Stop Testing, Start Building

There's a difference between training and testing, and most people have no idea which one they're doing.

Testing is when you walk into the gym and try to find out what you're capable of today. You go for a one rep max deadlift, or a set of max reps benching 225, or you run a mile all out, or you're just obsessively trying to beat your last workout every single session.

Testing feels good because everybody likes setting PRs and proving they're getting better. You get that instant feedback, it feels like progress, and it's fun.

Training is when you walk into the gym, do what the program says, get the stimulus you need, and leave.

Training is how you get better in the long run. Testing too frequently is a very good way to stall your progress.

The problem with testing too much

When you test too much, you start digging yourself a recovery hole. Your body can only handle so many true max effort lifts or runs or workouts per week.

That's why I recommend keeping most of your hard sessions at an RPE of 5 to 8, mostly in the 6 to 7 range.

Those efforts should be saved for race day or actual testing, because they don't really build anything.

Not in the way the other training does.

You need to give yourself time to accumulate enough volume and intensity to improve, and testing too much makes that very difficult.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't be pushing your lifting sets to 0-1 reps in reserve, or that you shouldn't have runs and workouts that are genuinely hard.

You absolutely should.

But there's a difference between pushing hard within a structured program and just going all out because you feel like it.

One is training. The other is testing.

Building looks boring

It's hitting your three sets of five at the prescribed 80% of your one rep max, even when you know you could do those sets at closer to 90% that day.

It's keeping your easy runs at 9:00 to 9:30 pace when you know you could easily hold an 8:00 to 8:30 pace.

It's finishing your sub-threshold workouts feeling like it was a good workout but not that hard, and you definitely could have done another set or two at the same pace and effort level.

The people who get strong or fast and stay strong and fast spend most of their training time well below max effort. They save the big efforts for when it counts: a peak, a race, a test day that's built into the program on purpose.

Everyone else just tests randomly and wonders why they're stuck at the same numbers year after year.

What building looks like in practice

I spent two years building my 5K from 20:35 to 16:56.

The vast majority of that time was spent running or biking at a pace that felt embarrassingly slow, and about 10 to 20% of that time was spent doing high-intensity training, but rarely anything past 8 RPE.

That doesn't mean I never tested.

I'm a pretty big proponent of racing every four to six weeks.

But between those races, I allowed myself long stretches of just training without obsessing about beating my last workout or running a faster time or hitting a bigger number.

You have to let the training work. Training is training, and testing is testing.

Try this
Look at your last two weeks of training. How many sessions were a genuine 8, 9, or 10 out of 10 in effort?

If the answer is more than one or two, you're testing, not training. Scale it back, trust the process, and build something instead of just measuring it.

Capacity Training

I built Capacity Training to plan your running and your lifting together. Log your sets and it picks your next weights, your runs build week to week, and a 5K, 2 mile or 1.5 mile time trial can update your paces.

Run faster. Get stronger. capacitytraining.app

Mike