8 Reasons Why You Should Keep a Pole Vaulting Journal

By Jake Winder, founder of RISE Pole Vault.

When I interviewed American record holder Sam Kendricks on episode twelve of the One More Jump Podcast, he talked about the importance of keeping a journal of his workouts and meets to reflect on and track his improvement. I can testify to the same thing: logging my workouts helped produce my best years of pole vaulting. The more you look at the world's best performers, the more you find accurate training logs behind them. Data-driven performance and workout design are powerful tools, and you can't be data driven if you don't have data.

With a new season on the horizon, here are eight reasons to keep a pole vaulting journal: documentation, learning yourself, proving your improvement, judging workouts accurately, telling a real wall from impatience, staying on the roadmap to your goals, reflection, and carrying the lessons into the rest of your life.

1. Documentation

So what is journaling your workouts and meets? It's simply writing down specific, quantifiable aspects of your training, along with what happens in your workouts and meets, day to day. That gives you reliable data you can reflect on and analyze to make improvements in the future.

When I was vaulting, I tracked everything. I had a vaulting journal, a lifting journal, a sprinting journal, and a nutrition journal. You should have seen the size of my workout bag. I still have all of those journals today, and I can pick one up and say: this journal won me a state championship, these two won me national championships, and this one shows how I rebuilt my body after knee surgery. The information in those journals got applied to the next season, year after year, continually refining my craft.

You can't change what you don't know.

2. Learning who you are

What you're really doing when you keep a journal is learning who you are and how you get better. What works for other people will not always work for you, and a journal lets you look back on the trial-and-error process of finding what does.

That information is valuable in your vaulting career right now, but the lessons and systems documented in your journals can also be applied to other areas of your life later, and even passed on to help other people on their journey. If you never take the time to log it, you risk losing it forever.

3. Proving your improvement

One of the main reasons I journaled was that I wanted proof I was getting better. Without data, you're left with what I call emotion-based progress: "I must be getting better, because I feel great today and I'm having a great workout!" The problem is that the great day can be followed by a terrible one: "I should just quit pole vaulting forever, because I'm having an awful workout. I must not be getting any better."

In two days you've swung from one end of the spectrum to the other. That kind of judgment is completely unreliable, a story of fiction made up in your head. Ask that athlete to prove they're getting better, or prove they're getting worse, and they can't answer either question with reliable data. A journal gives you tangible evidence. Grab your log book after a tough workout and find out which direction you're actually going. More often than not, you'll come out of that reflection more confident about where you are.

4. Was that a good workout or a bad workout?

Without the data in your journal, you have no grounds to say. Judging workouts on what you think and feel is too subjective; what you're calling a "good workout" might be an average one, and vice versa. You can't really judge a workout unless you can compare quantifiable data from one workout to another, or compare your targets for the day against what you actually did.

Hard, factual data gives you the ability to accurately judge a workout as productive or not. Without it, you're flailing around hoping to get better, with no guiding light. I never wanted to just hope my season ended up in a good spot. I wanted goals, and proof I was on the path to them.

5. Am I hitting a wall, or am I just being impatient?

Stay in this sport long enough and you'll hit the proverbial wall. But when athletes come to me saying they're getting worse, nine times out of ten the wall is an emotional one, not one that shows up in their performance data.

Day-to-day improvement in the pole vault comes in small, sometimes undetectable increments, and vaulters are very good at forgetting the times they made big jumps forward, like a foot PR or getting on the biggest pole of their life. If an athlete keeps a journal, a coach can say: flip back four months. More often than not, the numbers have improved. Flip back eight months and it's clearer. Go back a year, and the athlete will have a hard time convincing themselves they haven't improved. Their confidence can change in an instant.

If you don't keep a journal, that ability to reference real change simply isn't available during the difficult times, which is exactly when you need it.

6. A journal is the roadmap to your goals

Everyone agrees on the importance of setting goals: daily, weekly, monthly, annual, and career goals that are realistic, measurable, and refined over time. But goals also need a roadmap, meaning the training that gets you there. How high will you need to grip to vault high enough to win that championship? How fast will you need to run to grip that high? What training will improve your speed enough to run that fast? It starts with you and your coach getting the goal and the plan on paper.

Once the roadmap exists, the journal is how you track your progress along it. Sit down before practice and write your goal for the day, log your progress during the workout, and spend a few minutes afterward checking that your data lines up with the roadmap. If it doesn't, you'll know it's time to realign, and you'll know early.

7. Reflection

One of my favorite things to do is look back on old training journals and see what came out of each one: which new training techniques produced real results, and which were complete BS. At the end of every season, I would scour my journal for three big takeaways to carry into the next one.

That habit is actually the premise behind a question I ask every guest on the One More Jump Podcast: "If you could only pick three exercises to use exclusively for the rest of your pole vaulting career, what would they be?" The question forces you to cut through the exercises that waste your time and get to what actually moves the needle.

One year I was experimenting with banded barbell squats, felt incredibly explosive, and had a personal best, so that carried into the next year. Another year the journal showed me I was spending over an hour warming up, doing every warm-up exercise known to man, and it was eating into my energy for the actual workout. That got trimmed. Year after year, those refinements added solid layers of knowledge about what worked for me. Reflecting on past journals is the most efficient way I know to improve.

8. The lessons transfer to the rest of your life

Log your workouts long enough and you end up with journals full of data about who you are and what works for you, and that follows you well beyond the runway. I still keep journals today, just for different things. I have a logbook of the meetings, to-dos, and ideas from my first two years starting RISE Pole Vault, and I look back at it all the time. When I feel like RISE isn't moving forward fast enough, I grab that journal, see what we were up to a year ago, and it always shows me we are in fact moving. Sometimes I flip to a random page and find a forgotten idea worth pursuing. Without the journal, those ideas would be lost forever.

The other application is generational. If an athlete is dealing with a back injury, it's hard to remember what your warm-up looked like when you hurt your back 20 years ago, but if it's logged, you can pull that journal and hand them exactly what helped you. See an athlete fighting a technical problem you once had? Your journal might show the four weeks of a specific drill that fixed it. Boom, problem solved for the next generation. You might say, "I have a good memory, I don't need to write it down." Maybe so, but memory for details like reps and sets deteriorates over time, and those details are often exactly what solves the problem faster.

This is how we improve as a community: learn from the generation before us, refine it, and pass it on.

Start today

There you have it: eight solid reasons to journal your pole vaulting workouts and meets. If you're not doing it, at least try it and see what it does for you. Grab a spiral notebook, the notes app on your phone, or the Pole Vault Log Book we designed for exactly this, and start gathering data today.

Not sure how to start, or what data to track? Check out our companion article, How to Keep a Pole Vaulting Journal, for what to log and how to analyze it.