PERSONAL HEALTH : Fitness Log Will Keep You Focused

If your resolution to work out regularly in 1994 crumbled faster than a chocolate chip cookie, take a tip from the pros: Keep a fitness log.

“It gets you to start thinking about exercise,” says Timothy J. Moore, an exercise physiologist at the National Hospital for Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation in Virginia and an exercise adherence expert. “Keeping a log can give you a base line and allow you to see where you are going.”

Although some exercisers swear by a cheap, plain notebook to record their efforts, there are ready-made options.

Among the recent offerings:

* “The Ultimate Workout Log” (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1993) is $9.95. Author Suzanne Schlosberg calls it a log with a sense of humor. Besides space to record six months’ of any kind of workout, it includes exercise trivia (stair-climbers, she says, were used as punishment in federal prisons) and jock vocabulary (biceps are “guns”).

* “The MultiSport Log Book” (American Running and Fitness Assn., 1993) is $9 by telephone order: (800) 776-2732. Author Susan Kalish includes tips for runners, cyclists and swimmers along with space to record a year’s worth of exercise.

* The “VeloNews Training Diary” (Inside Communications, 1992) is $15.45 by telephone order: (800) 234-8356, Ext. 6. Meant for cyclists, there is enough space to record a year’s worth of rides, including such details as pulse, route ridden and hours slept.