Bullet Journal for Recovery + Performance

This simple but mighty recovery and performance tracker can help you be more consistent with your workout and self-care routines while allowing you to track flare ups like injuries and sore muscles. By following a few simple steps, you can help your body maximize performance while keeping your workouts, hobbies and workdays more comfortable.

This simple to use workout routine bullet journal can be used to track sports injuries, ongoing physical flare ups like arthritis or tendonitis, and keep an eye on sports performance and recovery over time. In less that one minute a day, it will help you visualize your workouts and behaviors over time while correlating comfort and performance with your daily habits.

Designed to be fast and easy to use, this printable exercise bullet journal can be filled out in less than 1 minute per day, and - while based on well-known best practices for balancing performance and recovery - can be easily modified according to your own lifestyle and wellness goals.

MONTHLY

Fill out the month in the corner and set 2 custom self-care habits (optional). These habits will vary depending on your goals, for instance, if you're managing an ongoing issue like tendonitis of the foot or elbow you might set a goal to graston yourself once daily. If you're committing to a Peloton routine, your goal might be to do one high-impact Peloton ride per day, as well as one Peloton recovery ride per day.

DAILY

Each day, record your workout intensity. Rate it from 0-3 with a simple dot in the correct square.

A rough guide, or make it your own:

Then record your pain or soreness level. Rate it from 0-3 with a simple dot in the correct square.

A rough guide, or make it your own:

Throughout the day, make a note of your habits putting a simple yes or no (y/n or a dot for yes and empty for no) in the box next to the behavior. Every day doesn't need to be perfect, but tracking daily will help illuminate which behaviors impact your recovery and performance the most.

Our suggested best practices on the recovery and performance tracker are:

• To exercise for 30+ minutes a day - whether you're in training or just trying to overcome injuries/chronic pain to live a more comfortable life, activity is essential. Exercise circulates rich, oxygenated blood throughout our bodies, keeping us healthy and improving strength and mobility. 30 minutes a day helps to keep our heart healthy, our weight in check, reduces stress, boosts mood, improves memory, increases productivity, and improves sleep.
• To warm up/cool down - No matter how intense your exercise routine, waking the body up and flushing it out at the end of a workout is critical to injury prevention and optimal exercise and injury recovery. For instance, at the end of a tough Peloton ride the instructor will often tell you to reduce your resistance and cool down to a few minutes of light spinning to flush out the legs and prepare them for the next training session. Regardless of what type of exercise you're doing, properly warming up and cooling down is one of the most effective ways to increase performance and prevent injuries.
• To stretch - stretching moves energy throughout the body, and reduces the chances of soreness and discomfort from exercise (which can contribute to sleeplessness and discomfort at night - and you're going to want that recovery sleep!). Stretching is highly effective for reducing pain and discomfort in joints and muscles and is a powerful tool in exercise recovery and injury prevention.
• To massage stressed areas - massage therapy is widely used as an aid to reduce pain and promote the recovery of injured muscles. In fact, studies show that massage can moderate inflammation, improve blood flow and reduce muscle stiffness¹, helping to prevent injury and increase performance.
  
  (Pro Tip: to enhance the efficacy of self-massage in injured, tired or swollen areas, try Jihi's Merrimint body balm. It is a powerful balm to be used with graston or self-massage to cool, calm and reduce inflammation post-exercise or wherever you're feeling tired and sore)

• Have adequate food/water - recovering from a workout is as important as the effort itself, and one of the key elements to a successful exercise recovery is drinking plenty of water and replenishing your body with proteins and carbohydrates after a workout. Diet and water are critical for everything from muscle repair to managing energy and helping the body regulate heart rate and blood pressure. It is critical to replenish the liquids, electrolytes and sodium lost during exercise, and to give your body the tools it needs to repair itself.
• Note if you needed a pain relief product - whether you're focusing on your workout routine or trying to manage an injury like tendonitis, sciatica, or arthritis, it's common (and understandable) to turn to a pain relief product for support. Keeping track of the days you used pain relief products will help you take a note of the worst days while helping you be mindful of your total intake and how it impacts performance and recovery over time.
• Customizable goals - fill in these two blank lines with whatever tools you use (or want to use) to support your exercise recovery, injury recovery or physical performance. Not sure what to put here? Maybe experimenting with graston massage (Merrimint is a perfect tool for that!), adding in some strength training, or committing to a yoga or mindfulness practice would be a good addition to your mind/body/soul routine.

Based on bullet journal organizational concepts, this workout tracking bullet journal will help you to get a quick, customizable view of your performance and flair ups over the course of a month. The exercise bullet journal layout allows you to instantly graph your performance and pain levels throughout the month and correlate "flare ups" or low energy days with your corresponding habits, giving you an idea which lifestyle choices are most critical to your overall vitality.

Here is an example of what a filled out tracker looks like. After filling it out daily, you can highlight the patterns at the end of the month, and see what correlating behaviors had the most impact on exercise performance and recovery:

From this performance tracker, here are a few things we can observe:

• Injury "flare ups" tended to happen in 2 day bursts
• These flare ups were usually preceded by a combination of lack of stretching + intense exercise
• Pain was managed by reducing intensity of exercise, being disciplined about warming up/cooling down, stretching and massaging injured areas

When dealing with a chronic injury (like tendonitis, runner's knee, or shin splints) it requires self-knowledge and accountability to grow in strength while managing symptoms and preventing flare ups. This tracker can be easily modified by adding recommendations from a doctor or physical therapist (like regular graston, or a particular stretch) to make sure you're staying on track in both your workout and your injury management and prevention.

Each month you track will reveal new insights and empower your self-knowledge, helping to create a smoother month ahead. Armed with this information, you'll be empowered to get in the best shape of your life!

You can also use this recovery and performance tracker to answer the question if a supplement, like CBD, is helping with your exercise recovery or performance. Our Merrimint body balm uses 500 mg CBD isolate with arnica, menthol and a rich bouquet of butters, herbs and mints to help you naturally unwind and relax sore muscles, joints or injuries. You can try filling out the tracker for a month before using a supplement like Merrimint and then adding the supplement to compare, or, once you're on a supplement you can compare different patterns of use (for instance, every other night compared to nightly) with recovery over time.

Many people wonder if CBD has a panacea effect, or if it will help their exercise recovery. By tracking your sleep quality and CBD dosage, you can watch over time and see how it works for your body.

We provide both printable and fillable versions of the PDFs, so you can use them however best works for you. If you'd like to edit the fields with our prompts, you can do this by opening them in Adobe Acrobat.

Bullet Journals & You

In summary, a recovery and performance bullet journal framework can be a very helpful way to stay mindful and accountable for your daily habits and be aware of how factors like stretching and supplements affect your performance and injury flare ups over time. Improving sleep and getting into great habits is an investment that will be rewarded in every area of your life.