Well, Well, Well: Look Who Else Writes Out His Workouts

There are a heap of different ways for you to improve performance in practice.

Things like incorporating drills to increase the efficiency of your stroke, dropping specialized sets to improve your underwater dolphin kick, or resolving to develop yourself into a swimmer with a punishing work ethic.

Another simple and proven way to become a faster swimmer is to write out your workouts and results using a training log.

Olympian Janet Evans kept a rather legendary one over the years.

And newly-minted sprint czar Caeleb Dressel used his log book to chronicle everything from he felt in the water to outlining his bad practices.

In an era where everything is gone full-blown tech, it’s interesting to see that some things continue to stand the test of time.

The old-school approach of putting pen-to-paper in order to measure progression, set goals and targets, and ultimately achieve the goal of simply getting better is something that never goes out of style.

Further exhibited by a recent post from Michael Phelps’ Instagram account, where we see his coach Bob Bowman and ASU strength and training coaches working with Phelps in the gym.

And while he performs his chain-weighted core work we notice a little something-something in the bottom right corner of the picture:

You see that too?

An old-school training log.

Paper.

And pen.

Which goes to show that even for the absolute best athletes in our sport there is no replacing the satisfaction and accountability that comes with writing out your workouts.