How to Determine Effective Workout

Recently, in many scientific articles devoted to strength training, the following definition has become common – an effective workout.

What is it, and how to evaluate the quality of a workout?

What can we call “effective workout”?

So – this is a training session carried out with the maximum possible weights in a given range of repetitions in the planned volume.

How do scientists explain this importance? The principle of recruiting muscle fibers, i.e., the relationship between weight and number of fibers involved in muscle contraction.

So what kind of training is this in reality? This is a kind of ideal training. That is, if you can bench press 100kg in 12 reps, then press, that would be nice. ⠀

We will explain with an example. You are going to a business meeting from London to Birmingham by car, and the navigator shows the ideal travel time, for example, 7 hours. You do not exceed the speed, and everything is calculated, but the gas began to run out of fuel on the road and had to stop at the gas station, then you felt that the steering wheel was pulling to the side, the pressure in one wheel was low and stopped again to pump up the wheel, and there was still a traffic cop to the pile for violation stopped.

As a result, you lost time, you were an hour late, and the business meeting instead of two lasted only one hour, and now you have to go to Birmingham again in a week to complete the negotiations. The trip could be of high quality, but due to your fault or due to circumstances, it was of poor quality.

Let’s return to the gym. You didn’t sleep well, didn’t eat, didn’t choose the right time for rest between sets, or simply not in the mood, and if all this resulted in premature fatigue and, as a result, a reduction in lifted weight or a decrease in the load volume, then this workout is not of high quality or less quality than you could have. Useless? No, you just have to go to Birmingham again, in the sense of going on a workout, to get the result that could have been if the training had been carried out qualitatively. And how many such trainings do you have in a year?

The secret of a good training session

Why do American professionals look better than others? Someone will say because of pharmacology, but this is an argument of the weak, everyone uses it, and there are no secrets there. Due to the fact that they eat, sleep, and live for muscle mass, and this translates into a completely different level of their training and, as a result, shape.

Output. We will not be able to foresee force majeure circumstances, but basically, the pedagogical miscalculations and sloppiness made by us are the reason for the low return on training.

Additionally, see “Death from steroids. Can steroids cause death?“.

What is more, why not read about the sense of doing ab exercises?