A minimalist workout tracker for the gym. I actually made this for myself to track my weight lifting and cardio progress. There is space for both cardio and machine / lifting exercises on the tracker, but feel free to let me know if you have any ideas to improve it. For me, this minimalistic design is just perfect, because I only want to jot down the most important data points and not start a whole gym journal.

How to use this workout tracker

The layout is pretty simple and straight forward. On the left of the table you find a column labeled “exercise”, where you can enter the name of your exercise or machine in the corresponding row. Each row (hence exercise) has three sub-rows labeled sets, steps and mass.

I prefer the term mass over weight, because I’m a physicist and that is the correct word for anything with the units lbs or kg attached to it. So yeah, I want to encourage you all to use the correct name for the quantity, because being correct is cool.

What are sets and reps?

When you are lifting weights, you will do a certain number of repetitions × a number of sets. E.g. you might want to do 3 × 15 lifts, that means you have 3 sets of 15 repetitions (of the elementary movement you are doing) each.

On my chart you can see, I started doing 4 sets on the horizontal leg press (first row) @ 15 reps each (how often the piece of metal has to go up and down per set) with a mass of 120 lbs. I endet up improving to 220 lbs within three months, which is pretty good.

Why track your progress with a workout tracker?

First, I didn’t really want to track anything, because I thought it would just be stressful and annoying. But it turned out to be a huge asset in improving my abilities in the gym. My goal was progressive overload, i.e. constantly challenge yourself to do more, so you will gain strength. Therefore, it is necessary to pick up where you left off last session each time you enter the gym. I honestly can’t remember all my data and so my tracker always comes with me in my gym bag (as you can see in the photo).

Download the minimalist workout tracker

Click on Download to get your free workout tracker. No strings attached. But if you want to subscribe to my newsletter to get updates on new freebies, you can sign-up here.