What are good indicators of work out quality

Judging whether your work outs are efficient and properly structured towards your goals can be difficult. It can be even more difficult when work outs and performances are not tracked or recorded with data. Often athletes evaluate the quality of their work outs based on short term performances rather than long term gains. Regardless of an athlete’s level or experience this can be great for the ego, be detrimental too long-term improvement.

Common indicators for work out quality

Athletes from different sports will have their own performance indicators. Generally, they can be separated into indicators for endurance activities and for strength/ gym activities. There can of course be some cross over.

Many apps will track different general parameters for work out tracking, but it is also important to ensure that work outs are specific to you goals and not just rack up time or distance at random.

Endurance activities

Sweating – Often athletes will equate how much they sweat with how hard they worked. The problem with this idea is that an individual’s sweat rate increases with body temperature and not directly to the work being done. If sweating a lot was an indicator of a high-quality endurance work out, everyone would only work out in saunas.

Average speed – It is common for athletes to judge the difficulty of an activity based off their average speed. Unfortunately, speed is extremely influenced by external factors. Wind, temperature, pressure, terrain, equipment; basically, anything can influence speed which can provide inconsistent data.

Feeling of exhaustion – This can come in many forms; being out of breath, feeling low on energy, not being able to increase the intensity above an endurance pace, etc. While these can be better indicators than sweating or average speed, they must be met within the right conditions. If an athlete is targeting long endurance events, but does a single 400m max effort run, they can have all the signs of exhaustion, but that effort is not produced by a stimulus that works towards their goals. It can also be heavily influenced by other factors like nutrition and sleep.

Strength/ gym activities

Soreness – In similar ways that a feeling of exhaustion can be a good indicator of work out quality only if the work out duration and intensity are appropriate, the same thing can be said for soreness from strength training. If an athlete is in the gym with the intention of building muscle, soreness can be a good indicator of work out quality. For other objectives like strength, speed, movement quality, stability, or basically anything else, this is not always the case. There are also to many external factors that can cause soreness such as introducing new exercises or poor technique.

The pump – The feeling of the pump is once again a good indicator for a high-quality muscle building work out, but not much else.

Feeling of exhaustion – This comes more from endurance athletes that start doing strength training when they try to evaluate their strength training with the same performance indicators as their endurance training. Functional fitnessers also often have this tendency. Since the different activities should have different objectives, how they are evaluated should be different.

What are good indicators of work out quality

Obviously, each type of work out, and even each individual work out should have its own performance indicator to evaluate its quality. For this reason, it is important to talk about macro and micro indicators. It is also important to find indicators that a directly related to the intended goal of a workout, with as little external influence as possible.

Micro indicators

A micro indicator evaluates how an individual work out is judged as an individual part of a training plan. This does not always mean that it was the hardest possible work out, but how well it accomplished the intended purpose for that work out.

For endurance sports this means spending the right amount of time in the right training zones. Judging these training zones can be the difficult part, with many athletes relying on their perception which is very often wrong or ill-informed. In my experience, athletes that have little to no equipment can best judge their training intensity with their breath rate. It may seem simple but adjusting your effort to maintain the correct breath rate is an excellent way to ensure you are working at the intended intensity This works because the oxygen consumption is directly linked to the rate of energy being expended (remember combustion reactions from high school chemistry). This is also a useful way to judge the relative intensity of efforts across different activities (running versus cycling versus CrossFit) and while it can be externally influenced, the degree is much smaller than other indicators.

Repeating the same strava segment can be a great way to automatically test improvement over time. It is important to keep variations such as the weather and riding in a group in mind. Its the general trend that is important rahter than setting a PR every ride.

Strength training and gym work can be a bit harder to judge. If hypertrophy is the goal, then the classic indicators of soreness and the pump can be excellent. But for all objectives in the gym the best way to judge work out quality is to track short term improve between sessions. Being able to lift more weight, do more reps with the same weight, having the relative effort decreases, being able to jump higher or further, or holding a position longer are some indicators that you have improved.  For newer athletes, these changes can be seen from week to week, but as you gain more experience with strength training it will take longer. It becomes even more important to track macro indicators.

Macro indicators

Macro indicators are used to evaluate improvement over a longer period such as a single training cycle, multiple training cycles, a whole season, or even multiple seasons. Regardless of the sport or activity, macro indicators will require the athlete tracking work out performances. Once you start tracking your performances, its as simple as repeating similar efforts and recording whether you have improved from your previous tests. One important element is replicating the same conditions from one test to another. For weight training and other gym exercises this is very easy because weights are the same everywhere. For endurance sports this can be more complicated. Having a standard testing loop that is the right distance can give a close approximation but using extra data such as a power meter can be extremely helpful.

Short term performance versus long term gains

One trap that athletes often fall into the trap of prioritizing short term performance over long term gains. This means trying to put everything possible into each individual work out, prioritizing the feeling of finishing completely exhausted rather than aiming to create the correct stimulus.

Body weight changes over time. While the variation from day to day seems random, the general tendency over time is in the reight direction.

It seems that this tendency is caused by a false positive, or a type 1 error, in an athlete’s training progression. When an athlete starts a new sport, they naturally do a lower total volume and work at lower relative intensities because they just are not very efficient. This protects them from initially over doing it. With time they can do more and work harder, so they develop the idea that to get better they simply must do more and more at their maximum capacity to continue getting better. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. As the athlete’s efficiency improves, they can cause more damage in a single training session. A more structured and periodized (or at least varied) approach is required for continued improving. Sessions and cycles must have different intentions and it is important to judge the quality of these sessions with the correct indicators, rather than ones that have been arbitrarily chosen. It is also important to judge a training session based off how it fits into the over all plan rather than as an individual work out.

Athletes often get discouraged once they reach this point. Once they stop seeing weekly improvement, the assumption is made that it is just impossible to continue improving. Too me, this is the most exciting point in a new athlete’s career. It means that they are no longer a complete beginner and have gotten to the point where the real process begins. The difference is that as an athlete matures, macro indicators become more and more important. Micro indicators can still provide useful information, but only to inform how productive a work out was towards its specific objective, rather than towards a long term goal.