“Easy training is good training” – Tony Gentilcore
There is a pervasive thought in the world of fitness that sweating like crazy during a workout means that your workout was effective. Although at face value this seems like it makes sense, it misses the mark in a few ways.
Sweating a ton means that you did a bunch of “stuff” in the gym, but it doesn’t mean what you did was effective or pushed you closer to your goals. There’s more to working out than sweating like a melting popsicle in the summer sun. For example, if I told you to do 1,000 burpees in a workout you’re going to sweat like crazy for sure. But, was that actually effective for you besides causing you to burn some calories? I’d argue that it wasn’t. Unless your goal is to get better at burpees then there are much better ways to burn calories if that is what you’re after.
Let’s say your goal is to get as strong as possible in the squat, bench press, and deadlift. Training for strength like this may cause you to sweat mildly but that’s not the intent of the exercise. In general, when we are training for strength that will mean using lower rep ranges (maybe 2-6 reps) and resting longer between sets. This probably wouldn’t cause you to sweat a ton, but if our mindset was “sweating = good workout,” then we might be tempted to rush through the reps or not rest enough. This would cause us to fatigue a lot quicker and we would get less benefit from our strength work. Not good.
This mentality also doesn’t place you in the best position to be successful. If you equate sweating with a good workout, then not sweating means it was a bad workout. You could do more weight on an exercise than ever before, improve your technique on a lift, etc., but feel like you had a crappy workout because you didn’t sweat.
Sometimes a “good” workout is simply making it to the gym.
Sometimes it’s setting a personal record on a lift while leaving a few reps in the tank.
Whatever it is, making sweating the main indicator of a good workout is a bad way to set yourself up for success.
To put an important caveat in, I’m not saying that we don’t want to ever sweat or that sweating is bad. For example, you’re probably going to be sweating more during the conditioning section of your workout, but that makes sense. If you sweat a ton during your workout but you feel pretty good after a couple minutes of rest, then that’s cool. If you sweat minimally but feel like you put in some quality work, then that’s cool too. At times you are going to be pushing yourself hard and sweating a lot, but it shouldn’t be all the time.
One of our goals at BSP NOVA is for you to leave our gym feeling better than when you came in. It’s why we use a Rating of Perceived Exertion in our programs and teach our clients to push themselves, and yet, to leave a couple reps in the tank each set. The true path to success in the gym lies in consistently showing up and putting in quality work over the long haul. Sweating like crazy tells us that you did a lot of “stuff,” but not that that “stuff” was effective in pushing you closer towards your goals. Instead, think of sweating as something that just happens when you exercise but it doesn’t determine if your workout was effective or not.