Functional Strength Lab

Recording your weight goals and tracking your progress, are two major factors in achieving these goals. Tracking promotes a sense of accountability, and helps to illuminate trends in your gains and losses. As such, I am attaching an excel weight tracker that I’ve created in order to help you meet your goals — Excel Weight Tracker

In the screenshot above, you’ll see the only 4 inputs you’ll need to know to create your own weight tracker. I’ve protected the entire sheet (with the exception of these four cells (and your daily weight input cells)) to help avoid folks messing up the equations. If you feel comfortable in excel or want to make your own modifications, simply go to the “Review” tab and click “Unprotect Sheet”. There is no password, just clicking the button should make the entire file editable.

After filling in these 4 inputs, you’ll notice the spreadsheet will automatically change. It will display the dates until your goal deadline, and it will show a steady decrease in your current weight to the goal weight. Next to these projected weights, you’ll find a column for you to input your actual daily weights. At this point, your daily tracking should be fairly straight forward…see below:

(the chart continues past this screenshot — this simply depicts the changes that occur to the document after filling in the first 4 inputs)

Once you’ve recorded a couple weeks or two worth of daily weights, you may want to see your progress in a chart form. In order to do this:

1. Go to the “Review Tab”
2. Click “Unprotect Sheet”
3. Highlight all data from B6:D6 down to where the date column stops showing dates.
4. Go to “Insert” Tab
5. Click “Line” chart icon (pick the first one down in the dropdown)

Once completed it should (hopefully) look something like this.

Now you can graphically see how awesome you’re progressing in meeting your goals. Good luck! Hope this helps!

To download the original template use this link: Weight Tracker

 

Have you ever wondered how your one rep max is calculated? Before creating Functional Strength Lab’s 1RM calculator, I asked the same question. I visited many sites to determine the math and reasoning behind the various calculations. Some of my findings were very interesting:

1. There are seven distinct formulas that have been proposed to calculate 1RM’s. Two have become the industry standards: Epley & Brzycki. The five other calculations are slightly more complicated and are less recognized: Lander, Lombardi, Mayhew et al., O’Conner et al., & Wathan
2. All calculations can be used interchangeably for all of the big three lifts: Bench Press, Squat, Dead Lift.
3. All calculations require a weight that you can rep out for more than two reps, but less than 10-12 to remain fairly accurate.
4. These calculations can help you avoid injuries that often result from actually performing your One Rep Max. While it’s difficult to refrain from “proving” your strength through one rep maxes, it seems pointless when you can craft your workouts using the fairly accurate figures that these calculations will spit out.

Various Calculations (where “r” stands for reps and “w” stands for weight used):

***Most Commonly Recognized 1RM Formulas***

– Epley Formula –

– Bryzicki Formula –

***Less Recognized 1RM Formulas***

– Lander Formula –

– Lombardi Formula –

– Mayhew, et al. –

– O’Conner et al. –

– Wathan –

You can either crack open your notebook and start using these formulas yourself, or you can use these pre-crafted 1RM calculators created by Functional Strength Lab:

1RM Bench Calculator

1RM Squat Calculator

1RM Dead Lift Calculator

(Hint: As I’ve already mentioned, these are the same calculators!!!)

Brian Dick

Do you want to calculate your BMI? Type in your height and weight in the shaded boxes below:

The BMI Calculator Page includes more information on how the BMI is calculated and the controversies surrounding it. You can simply click on this link, or find the BMI Calculator along with many others under the Workout Calculators button on the top right. Hover over the button and select which calculator you want to try out.