Today I looked on this blog and saw my Big 24 numbers from last September. The results were sobering. Despite working out rather regularly since that time. I was doing 20 lbs less on “The Exercise”. Whoa!?! What happened? I am way stronger than last September. All my other lifts are up. I think this drop comes down to one thing: location. Last time I was doing Big 24s I was on an olympic platform. I could let myself go all in. This time around I’m doing Big 24 in a confined apartment complex gym. If I miss the lift I just don’t have a lot of space to bail. The solution is simple. The gym in my apartment building is right next to the roofdeck. All I got to do is drag the weights outside. We’ll see how that goes.

There is a clear, larger lesson to this. If you’re serious about improving performance, you have to keep track. I would have had NO idea if I hadn’t written things down here on the blog.

This got me thinking, what else should I be tracking? My 30 day push ahead of July 4th is a perfect opportunity to keep track of a wide variety of data points to see what makes sense and what doesn’t:

- Training.
- Food. Obvious, low-hanging fruit. I eat pretty darn clean, but I’m quite sure that I eat way too much
- Sleep
- Supplements
- Weight
- Body measurements
- Some sort of qualitative measurement of how I feel.

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