Poor Signs of a Good Workout
I remember years ago speaking with legendary strength coach Dan John and he said something that clicked with me and stuck with me since. It was simple, but an effective reminder that every training session is just another session of building your armor. His words were “If you have five workouts, two will be ok, two will be not great, and one will be great”. His point with saying this was simply to keep moving forward and realize that most your training sessions are just building. When I competed in powerlifting, we followed the same basic principle. Most of our workouts were “builder” workouts and then periodically we would have “tester” workouts either with a competition lift or a lift that we tracked closely as an indicator to our performance. Somewhere in the story of health and fitness, we became amazed by the hardcore, brutal, military style workouts that leave people sore, puking, and hating fitness. This has been one of the set backs in fitness over the last few decades. People should be excited for their next workout, not dreading it. Let’s dive into some very poor signs of a good workout, even though many are still using them as their metrics.
Soreness
A coach or trainer shouldn’t have the goal of making people so sore they can’t move or function. Each workout should be scaled to that person for where they’re currently at and not force the person to the workout. Some soreness can happen from each training session as strength training is essentially tearing muscles down (which is why nutrition plays such a critical role in health and fitness), but extreme soreness should be avoided at all costs. If you had anyone do 30 minutes of squat jumps, they would be incredibly sore for the following days, but there would be little training benefit from that workout. It would also likely minimize or eliminate the following workout, which is taking away from fitness.
Throwing Up
If someone throws up while working out, the session is done and it is a clear sign that too much was done. Once someone gets to this point, it negates any training benefit. Like soreness, this isn’t difficult to achieve and shouldn’t be the goal. When people use social media to highlight this, it might be one of the biggest things holding fitness back. Think from an outsider perspective who’s looking to get into a fitness routine. They look online and seeing people praising vomit inducing workouts. While it may be fun within your circle, it’s not appealing to most and isn’t drawing more people into exercise.
Calories Burned
As someone who generally wears their watch during a workout, I really wish they calories burned feature would go away. I don’t like this for a few different reasons. The first being is it’s likely not accurate. Studies have shown calorie trackers to be as much as 80% off in their measurements. When people see that they burned 500 calories in a workout, it can lead them eating too much after the workout when in reality they might have only used 300 calories in their workout. The second reason I don’t like the calorie burn feature is it shifts the importance of the workout from building strength and healthy movement patterns to a focus on calories(weight loss). We strength train to build muscle and building muscle is much more difficult in a caloric deficit constantly.
Workouts Designed for Pro Athletes
There is a difference in pro athletes and most of us. Well, there are a lot of differences, but mainly that we don’t have the skill set or training density that they have. This means that we don’t need the same things from a training session as a pro athlete and in trying to replicate their workout is a quick way to injury. Another thing to consider, many pro athletes are simply training to avoid injury, not improve performance. Just because a pro athlete does a certain workout, doesn’t mean it’s good for everyone else.
One of the best indicators of a good training session that I use with all our clients is a very simple one. Do you feel better walking out of the door than you did when you walked in? If you feel better after a workout every time, then you have set yourself up to win consistently in training and will likely lead to better compounded habits like eating healthy when you’re not at the gym, getting better sleep, or being more active outside the gym.
Nick Showman
Showtime Strength & Performance
www.showtimestrength.com