What do a blood work report, balance sheet, and your daily workout log have in common? The blood work is a snapshot of various pre-requested biomarkers that could possibly indicate certain things about one’s health and wellbeing. The balance sheet is a snapshot of the assets and liabilities of a company on any given day. The workout log is simply a crude snapshot of what your current physical capacities are.
All of these are simply indicators of performance based on predetermined quantitative metrics that one believes are pertinent to measuring progress.
What’s often missed when given these snapshots is:
- Interpreting what the numbers mean in order to build a strategy so that in the next snapshot the metrics have improved.
- Having a strategy but not following through with it because the habits weren’t established or the strategy was not adequate.
Giving this idea some context let’s take this example to what you may be facing right now. Let’s assume you’re movement practice of choice is weightlifting and your primary performance metric is increasing your bodyweight to strength ratio.
Your primary snapshot is likely when you test RM’s in the 1-5 range. Some questions you should consider are the following.
- Do I have a log of my RM’s from the last year?
- If I do have a log, have my numbers been going up at a rate appropriate for my training development?
- If they haven’t, did I adjust my training strategy?
If the answer is no to those questions and being stronger is one of your primary performance metrics then I implore you to shift it so that 6 months from now you can answer yes to those three questions.