Categorized | Building Muscle

3 Reasons Why You Should Use A Weight Lifting Program Chart

One of the most unused tools available to those individuals looking to add muscle mass to their bodies is a weight lifting program chart. Although they come in many forms, the basic purpose of these charts is to provide a way to document and analyze your strength training progress. If you are serious about adding muscle, you need to work off a weight lifting program chart. Here are three reasons why:

Reason #1: Motivation. I don’t know about you, but I keep my weight training chart up all the time. Why? Because it is a constant reminder of a crucial part of my life: adding and maintaining muscle mass to my body. Each time I see the chart I remember the intensity of my last workout, and more times than not, I start getting mentally prepared for my next workout. Its a great motivator.

Reason #2: Quicker muscle gains. Do you like watching athletes break records? Me too. Well, why don’t you set up your own records to break? That’s exactly how I use my weight lifting program chart. On mine, not only does it show my last 2-3 months of workouts, but it also shows my record bests for each exercise. By constantly challenging yourself against yourself, you will see quicker gains because you will be using your personal best as the goal to beat (and not just the dull routine of keeping track of what you did for that workout).

So remember to include your personal bests for all the exercises you are doing, not just your bench press. And I’ll tell you what, nothing is quite as satisfying as knowing that you just performed at your best. Breaking records can, and should, be just as fun for you, even if you aren’t a professional athlete.

Reason #3: More efficient workouts. I know some guys that lift weights and never keep track of anything. Now, some of them do gain muscle. But my thinking is that they could be adding muscle mass at a much quicker pace if they could analyze their prior workouts from their weight lifting charts.

Who do you think will gain and maintain muscle mass more efficiently?

Weight lifter A is ready to workout. He vaguely remember what he lifted during is last session. He throws some weight on the bar and starts doing some reps. After a few reps, he stops because the weight is too light. So now he adds some more, but again has to stop because now the bar’s too heavy. He’s wasting precious time and energy.

Weight lifter B is ready to workout and looks over his program chart. He sees that in his last three bench press sessions, he has steadily increased the weight by ten pounds each time. He finds out what he lifted during is most recent workout and adds ten pounds to that number. He’s now ready to have a challenging workout.

See the difference in the two weight lifters?

If building more muscle is going to be a priority in your life, you need to use a weight lifting program chart. It will give you additional motivation to workout, cause you to get quicker muscle gains by challenging yourself, and allows you to have shorter, more efficient weight training sessions. Be sure to put your chart somewhere where you can see it often, and never do a workout without documenting your results

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