At Georgetown this year, we have really stepped up our commitment to increasing our strength and conditioning at the gym and on the track, especially during the winter months. Our coach, Ryan Thompson, introduced Catholic Justice to workoutlogthing.com as a way to keep each other accountable and monitor the team’s progress. Workoutlogthing.com is a great website that was designed by Louis Eisenberg at Standford back in 2004. He created the very simple website in the middle of Bloodthirsty’s season because they wanted a way to keep everyone on the team accountable. Since its inception, workoutlogthing.com has been used by dozens of other college and club teams including Superfly, Kaos, Revolver, Mischief, Zeitgeist, Voodoo, and Boost.
An example of a team page — click to enlarge
Workoutlogthing.com has a relatively simple premise. Everyone on your team signs up and gets a row for each week with seven boxes. Each day, you and your teammates post a description of the workout you did that day which can be as brief or detailed as you want (e.g., shoulder PT, Zen throwing on the front lawn, 3 mile fartlek run, X sets of Y reps of activity Z, etc). On days when you can’t find time for a workout, then you just post a comment about what activities you did that prevented you from working out (e.g., rest day, Ravens game, family Christmas party, etc). This is a great format to encourage your teammates to work out together, to share new types of workouts with the team, and to track the number of workouts everyone is doing. You can setup goals for a specific number of workouts by individual or by the team for each week. It serves as a great source of motivation for me to keep putting in the time and effort to strive for greatness when I see how hard my teammates are working to improve every single day.
The daily boxes are easy to edit with plain text or any HTML code you want to include to customize your posts. You can include formatting, line breaks for ease of reading (<br/>), and links to useful workouts you found online. Here is a link to learn more about HTML if you are interested. You can also post specific comments to one another with an “@jacob” comment in your box.
A couple logistical items about the site:
- If you are registered with more than one team, your daily posts will be displayed to each team (this can be confusing with @matt comments when matt is only on one team, etc.)
- You can register with multiple email addresses to prevent this confusion and use multiple browsers to store your login info for ease of posting
- If you do register with multiple emails, your first and last name must be distinct because it is the unique identifier for the database
- Email Louis to report any bugs or make a suggestion about how to improve the site
Uses
One of the great things about workoutlogthing.com is that you can work out in whatever way is best for you. Do you like to run a lot of distance? Do that, and let the team know. Do you need to focus on rehab exercises right now? That’s great, keep the team posted about your physical therapy. Are you striving to complete a certain workout under a specific time? Awesome, post each of your times to track your progress towards your goal. Everyone has different body types and different areas of their game that they are focused on improving, so the openness of workoutlogthing.com can truly benefit all the players on your team.
Workoutlogthing.com may take a little while for it to catch on with your whole team, and for a lot of schools it is probably best suited for just the A team. However, if your captains and/or coaches set one up for your team, I’m sure it won’t be long before everyone joins in the fun. The site is a great way to stay in touch over break and to share comical stories from your night time shenanigans and important updates about your (and your coaches’) love lives. There’s definitely a team bonding aspect of using workoutlogthing.com that shouldn’t be overlooked. I believe that sharing the collective struggle to get stronger, faster, and better will go a long way to bringing our team closer together over the course of the season and result in a deeper bond and enhanced on-field chemistry.
I strongly recommend using workoutlogthing.com to any programs that are serious about their fitness and have high aspirations for the upcoming college season. It’s also a valuable tool for club teams who will begin their preseason workout regimens over the next few months. Thanks again to Louis Eisenberg for putting together the site and sharing it with the ultimate community. I’m confident that if more teams start using workoutlogthing.com, we will see an increase in the overall level of play at the college level across the country. Do work.
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