Are You Training Hard Enough? Why Effort Matters More Than Fancy Exercises

Walk into almost any gym and you will see an enormous variety of exercises. There are new pieces of equipment, complicated exercise combinations, different programmes on social media and a seemingly endless stream of people telling you that one particular exercise is the secret to building muscle, getting stronger or changing your body.

But for most people, the exercises themselves are rarely the problem. The bigger question is whether you are actually giving your body enough reason to adapt.

You can have the best programme in the world, but if the weights remain the same, every set feels comfortable and nothing becomes progressively more challenging, eventually your body has very little incentive to get stronger. At SPC, this is one of the biggest differences between simply exercising and actually training.

Strength training

Strength training works because we expose the body to a challenge and then allow it to adapt. Over time, that might mean becoming stronger, increasing muscle mass, improving tendon capacity, producing more force or simply becoming more capable of completing tasks that previously felt difficult. But once your body becomes accustomed to a particular workload, repeating exactly the same thing indefinitely produces a smaller and smaller stimulus.

This is why progressive overload is such an important part of resistance training. Progressive overload does not mean adding weight to the bar every single session. It simply means that, over time, the training challenge needs to progress. That could mean lifting slightly more weight, completing another repetition, improving your technique, increasing your range of motion, performing more total work or progressing to a more demanding variation. The important part is that your training does not remain permanently comfortable.

Measuring your effort levels

One useful way of measuring resistance training effort is something called repetitions in reserve, or RIR. Imagine you perform a set of eight goblet squats. If you finish the eighth repetition and genuinely feel you could have completed another eight repetitions, the set was probably relatively easy. If you finish and think you could perhaps have managed another two or three good-quality repetitions, you were much closer to your current capacity.

That distinction matters. Research examining proximity to muscular failure suggests that muscle growth generally benefits from sets being performed reasonably close to failure, while strength improvements can occur across a somewhat broader range of effort levels. This does not mean every set needs to become an all-out battle. In fact, training to complete muscular failure is not necessary for either strength or muscle development in most situations.

For many people, finishing a challenging working set knowing you could possibly have completed another one to three good repetitions is a useful place to train. There will always be exceptions depending on the person, exercise and goal, but the principle is simple: the set needs to provide some meaningful challenge.

This is where people can easily fall into the trap of confusing activity with effective training. You can spend an hour in the gym, complete ten exercises and leave feeling as though you have trained without necessarily creating a particularly strong strength-training stimulus. You might sweat, your heart rate might increase and your muscles might feel tired, but none of those things automatically tell us that you have provided enough resistance to stimulate meaningful improvements in strength.

This is particularly common when somebody has followed the same routine for months. Perhaps they started using 8kg dumbbells for an exercise when those dumbbells genuinely felt difficult. Six months later they are considerably stronger, but they are still using 8kg. The workout has not changed, but they have. What was once training is now much closer to maintenance.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. Maintaining strength is valuable. But if the goal is continued improvement, the programme eventually needs to move forwards as well.

What reps work best to force adaptations?

There is another side to this, because progressive training does not mean endlessly chasing heavier weights. Research comparing different resistance-training loads suggests that a wide range of loads can successfully stimulate muscle growth when sets are performed with sufficient effort. Heavier loads do, however, tend to have an advantage when the specific goal is maximising strength.

That means a heavy set of five squats and a challenging set of ten split squats can both have a place within a programme. At SPC, we do not judge the effectiveness of an exercise simply by how much weight somebody can lift. We are also looking at movement quality, control, range of motion, stability, the individual’s training history and what we are actually trying to achieve. Sometimes adding 5kg is the right progression. Sometimes keeping the same weight and performing the exercise significantly better is the progression.

What if progress slows?

When progress slows, one of the first reactions is often to change the programme completely. New exercises, new workout, new training split, new piece of equipment. But novelty is not the same thing as progression.

If somebody has become stronger at squatting, pressing, pulling, hinging, lunging and carrying, there is no particular reason to abandon those movements simply because they have been doing them for a while. In many cases, repeating key movements gives us something valuable: the ability to measure progress.

If you performed a split squat with 10kg three months ago and can now perform the same movement with 18kg using better control and a greater range of motion, something has clearly changed. Constantly replacing exercises can make that progression much harder to see. This is why good training programmes can sometimes look surprisingly simple. The sophistication comes from how the programme is coached and progressed, not from trying to make every session look different.

Do I just add more exercises?

There is also a point where simply adding more work produces diminishing returns. Resistance-training research generally shows a dose-response relationship between training volume and improvements in strength and muscle, but that does not mean twice as much training automatically produces twice the result.

The goal is not to perform the maximum amount of training you can tolerate. It is to perform enough high-quality training to produce an adaptation, recover from it and then repeat the process consistently. For many busy adults, two or three well-structured resistance-training sessions each week can achieve far more than five poorly planned sessions performed inconsistently.

This is something we see regularly at SPC. People often assume they need to spend almost every day in the gym to make meaningful progress. In reality, a smaller number of purposeful sessions completed consistently can be extremely effective.

How hard should every workout be?

There is also an important difference between challenging yourself and simply trying to make every workout as hard as possible. Good strength training should be controlled. Technique still matters. Exercise selection still matters. Recovery still matters. And different exercises deserve different levels of effort.

Taking a controlled leg extension or dumbbell curl very close to failure is very different from repeatedly pushing a technically demanding heavy deadlift until your form completely breaks down. A coach’s job is not simply to encourage somebody to work harder. It is to judge when they should work harder, where they can progress and when holding something back is the smarter decision.

Some weeks you will be capable of more than others. Sleep, stress, work, sport, illness and general fatigue can all affect performance. This is another reason why using perceived effort alongside prescribed weights can be useful, rather than assuming every session should look identical.

When people first start strength training, almost anything provides a new stimulus and progress can happen quickly. As you become fitter and stronger, however, simply turning up and completing the exercises is not always enough. The details start to matter more.

How much are you lifting? How difficult was the final repetition? Could you have completed another five repetitions, or perhaps only one? Has the weight increased over the last few months? Has your technique improved? Are you moving through a greater range? Are you doing more high-quality work than you were previously?

These are the things that turn a collection of exercises into a training programme.

At SPC, we want people to enjoy training. We want the environment to be social, supportive and something people genuinely look forward to each week. But we also want the hour you spend with us to achieve something.

Sometimes that means learning a movement. Sometimes it means backing off. And sometimes it means your coach handing you the next pair of dumbbells because the ones you have been using are no longer challenging enough. You do not need fancy exercises to keep progressing. You need good movements, good coaching, consistency and, when appropriate, the willingness to make your training difficult enough that your body has a reason to change.

References

Refalo MC et al. Influence of Resistance Training Proximity-to-Failure on Skeletal Muscle Hypertrophy: A Systematic Review with Meta-analysis. Sports Medicine, 2023.

Robinson ZP et al. Exploring the Dose-Response Relationship Between Estimated Resistance Training Proximity to Failure, Strength Gain, and Muscle Hypertrophy. Sports Medicine, 2024.

Grgic J et al. Effects of Resistance Training Performed to Repetition Failure or Non-Failure on Muscular Strength and Hypertrophy: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Journal of Sport and Health Science, 2022.

Lopez P et al. Resistance Training Load Effects on Muscle Hypertrophy and Strength Gain: Systematic Review and Network Meta-analysis. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 2021.

Ralston GW et al. The Effect of Weekly Set Volume on Strength Gain: A Meta-analysis. Sports Medicine, 2017.

Lovegrove S et al. Repetitions in Reserve Is a Reliable Tool for Prescribing Resistance Training Load. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2022.