Make your workout goals fun and more likely to achieve by tracking them in a fitness journal. And motivate yourself even further by creating fitness bullet journal ideas that inspire you to workout. You can use any kind of journal or habit tracker. Maybe one of the best ways is to use a bullet journal fitness tracker to monitor your healthy habits and workout routine on your way to smashing those elusive fitness goals? A bullet journal is a great way to monitor what you are doing and reflect on it. If you want to know a little more about bullet journaling before you start your fitness bullet journal then check out the website and the book.
Decide what you are going to track
Overview of the fitness journal
Your fitness bullet journal encompasses the entirety of your fitness project and will have a fitness tracker within it. You can use the journal aspect of it to write about your feelings, journal about what has gone well, what didn’t go so well. You can also journal about the resistance you feel to fitness. Your journal will also contain your fitness goals. The journal will also contain all the elements listed out below such as a weight loss tracker, a meal planner etc.
What gets you fitness results: a habit tracker
You may have seen some of the bullet journal habit trackers that people have created in images on the internet. Many of them show creative and different ways to track and journal your fitness journey. Essentially trackers track progress. They don’t have to be beautiful and creative. They just need to track. The ‘magic’ comes in the interaction you have with your tracker. The more that you are compelled to keep track of your progress, the more you will keep track of your progress. And keeping track is what will keep you on course to achieve your goals.
If you are the type of person who, in the past, may not have stuck to your projects for long enough to see them come to fruition, then trackers may be your secret weapon to help you stay on course and see the change you want to see.
The Big question: Why do you want to track it?
The bullet journal method lends itself to fitness bullet journal trackers and they can look amazing in your journal. However the most important thing is to know exactly why you are planning on tracking these daily activities. You don’t need to create separate habit trackers for every aspect of keeping track of your health. You can only track so much, it isimpossible to track all the minute details unless you are a full-time athlete with a coach and team of people monitoring you. So you need to decide what is important to you.
Also consider the time element of your fitness project. If it’s a relatively short-term goal then you might be able to devote the time to a higher level of monitoring of your action plan. However, if you are tracking your results over a longer period of time, then you might want a simpler fitness log to reach your goal.
Use these prompts to help you decide what you want to track and discover your internal motivation for why you want to track it, which is ultimately as important, if not more important, than the what of tracking. I am grateful to Chelsea’s blog on the bullet journal website for this useful thought process:
- For each habit you’re tracking or want to track, ask: why do I want to do this? Is it driven by a positive purpose, or a negative mindset? Can I reframe the habit?
- Brain dump of habits, hopes, goals, and dreams you want to tackle.
- Take a look at the brain dump. What is measurable already? If something doesn’t feel measurable, can you make it measurable?
- What’s the time frame for your habits—is it something you need to do daily, weekly, monthly?
Sorting through the above will help you figure out what you actually want or need to track, as well as the way you might track it that will actually help you stick with it.
Habit tracking
A quick note about tracking habits. You can set up separate collections in your fitness bullet journal that deal specifically with particular aspects of physical activity and a healthy lifestyle. Most of the ideas below will be that kind of tracker. You can also incorporate a habit tracker into your Monthly Log. For example, if you want to track how many times you are going to the gym then you can create a small key in your monthly log that would be something like:
G = Gym
S = Swim
Y = Yoga
Then your future self will know what you were tracking. Then on the right margin of the page create three columns: G, S and Y. Add Task bullets in the cells of the columns and then each time you take action and do that activity you can ‘X’ them.
Here are 9 areas that you can monitor in your bullet journal
Weight loss tracker
There are so many different types of tracker available to you. Seek out something via Pinterest or Instagram that inspires you and that is a chart that you would want to interact with. Also decide whether you want a daily planner or maybe a weekly chart.
First decide what your goal is and then create your diet plan from there. With something like losing weight, try and use your tracker in conjunction with your daily log. Your tracker will measure your progress and your daily log will give you insight as to your thoughts around your plan. How were you feeling? Why did you eat cake? Was it because you were sad, or delighted because you’d lost a few pounds and thought you would treat yourself? Take the time to monitor your mental health. Your subconscious thoughts and scripts in your brain are what will be driving your conscious thoughts. If you can track your thoughts you will have a method by which to understand your actions.
For example, if you comfort eat and this is what is stalling your fitness progress then tracking what you are thinking when you comfort eat is going to be your most effective tool to help you adjust your habits. If you know that particular types of stress lead you straight to the fridge, then you can start to work out a different habit for yourself that takes you away from the fridge at crucial moments. This leads me on to quite nicely from understanding your thoughts to hearing how you speak to yourself.
How you speak to yourself matters
I don’t know about you but when I started to realise how I was talking to myself I was a bit shocked. My internal script was so negative. So, as you are tracking your physical progress, make sure you track your mental progress and use your daily log to write down your thoughts during the day. Listen in for how you are talking to yourself. Sometimes it isn’t even talking to yourself, it’s what you are thinking. It’s so subtle that you could miss it. Try and prioritise tracking as a way of cultivating self-awareness and not just tracking progress. You may want to track your body measurements and how they change as you diet and exercise. Being able to do so compassionately will help you to achieve those goals.
I’m definitely not for women, and men for that matter, feeling that they are not ‘good enough’ if they don’t weigh a certain weight or conform to specific body measurements. However you can track your weight loss in a healthy way. Just be intentional about what you want to track and why you want to track it. For example if your current weight makes you feel uncomfortable or out of sorts with yourself then by all means set healthy weight loss goals. A weight loss journey can be very exciting and empowering. To know you have the self control and discipline to decide what you want is always very empowering.
Meal planning
I love the idea of meal planning but what lets me down is that I don’t allocate enough time to actual do the planning. You can have a two page spread. On the left hand page you can create your food / grocery list. On the right hand page you can start to create your meal ideas. You can create a weekly meal planner like this for next week and even do some forward planning. If you have a family holiday coming up you can start to plan your meals well in advance.
One of the benefits of planning your meals in advance is that you are more likely to eat healthily if you have your food prepared. If you know that you have apples ready to eat, you will be less likely to eat cake when you are hungry. If you have smoothy ingredients to hand it will be easy to create a post workout shake rather than eat a burger :-).
Health goals
Your bullet journal can help you track your overall health goals. You may want to lose weight and get fitter, but the reason for that may be the you are suffering neck pain, or back pain that has been caused by a sedentary life. Or you may be out of breath just climbing up one flight of stairs and need to increase your aerobic capacity. Or you may be very tired all the time and have very low energy levels and need to get out into the fresh air more. These are great goals to track because they are personal to you so when you start to see an improvement you will probably be really delighted and that will encourage you to continue with your fitness routine.
Mood tracker
You can easily use bullet journaling to track your mood and you don’t need to create a separate tracker for it if you don’t want to. You can use your Daily log to monitor your mood. Use the – symbol and make a note of your mood. Ryder Carroll also recommends that if you want to write more expansively about your mood, you can turn the – into a + . When you have the time return to your bullet journal to write long form and expand upon your short statement.
Of course you can create your own mood tracker and track it separately and on a regular basis. It could be useful to know if there are times in the week when you feel more or less optimistic. For example you might have a low mood on a Monday morning, but a better mood on a Friday morning. Then you can decide for yourself whether exercising on a Monday morning is too much of a stretch or whether it’s actually a really good idea because it will transform your mood and put you in a much better frame of mind. You might also be able to track that as you get stronger and more resilient, both physically and mentally, that you are better able to overcome your mood and direct yourself to exercise. once you start to see yourself transforming in this way it will give you a lot more confidence in yourself in all aspects of your life.
Water tracker
Water trackers can be great fun. You can create the little water glass outlines and cross them off, or fill them in as you drink each glass. Decide how much water you think it good, and then create that number of glasses on the page. Of course you will need to create that table for each page. However it doesn’t need to be aesthetically pleasing. You can create 8 dots on each day and each time you drink a glass of water turn one of those dots into a cross to indicate that the action is complete.
Sleep tracker
You could create a Sleep Collection that helps you keep track of being able to sleep better. The Collection would track your situation before you went to bed: Was the room dark; did it smell nice; did you eat more than three hours before bedtime; had you exercised that day; did you have a bath before bed; when did you last drink caffeine?
Workout schedule
Of course your fitness bullet journal is going to track your exercise plans. This probably will make up the core of your journal. The workout plan that you choose for yourself is entirely your choice. If you can incorporate aerobic exercise, stretching and strength training into your routine then you will have a fantastic balanced programme.
Again, you need to work out in advance what your exercise goals are in order to track them. Do you want to build muscle, or tone up. Do you want more energy, or to feel less stiff, or just to feel better in your own skin. Work out what you need and what feels like a personal challenge to you. The more personal your goal is, the more likely you are to achieve it. Just saying, I need to get fit, will not get you very far. But to say that you want to have great legs for the summer and wear shorts starts to make it personal. And when it’s personal you are more likely to achieve it.
Fitness challenges
You could give yourself a fitness challenge. These are great to monitor in your fitness journal. They are also finite, they have a definitive end, so you could view them as a bit more motivating to accomplish. Whether it’s a 30-day yoga challenge, or a couch to 5k, or a swim the length of the Thames/Hudson/Seine kind of challenge, challenges can kick start a routine and really help with your motivation levels.
I have done the easy bit for you, I’ve outlined all the ways you can use a bullet journal, or any journal for that matter, to monitor your fitness routine, but also to motivate and inspire you. Now it’s over to you for the heavy lifting of actually doing the work!
I hope you liked this blog post. If you did enjoy it you may also like:
How to create a diy fitness journal and actually work out
Create a healthy life with our easy fitness journal ideas
How to create health journal ideas to inspire your life