Quality over Quantity

By Coach Harry

Once we’ve completed our workout and we find sometime to reflect on it, how do we grade ourselves? What is the criteria or scale to which we attribute a score?

Do we base it on how long we spent in the gym? Or how many calories we burnt through? Perhaps our average heart rate or maybe our heaviest lift of the day.

All are valid and all have their place under certain conditions, but do they tell us what we need to know? And are we even using the correct metric to evaluate ourselves by?

One trap we all have fallen into at some point is basing the success of our workout on how tired we feel. We don’t feel like we’ve done enough or achieved anything if we aren’t crawling out of the gym and slumping ourselves down into the changing room. In these instances the benchmark we set ourselves against was Quantity. Everything focused around maximising the amount of work we could cram in. Which sounds valiant, but was it at the detriment of everything else? 

Quantity is important, progressive overload can be measured this way and a lot of the adaptations that we experience are down in part to an increase in quantity. Often in Exercise Science it is referred to as the ‘dose response’ phenomenon. Dose response describes the ‘magnitude of the response to a stimulus or stressor after a certain exposure time’. In a workout or series of workouts that would include variables such as frequency, intensity, duration and volume. One thing is for certain though, dose response or progressive overload has its limits, if not, after 2 years of training we’d all need to spend 5+ hours in the gym to see any sort of improvements. So when does quantity need to take a back seat to quality? Not after 2 years, in fact straight away.

Looking at some of the variables mentioned, we can assess how we look at both quality and quantity and how to strike the balance between the two:

Training volume (reps x sets x weight):

If we counted our total reps and sets within a workout we can get an idea for the quantity aspect. Let’s say that we did 100 reps total, in 2 weeks time we did the same session and completed 110 reps, 2 weeks later we did 120 reps. So in 1 month we increased our training volume by 20%. Linking back our dose response phenomenon it would need us to continually add reps and sets to our workout. It wouldn’t take very long for this to become unsustainable. Unsustainable for many reasons; time restrictions, tendon wear, joint inflammation, all because our quantity had become too great and our quality lacking.

In another article about our FST programming we go into more detail on how to control these variables, whilst looking at both the macro and micro cycles of training. 

So in order to improve our quality we need to look at not increasing our rep count, but instead increasing how much weight we are lifting across the session. Which can also be calculated (though it doesn’t need to be every time you’re in the gym). Instead of doing 100+ reps, many of which may not be overly challenging for our muscles (also known as junk volume), we instead look at increasing the intensity per rep, reducing or maintaining our quantity and therefore enhancing the quality of our workout. 

Technique:

What’s better? 30 reps of which 15 were pretty awful; awful because there was little attention to movement quality? Reducing the effectiveness on the target muscles, increasing our level of fatigue for very little payback (both in session and the days that follow), possible exposure to injury and in the long run, less return (strength/fitness/fat loss) on our investment (time spent grinding in the gym).

Or

15 reps that we executed well and with intention? Executed well because the weight was appropriate, movement was conscious and deliberate, target muscle exposure was maximised and therefore our return on investment greater. Not to mention less risk of injury, less time intensive, levels of fatigue managed….

Quality quality quality.

Duration:

Some workouts need to be long in duration. If you’re training for a marathon or triathlon then some workouts may well be 3+ hours. Strength training can also be quite time consuming (although a lot of time is spent resting). So there are always exceptions. But what is the right amount of time? Different studies cite different timescales, and these timescales are often based upon specificity of the training goal. Is it building muscle? is it reducing body fat? Is it becoming faster? Building your cardiovascular endurance?

Each will give you a slightly different number, so instead of focusing on the time itself, let focus on what we do with that time. This was highlighted in a recent Ignither class where the actual work time was 15 mins and the rest was a mirror image of 15 mins. Because of the nature of the session, both in exercise selection, intensity and format it was a gruelling session. A session that was a calorie burner, had our heart rates at 80%+ of maximum for most of the time and one that would have assisted in building physical stamina, mental fortitude, power endurance and technique under fatigue. 

All of that in 15 mins! So when we look at improving our fitness or our body composition we can see that it’s not much we do, but how we do it.

Now this workout did see us crawl out of the gym and slump into the changing room! We did cram as much work in as possible. But we were able to do so because we still focused on quality movement, appropriate weight selection and we time-framed it to allow repeated maximal efforts for short durations of time. 

In a further article we will discuss training under fatigue, but to just lean on this subject for a second; if the majority of your training sessions focus on quality, we develop the strength, skills and conditioning to be able to max out both quality and quantity in the same session. 

So to round up, more can be better and will be better for us at certain points, but only if the ‘less’ was performed to the best of our abilities and consistently so. Each rep, each set, each workout, each week and each month need to be knitted together with the repetitive theme of continually aiming to improve our skill set. Lifting technique for a squat should strive to be the same at 90% of 1rm as at 20% of 1rm. We should always be looking to maximise the effectiveness of how much weight we can lift within a specific rep range and to ensure those more intensive reps remain effective and focused. 

4 sessions per week executed with a mind for all of the above will be undeniably more beneficial for us than 6 sessions per week. The balance between quantity and quality is continually shifting and there will be points where one may take precedence over another. However when we zoom out and look at our training journey in terms of being a lifelong commitment, we’ll quickly realise that the quantity will naturally come, so lets always strive to keep quality as our number one priority.

This is why our FST programming is so important and suggested to follow- it gives you the volume of each system required, the duration to ensure you are getting the most out of the session and the technique is held to an upmost standard.