on keeping better records.
Do your clients know what their max deadlift is? Do they care? Probably but thats if they remember what the deadlift is. Many times as a trainer you forget that your clients are as down with crossfit as you are. It is frustrating to hear clients ask if a deadlfit is this thingy (as she flings her arms over her head with a jump)? patiently you answer no, its when you pick something up off the ground.
I digressed but my point is they may not know enough to remember things that they can look back on and see improvement. It is important for clients to look back and see their progress.
How do you track your clients progress? How do you track your progress?
Feb. 19 2006, I hadn’t yet found CrossFit!
Feb. 19, 2007, I had been CrossFitting for about three months, and honestly, I thought I knew what I was doing – I really didn’t and had terrible form. I did 5×5 OHS, 3×3 back squat, 3×3 deadlifts, 1 mile run.
Feb. 19, 2008 – rest day.
Feb. 19, 2009 – 7 rounds, 7 OHS, 7 K2E. 11:00
Absolutely, I track it! I like to think of it as “showing my work” – haha…little math humor.
Ever since I started training with weights, I recorded my progress. When I started playing beach volleyball more seriously I also kept track of how many hours and in which domains I trained (e.g. skill training etc.) as I learned it helped to identify possible causes for fatigue and over training.
I keep records of pretty much every CrossFit training (about 16 months in) and find it is a good source of motivation and helps a lot with tracking overall progress. I put all the workouts in an Excel sheet where workouts are listed one below the other, starting with the benchmark workouts and Lifts, then on top I put in the months where every month gets 2 columns: one for the result (time or load) and one for modification (scaling) and comments. Usually that is enough because a workouts seldom comes along more then once a month. This makes it real easy to see my capacity for 6 months or 1 year ago.
I do the same for my clients, both for me and for them – so that I always know about which capacity they have (more or less). It makes it easier to tailor workouts for them and estimate how long it may take for them (and avoids accidental overload…). I feel that as a trainer I am responsible to know of about how much my athletes/clients are capable of and tracking results/progress is very helpful here.
As a side note: a few weeks after starting with CrossFit, I deleted most of my previous “strength” training records since I felt they were useless to compare vs the CrossFit results, one reason being that technique of some of the lifts is much improved now (and I do not know which result I would have had earlier had I held myself to that standard) and because some exercises from back then I would now consider rather “harmless” but mostly useless. So another nice thing is that CrossFit has clear standards (movements and numbers), that make it easily trackable.
Jobst,
Good point. The clear standards makes it much easier to track.
Amie,
You are a dork. I love it!
Hehe!
I’ve gotten into a habit of writing down my WODs as soon as I finish because if I don’t, I forget to write it down later. I also used to keep a food journal so that I could see if what I ate affected my performance, if certain things were better than others. I’m all about finding the patterns!
On a side note, I just figured out a couple of days ago that for the past couple of weeks, I’ve only been eating about 10 blocks, which explains why I’ve been so freaking hungry and kept running out of gas every day…glad to get that ironed out.
I keep track of my WOD’s using a blog. It allows for me to write other stuff like: how i feel, how i did the WOD with, and any pictures if there are any.
Danny,can you post your website so we can all keep you accountable?
Amie,
Brilliant idea on the nutrition piece. I suggest everyone add a column for diet info as well as how the body feels that day. That will give some insight into your performances as well.