Have you ever heard people at the gym talk about their feelings? I sure have.
No, I'm not talking about getting in touch with your childhood or having an emotional outburst while using the Stairmaster.
What I mean is that many seem to rely on their feelings when measuring your progress.
Let's consider a scenario where this might cause a problem.
You go to the gym one day and go through your usual weightlifting routine.
Your basic philosophy is that you lift weights with a certain muscle until you're just too plain tired to go on.
But what happens during the next workout if you don't feel quite the same as before.
Maybe you're feeling a little under the weather, or maybe you caught a cold from your nephew sneezing all over you.
Maybe you had a long shift at work that day, or you have a bunch of stress in your life at the moment.
For whatever reason, you just aren't able to perform as well as you did the day before.
Only you wouldn't know it if you weren't keeping a close eye on things.
You have to keep a good record of all of your efforts in the gym.
What's more, you have to have a specific goal in mind when going from one workout session to the next.
It could be lifting a certain weight or doing a certain number of repetitions within a timeframe.
Whatever your specific goal may be, you have to have a way of measuring your progress.
You should be making some definite, measurable progress from one workout to the next.
Otherwise, you're just wasting your time.