The training journal: why the players who improve keep one
A journal is not a diary. It is the feedback step in deliberate practice, and it is the cheapest one available. Here is what to record, and what most players get wrong about it.
You have played the same shot badly for a year. You know you have, because you feel it every Tuesday. What you cannot say is what specifically goes wrong, or whether it is getting better.
That gap between feeling something and being able to name it is where improvement stalls. A training journal closes it, and it costs a few minutes after each session.
Why writing it down works
Deliberate practice, the model Anders Ericsson built from studying expert performers, is not simply more practice. It is practice with a specific target and a feedback loop: you attempt something, find out how far off you were, and adjust.
The hard part for a club player is that nobody provides the loop. A coach does it for the players who have one. A journal is how you build it yourself.
The evidence on the writing part is narrower than the claims made for it, and it is worth being straight about that. A 16-week study of 52 Taekwondo athletes found that reflective journaling with structured feedback produced significantly higher self-regulation and perceived performance than journaling alone — which points at the feedback, not the diary.
That finding is the useful one. Writing things down is the mechanism. Writing things down and doing nothing with them is where most journals die.
What to record
Four things, and no more. A journal that takes twenty minutes is a journal that stops in three weeks.
- One sentence on what happenedNot a verdict. "Lost 3-1, could not handle his serve to my backhand" rather than "played badly".
- One thing that workedThis is the entry people skip, and it is the one that tells you what to keep. If your third-ball attack won four points in a row, you need to know that you did it.
- One thing to work on nextExactly one. A list of five is a list of none, because you cannot hold five intentions on a table.
- How it felt, in one wordTired, sharp, flat, nervous. Over a month this column explains results that otherwise look random.
Tags do more work than prose here. If your entries carry a tag for the part of the game you were working on, then after twenty sessions you can ask a question with an answer: how many of my entries tagged "receive" describe the same problem?
The three mistakes
Writing a verdict instead of an observation. "I was terrible" is a feeling about yourself. "I pushed long on the first three receive points" is information about your game. Only the second one can be practised.
Only writing after bad sessions. If the journal only appears when something went wrong, it becomes a punishment log, and you will avoid it. Record the good sessions too, because they are the evidence of what your game looks like when it works.
Recording without reviewing. This is the failure the Taekwondo study points at directly. A journal read once a month, before you plan the next month's practice, is worth ten journals read never.
Reviewing it
Fifteen minutes a month is enough. Read the entries and answer three questions.
Which problem appears most often? That is your practice target, whether or not it is the one you find most interesting.
What did I do in the sessions that went well, and can I repeat it? Preparation, warm-up, sleep and who you played are all in here somewhere.
Has the thing I worked on last month got better? If the same sentence appears for three months, the practice is not addressing the cause, and it is worth changing the drill rather than repeating it.
Why it pairs with a rating
A journal is subjective. That is its strength, because it records what a number cannot: how you felt, what you were trying, and what you noticed. But it is also its weakness, because players are poor judges of their own progress.
A rating is the objective half. It measures who you can beat, and it does not care how the match felt. Put the two side by side and they check each other. A month of entries saying your receive has improved, next to a rating that has not moved, tells you the improvement is real but not yet winning points. A rating that jumped while the journal says nothing changed tells you the results came from somewhere you have not noticed yet.
That combination is what TTRA's journal and match record are for. Entries sit against the matches they describe, and the match record carries the rating movement, so the story and the number are in the same place.
Common questions
How long should an entry be?
A few lines. The four items above, written as sentences, take about two minutes. Length is not the point and long entries are the reason journals stop.
Should I journal after training, not just matches?
Both, but matches first. A match gives you an opponent who is trying to stop you, which produces information a drill cannot. If you only have time for one, write after matches.
Is this different from a training log?
A training log records volume — hours, drills, repetitions. A journal records what you noticed and what you intend to change. The log tells you what you did; the journal tells you what you learned.
What if I do not have a coach?
That is the case a journal is most useful for, because nobody else is providing the feedback step. Your own notes are the coach, and the review once a month is the session.
Can anyone else see my journal?
No. A journal entry is private to your account, alongside your match record and your rating history.
Start a training journal
Write a few lines after your next match and tag what you were working on.