How to Know if You are Making Progress

Having been a hard core gym rat for a very long time, Im always interested in what concrete results my workouts are producing.

IMHO most of the people who work out in fitness gyms seem to have no systematic approach to understanding their own progress other than simply showing up regularly and looking in the mirror.

I thought I would share some of the approaches I have developed over the decades that others might find useful in their own training.

 

Be Specific

Regardless of the sport, I have found that it is of huge value to be very specific about what you are trying to accomplish, and how your training relates to that.

When running I always trained to be faster. The key what faster at what distance?

In weightlifting we all want to lift more. OKwhat lifthow many reps, etc.

Most of us set very general goals such as improve my bench press or build a bigger deadlift.

OK so far

Now the dive into the details.

First, seeking improvement in the bench press.the question becomes:

For a single rep?

For a double rep wit a pause?

For five reps?

Next is an estimate of how long this will take? Weeks.months

Next task will be to design a training plan based on your own knowledge of yourself and the specific issues you have with a given lift that gives you the best chance to realize a specific amount of improvement (eg. 20 pound increase).

So farso good

 

You have a plan, is it working?

Our tendency is to focus almost entirely on this workout or what I did today.

A useful approach is summarized as:

We always tend to overestimate how much we can accomplish in a day and underestimate how much we can accomplish in a month

At minimum, to know if your plan is working you must be able to look at all the data on your workouts from a month.

That means keeping detailed written records.

Almost no one does this. It is too easy to wing it and claim to remember everything you did during a session.

Try recalling what you lifted on your third set of squats two weeks agonot the second set, the third set!

The big picture of how your lifting is progressing (slowly) over a month or two will allow you to understand whether you are moving ahead, staying in the same place, or slowly going down hill.

Here is an example of a month appraisal:

Did the volume of heavy sets increase over the month?

Did the low rep sets (2, 3, 5) increase over the month?

Was there a regular pattern to the increases (or decreases)?

Did fatigue occur regularly? Any pattern?

Did I consistently have problems with some part of the lift?

Do I keep making certain mistakes in the lift?

What was my recovery cycle from one workout to the next?

Compare overall strength in the first week of the month with the last week.

Did my lifts increase at the rate I specified in the initial plan?

Did a good coach or savvy lifter give me a critique of my liftsand did I write down

what he said?

The point is that being able to compare your real performance data across a period of at least a month can give you more insight than just about anything else you have available to you.

It is impossible to remember the vast amount of information that you generate in your training sessions. By not writing it down you lose what you have worked so hard to get!

This means keeping real written records in a notebook at the gym while you are lifting.

Sorry if writing in a book isnt cool.

But it can be your secret method for getting stronger and stronger!

Lift Big!

Richard