Today I want to talk to you about your max effort. What do I mean by this? Your max effort is doing something as hard as you possibly can. That could be swimming 100m as fast as you can, lifting the most weight you could possibly lift at least once, or even running the furthest you’ve ever run before.

Now the reason I wanted to touch on this point is for a couple of reasons but the main one is to make sure you aren’t just doing what you are comfortable with and going through the motions. Doing the same thing over time means you won’t progress or improve, causing you to plateau in your results.

When we create training programs, depending on your goals your training loads, volumes and intensities will be based around your max effort (1RM/1 Rep Max ) for each exercise. You don’t and shouldn’t train at your maximum effort, instead, you should be working off a percentage of your max effort.

To know what that is though you need to get yourself out of your comfort zone and push yourself to test out what you are actually capable of. For example, if you do sets of 10 push-ups as part of your program but can actually do 20 push-ups when pushing yourself then you aren’t working hard enough in your training to make any progress.

What to do from here?

No matter what training you are doing, I want you to challenge yourself to see how much harder you can be working. Can you increase your weights, walk faster, run further, do more reps? Aim to work that little bit harder each week and you’ll avoid plateaus and improve your results.

Not sure about some of the terminology in this blog? Check out Gym Jargon Explained

Need help with your exercise and training programming? We’d love to help!

Nathan Spring