How to Know If You Exercised Well
Exercise doesn’t have to feel awful, although it can often feel arduous . It’s tempting to think of soreness or sweating as signs of a good workout, but none of them actually tell you if what you’re doing is improving your health or moving towards your goals. Instead, look at some of these measures.
Can you do more than last month?
Do not compare today’s workout with yesterday’s one, but compare it with something you did a few weeks or months, or even years ago.
Why not yesterday? First, because strength can change from day to day for a variety of reasons, including how you ate, how well you slept, and your mood or stress level that day.
But also, importantly, whether you realize it or not, every hard workout leaves you with a little fatigue that you will carry with you for the next few days. You can still train and make progress during this time, but your objective performance may be reduced. So, you may have managed to gain 60 pounds for a particular exercise last week when you were feeling refreshed, but today you are only 55. This is completely normal and does not mean that you have become weaker.
Instead, compare yourself to a few weeks ago. Are you lifting 55 pounds now when you struggled with a 45 pound empty bar last month? Have you been running 30 minutes continuously today when you had to take multiple walking breaks last month to run for the same amount of time? This is progress !
Are you wasting time and consistency?
Maybe you can’t compare yourself to last month because you were doing completely different exercises back then – or not at all. Remember to stay consistent in order to make progress.
Wasting time is already a victory . I have come to the conclusion that this is the most important achievement you can achieve, because if you are consistent, progress will find you. You can even combine this moment with the previous one: are you more consistent now than you were last month?
Are your lows going up?
I have come to believe that in weightlifting, a sport that requires technique and focus in addition to pure strength, I have come to the conclusion that good days can be really good , but they can be rare.
My coach likes to remind me that the real sign of progress isn’t setting new PRs, but raising the minimum you can raise on a given day. I put on 54 kilos once, but I don’t know when I can snatch it again. On the other hand, I can constantly go up to the high 40; I did 48 on Tuesday and 49 on last Friday. This is a huge improvement over what was just a few months ago, when 42 was a lot for me.
It’s actually just another way to compare progress over time, but it’s especially useful if you’ve been training for a while. I remember when the two-cymbal deadlift was just a dream. Then I remember hitting him for PR. Then I remember doing it with repetitions. These days, it’s just a warm-up I do on my way to my working weight throughout the day.
As you run, you may notice that your best mile time is converting to the pace of a 5K race. You could see a 30 minute 5K evaporating, damn it, did I? moment to the routine thing you do when your program requires a tempo run.
Or, if you do a dumbbell workout video , you can start with five pound dumbbells and later find that you can stick to eight pounds throughout the video. Don’t worry about what you do on your best day, but pay attention when it becomes easy to do something on a regular basis.
Is your shape better?
It’s still progress if you are doing better than before, even if you haven’t increased your metrics. Are you squatting deeper? Do you get square thighs every time in Warrior 1 ?
Any type of exercise that depends on technique is an exercise in which improving your technique is a legitimate achievement. Work aimed at improving technology or mobility is easily discounted. Just because it’s small doesn’t mean it’s not important. Again, this is something you may notice more over time than in a single workout, but small changes do add up.
Are you feeling great?
Not only should you not feel terrible, but you also feel great after your workout. Have you ever ended a workout feeling like you have more energy than you started? It can happen! Especially if you agree that training can be fun and you don’t have to chase suffering.
Exercise can be enjoyable at the moment. It’s also great to enjoy a sense of accomplishment afterward, especially if you’ve hit PR or noticed one of these other signs of progress.
The benefits of training can last throughout the day. Exercise over time can improve sleep , improve mood, and relieve symptoms of anxiety or depression .
Improving your mood or mental health is absolutely the right response to exercise – and honestly, it’s a better indicator of whether your time has been well spent than whether you have run out of feeling like you want to pass out and die. (It’s also perfectly acceptable to feel both of these things at the same time.)