A blank workout log sheet: twelve exercise rows, five sets each, weight and reps side by side, and a header for the date, the session, and your bodyweight. Print it, or choose Save as PDF in the print dialog if you want a file. One sheet covers one session.
Workout Log
- Date
- Session
- Bodyweight
| Exercise | Set 1 | Set 2 | Set 3 | Set 4 | Set 5 | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| kg | reps | kg | reps | kg | reps | kg | reps | kg | reps | |
Prints the sheet only — no navigation, no article text.
How to use it#
- Fill the header before you warm up. Date and session name take five seconds and make a stack of sheets sortable later. Bodyweight is optional but it is the context that explains a bad month.
- Write the exercise names in the left column at the start, in the order you will do them. The sheet then doubles as the plan, and you stop deciding what is next while standing around.
- Fill each set as you finish it, not at the end. Weight on the left of the pair, reps on the right. Retroactive logging is how the fourth set becomes a guess.
- Leave unused set boxes empty. Three sets means three filled pairs. Do not write zeros — an empty box reads as “did not do” and a zero reads as a failed set.
- Put next week's decision in Notes. “82.5 kg if I get 5,5,5” is the sentence that makes the next session a plan instead of a repeat. That is progressive overload in one line.
- Print a month at a time and keep them in one folder. Loose sheets in a gym bag are how a training history disappears.
Paper or an app: the honest comparison#
Paper is not a compromise. It genuinely wins on the things that matter most during a hard set, and loses on everything that happens after.
| Paper | App | |
|---|---|---|
| Distraction while training | None — a sheet cannot show you a notification | A phone is a phone |
| Battery and signal | Irrelevant | Both required eventually |
| Speed of writing a set | As fast as a pencil | Comparable, once you know the app |
| Cost | Paper | Free tier, or a subscription for the extras |
| Finding what you lifted last April | Leafing through a folder | Search, instantly |
| PRs and estimated 1RM | You work them out yourself | Automatic |
| Progress charts | None | Built as you log |
| Surviving a lost folder or a spilled bottle | It does not | Synced to an account |
Most people who train well on paper are not making a mistake, and telling them to switch on principle is silly. The case for a digital log is narrower and more specific than “paper is old”: it is that a year of sheets in a drawer cannot answer a question, and a year of logged sessions can.
Already have a stack of filled sheets?#
Then you do not have to type any of it in. Snap a photo of each page — or of your notebook, handwriting and all — and hand them to Gript's AI import. It reads the sheets, pulls out the dates, exercises, weights, and reps, and matches the names onto real exercises. You see everything it found and confirm it before a single workout is saved, so a misread number is caught rather than filed.
It is free, it works on photos, PDFs, and plain text, and it means the choice is not paper-or-app with two years left behind. Keep printing sheets if you like training with a pencil; photograph the stack once a month and you get the charts and PRs anyway.
If you would rather keep everything in one file, the workout spreadsheet template has the same columns with the formulas prewritten, and the workout log template covers the notes-app version.