What is the most important piece of gym equipment?
Hello everybody and welcome to BW Barbell podcast. Thanks for tuning in. I’m your host, Andres. This podcast is brought to you by Cafe Tres Estrellas. CTE is an small batch, craft-coffee roaster that specializes in fair trade organic coffee. If you need a good cup of coffee, visit them at cafetresestrellas.com. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get on with the show.
Can you guess what’s the most important piece of equipment in the gym? Most people would say the barbell or squat rack. Although both are very important, they aren’t the most important. In my opinion the most important piece of gym equipment is your training log. Without this, you’ll never where you should go because you don’t remember where you’ve been.
People that can make progress in the gym by doing everything by feel are few and far between. Most of us need something to keep us honest. Pushing yourself every week sucks. Training hard is painful, but it’s the only way to make progress. And if you rely on your memory to keep you on track, you’ll talk yourself into believing anything.
All you need is a regular spiral bound notebook and a pen. Before you got to the gym, write out your workout. When you’re at the gym, write down every weight and rep. You can add your weight, time, pre workout meal, post workout meal and how you felt if you want.
The next time you do the same workout, you can refer to your logbook and see what you have to do to make progress. This way there isn’t any guessing. It’s all written down in black and white. You repeat this every workout. No need to make big jumps in weight or reps. Just make some progress every workout.
As a bonus, once you fill up a few notebooks you can look back and feel good at all the progress you’ve made.
So that’s the show for this week. Thanks for listening. If you have any comments or questions on the things I spoke about today, please leave them in the comments below. You can email me at andres@bwbarbell.com if you want more information about the show or its sponsor. Thanks again for listening and I’ll talk to you next time.