When it comes to fitness—whether you're aiming to lose fat, build muscle, or just feel better—your performance in training over time is the foundational benchmark to focus on.
In this article, we'll cover the three main reasons why focusing on your performance is crucial for optimizing all areas of your fitness journey—not just your physical abilities.
Training Performance Tells You When to Adjust (or Not)
Your performance in training doesn't just indicate if you're following an adequate program; it also reflects whether other areas of your life are aligned.
Is your performance increasing regularly? Awesome! That's a strong sign you're giving your body what it needs—adequate nutrition, sleep, and stress management—to keep improving.
But if your performance has stalled or, worse, is declining, it's a clear sign that it's time to make some adjustments.
Here's the deal:
For your physical performance to improve consistently and predictably, three things must happen in order:
- Proper Stimulus: This means following a good training program. You need to challenge your body with adequate training to prompt it to improve in the first place.
- Adequate Recovery: This involves proper nutrition, sufficient quality and quantity of sleep, and effective stress management that allows your body to adapt to the training you do.
- Adaptation: If we've done the first two steps properly, the body responds by building muscle, getting stronger, improving nervous system efficiency, and so on—making it better equipped to handle future training.
A stall in your performance (i.e., a stall in adaptation) is a sign that there's a fault in one of the first two steps (or a combination of both).
By keeping an eye on your performance, you can catch these issues early and address them accordingly.
Build More Muscle Mass
For both quality and quality of life, having more lean mass (i.e., muscle) is always a good thing.
Over the long term, you want your total amount of muscle mass to keep increasing. You might have specific phases where you're cutting, bulking, or maintaining, but the overall trend should be an increase in total lean mass.
Sure, gains slow down as we age, but the goal remains: keep building muscle whenever possible.
Again, this isn't just about looking good (although that's a nice bonus)—having more muscle improves both the quality and length of your life.
While gadgets like body fat scales or DEXA scans can measure muscle gain, they're often inconvenient and not always accurate. The best real-time indicator of muscle growth? Your performance in the gym.
There are two main reasons you might lift more weight or do more reps:
- Better Technique: You've improved your form and become more efficient with the movement.
- More Muscle: You've gained muscle mass, making you stronger.
As you gain experience, improvements from technique alone become less significant. So if you're lifting more, it's likely because you've built muscle.
Preserve Muscle While Cutting/Losing Weight
When you're cutting weight, the goal is to lose fat, not muscle. But many folks end up losing muscle because they focus way too much on the scale and not enough on maintaining performance.
Building muscle is incredibly difficult to accomplish, requiring conscious effort on your part and complex processes your body handles behind the scenes.
How to Avoid Muscle Loss
- Take It Slow: Aim to lose no more than 1% of your body weight per week. Ideally, keep it around 0.5% to better preserve muscle.
- Monitor Your Performance: It's normal for progress to slow during a cut, but significant drops in strength or endurance are red flags.
If Your Performance Drops Significantly:
- Eat a Bit More: Slightly increase your calorie intake to support muscle maintenance.
- Adjust Your Training: Modify your workouts to match your energy levels.
- Take a Break: Pause the cut and focus on maintaining your weight or recompositioning (losing fat while gaining muscle).