Everyone wants to feel like they had a good workout, not waste their time in the gym. The feeling of a good workout can change your mood for the day, help you maintain your training routine for the week, and stay on course with your nutrition and habits. 

Feeling sore, sweaty, and exhausted make us feel like the workout was effective, but may not be giving you the results you want. Depending on your goal, it’s important for you to know the difference between the feeling of a good workout, and actually being productive.

In the context of muscle growth and strength, the goal is to drive muscular adaptation through mechanical stress. That is, achieving enough tension through the muscle fibre to cause the muscle cell to signal changes that increase its capacity to contract and relax when needed under the new stress. 

Progressive overload allows us to ensure the muscle is adapting to the stress by constantly adding more tension to the muscle fibre during the contraction-relaxation cycle. The cell responds by growing in size and strength. This is why progressive overload matters. 

Soreness, sweat, or fatigue do not necessarily equate to progressive overload. These subjective feelings from the workout could be the result of any number of outside factors, such as sleep, recovery, nutrition, or environment, and are an unreliable source of information relating to objective muscle growth. 

Relying on the way you feel after a workout could lead to excessive fatigue, resulting in a reduction of long-term progress. Nervous system down-regulation is a product of excessive fatigue, which will leave you feeling exhausted and less-equipped to make good decisions with your food, habits, and sleep. 

It’s easy to get trapped into relying on the feeling of a workout, as it can feel really good at first. You walk out of the gym with a pump, sweaty, and feeling like you pushed yourself to the max. This feeling is great, but not all the time, every time you train. Knowing when it’s ok to push to your limit and get those feelings is a learned skill that comes over time as you train more. 

What we see on social media often causes us to feel like we aren’t training “hard enough”. Social media often promotes the idea that effective training must leave you collapsed on the floor, drenched in sweat, and barely able to walk. But it is important to remember that it’s just a highlight reel: these influencers don’t achieve the way they look by doing this every time they are in the gym. They are doing it for views and likes, and to get a reaction out of their viewers. 

Fatigue and soreness are unreliable, subjective feelings. The solution? Following a program and tracking your weights will ensure you achieve progressive overload, applying appropriate tension to your muscle cells and allowing adaptation for muscle growth and strength. 

Get a program and follow it. If the weights are going up, your program is working. If they aren’t, you either need a new program or look at other outside factors like sleep, recovery, and nutrition. 

Effective training is not about how destroyed you feel afterwards. It is about whether the body is given a reason to adapt.