When Can You Expect a Personal Best at the Gym?
Tell me if this sounds familiar: you trained to do something – say, your first pull-up – and after a few weeks or months, you finally did it. Hooray! But the next day or week you try to do it again, but now you cannot . Have you become weaker? Didn’t your training pay off? Are you a loser? Should you just lie down and cry?
Of course not: you have achieved this PR (personal record), and it is yours. You deserved it. Nobody can take it away from you. But if it’s real, why can’t you do it every time?
This isn’t just a problem for lifters. Beginner runners sometimes fall into the trap of timing their training runs and trying to buy time every day when they go outside. But running slow is what makes you run faster in the long run , and consistent training is what makes you stronger in the gym.
Progress of fatigue masks
You are not the person you were yesterday. Maybe you are stronger, but maybe you get even more tired. Maybe you ate well and slept well, or maybe you didn’t. Maybe you have additional stress at work today. All sorts of things can affect our body’s ability to lift a certain weight or run at a certain speed.
The biggest factor when you train constantly is fatigue. I don’t mean sleepiness (although it does happen). I mean when your body is working so hard that it cannot perform at its best. Once you did a pull-up and now you can’t.
Fatigue is not a bad thing! In fact, this is a sign that you are doing everything right .
You see, newbies are often worried that they haven’t “gotten enough” or that they need more days off. And it may be true that after a few days of rest, you will be able to achieve that PR again or establish a new one. But if you’re used to waiting until you’re fully, fully recovered, to return to the gym, you would only do one or two workouts a week. And it will ultimately hurt your progress because you won’t train hard enough or often enough to keep getting stronger.
Short-term wins don’t always mean long-term progress
It is shortsighted to measure your performance by what you can do in the gym today versus yesterday. What if, instead, you compare yourself to what you might have done last month or last year?
Here’s an example. A few years ago, my best deadlift was somewhere around 200. My goal is a two-plate deadlift, 225 lbs. I lifted 215 pounds one day, felt good and decided to put on the other 10 pounds and go for it. I didn’t expect the weight to actually increase, but it did. I pulled out 225! I ran and grabbed my phone to do it again for the video. I walked over to the bar with the rotating camera, and … it was glued to the ground.
I tried 225 again later that day. I tried it again later that week. I could not understand why I was able to lift it only once and never again. Finally, after about three weeks, I pulled 225 for the second time in my life.
But here’s the thing: I haven’t stopped my other workouts. In the meantime, I kept going to the gym and lifting whatever was on the program that day, be it a heavy single at 205 reps or reps at 185. I kept getting stronger, even if I had a level of fatigue (or stress! !) were hiding my ability to pull 225.
What happened is that the minimum that I could raise on a given day increased. At the time I was gaining 225 for PR, my “oh yeah, no problem” weight was probably around 200. As I continued to train, 225 was soon the weight I could count on for a heavy single on any training day. Then it was the weight I could do for reps. These days 225 is the number I dial when I warm up; then I put on more weight and keep walking. It’s been a year and a half since I had two PR cymbals, and now I can pull 300+ on any old deadlift day.
Progress is not linear; every week and every training cycle has its ups and downs. Maybe you can only pull up on your best days right now, but over time, you can do one pull-up on any old day, and on your best days, you can do three. Sometime later, three may be your minimum, but on good days, you can make five. The key to progress is to raise these lows.
Training days are not test days
If you are one of those people who can do PR every training day and you have maintained that reputation for a while, congratulations! You are in the newbie phase and this is a fun time in your life. Keep exercising. Just don’t be surprised when one day you don’t get into PR; it will be a sign that you need to focus more on the process of becoming stronger than on the results of testing yourself.
Think of building strength as learning a new subject at school. If you have some prior knowledge, you can take the Chapter 1 test without much study. Maybe chapter 2. But if you really want to learn new material, testing yourself won’t get you far. At some point, you need to open a book and start studying.
Training is like that. If you look at your upcoming workouts and can’t separate which ones are for workouts and which ones are for testing, you may need to rethink how you do things.
Registering for a competition can be a way to schedule yourself a test day, but you can also pick a date yourself and mark it on your calendar. Strength training programs will last a set number of weeks, and then there is often a testing day at the end. (Likewise, running workout plans often end up racing.)
So you’re looking at some amount of training – usually one to three months – that has a purpose. This goal is to make you stronger, faster, or better on test day . You may feel tired from time to time, but it doesn’t matter if you can end your day workout and look forward to the next one.
Use your vacation strategically
On the eve of a competition or test, it’s time to peak. (Runners call this a taper.) For a short time, perhaps a week, you will be exercising less. Workouts will be shorter and easier; you may have a few extra days off. By exercising less, you sacrifice a tiny amount of future achievement, but you get some temporary relief from fatigue.
Without this fatigue hiding your true ability, you will be ready to give your best on a day of challenges. Then we should expect PR. But remember, the rush didn’t make you stronger; it just showed the strength that you already had.
Sometimes aspiring lifters find they appear stronger after a few extra days of rest. It can backfire if they mistakenly think that rest is a tool that makes them stronger. Their progress is slowed down, so they reduce training volume and add a little rest; if it dies again, they will do even less. Do this long enough and you end up with little to no exercise and wonder why you are not making any progress.
Instead, keep learning and save testing for test days.