How can I measure my results? Am I getting stronger? How did I do compared to my last workout?
These are legitimate, and some of the more commonly asked, questions we hear at NET.
Working with hundreds of clients over many years specializing in our specific training has allowed me to understand these aspects of our training experience with a substantial degree of confidence.
Before we go deeper into this discussion, let's revisit my favourite modulatory neurotransmitter, dopamine. When the brain releases dopamine, we feel good. One of its functions is to register a successful behaviour, so you can repeat it later and have more success. Let's say you are a hunter-gatherer: Dopamine will make you motivated to get out there and look for food to provide for your family. On your food-gathering journey, you might come across a place with an abundance of wild berries. Your brain will immediately release dopamine, making you feel good about your discovery, so next time you are more likely to apply the same gathering strategies that led to it.
In your mindful strength training to failure (MSTF) journey (or anything else in your life for that matter), it is important to know that what you are doing is right, that you are on the right track. When that happens, your brain will release this "feel good" neurotransmitter, making you more likely to repeat the actions that will lead to that event in the future.
This is why you want to know if you did better at your workout today than last time. Your brain wants to release more dopamine, but it needs to confirm first that you are on the right track. When it does, it feels good.
But what do you need to pay attention to to indicate whether you are on the right track or not? This is where we need some clarity.
There are three levels of muscular adaptations that you should expect from MSTF: brain changes, strength gains, and increase in lean tissue. The first two we can guarantee; this is something we are really good at at NET. The last one has a lot to do with your nutrition. While strength training is a must if you want to build muscle, in itself it is not enough. You can fast, workout, and keep fasting and actually lose muscle! (Read more about scientific principles for losing fat or building muscle, if you want to dive into the nutrition side.) Once you see measurable progress in your muscle size, you will release feel-good dopamine and be more likely to keep going and return to what worked for you in the future.
For the purpose of this discussion, let's talk about what you should be prioritizing as a marker of success when doing the workout itself. Do you focus on how much weight you lifted? How long your time under load was? While it feels good to know that you did more work than last time, this should not be your primary measure of success. The reason I note those numbers is to know what to do in your next session. Should I keep the same weight, increase it, or decrease it? Though it always feels good to see those numbers going up, I would not make them a primary measure of success, at least until you become a somewhat advanced trainee. If you change the order of exercises, those numbers will change; if you change a technique, those numbers will change; if you improve your form, those numbers will change. And in all those instances, it has nothing to do with the progress of your strength.
Instead, what you should be prioritizing the most as a marker of your success is how well you do those exercises. If you make sure you are feeling and engaging the right muscles, moving through resistance slowly enough so you can actually feel those muscles at every position of the range of motion, and keep going until you get to full muscle exhaustion, that's true success. If you do that on all your exercises, you will be getting stronger, guaranteed! Make that a priority, stay consistent with the training, and baby step by baby step your body will progress toward a more and more optimal expression of itself.