There Must Be Tests!

Most people reading this are training consistently. Showing up, putting in work, living generally active lives. And if you asked them how their training is going, they'd probably say something like, "pretty well," "I feel good," or "better than last year." They are most likely answering honestly. But it is almost always incomplete, and in some important ways, wrong.

The problem isn't effort. It's information. Specifically, the absence of it.

Training without a written record is training on memory, and memory is not a reliable narrator when it comes to your own performance. It smooths out the bad sessions. It inflates the good ones. It tells you that you've been working harder than you have, and progressing more consistently than you have. The research on self-monitoring is unambiguous here: most people systematically overestimate the quality and volume of their training. Not because they're dishonest, but because perception fills in the gaps where data isn't collected.

The fix is almost embarrassingly simple. Write it down. An app is not alwayst the best choice sometime a notebook is still best. What you did, what weight you used, how many reps, how it felt. That's it. The act of recording is itself an intervention. Studies on behavioral self-monitoring consistently show that people who track their training change their behavior during the process of tracking, independent of what they do with the data afterward. The notebook makes you honest before you've even reviewed a single entry. And when you do review it, when you flip back six weeks, you might realize you've been doing the same weight on the same lift for two months. Not good.

That knowledge is uncomfortable. It's also exactly the point.

But a training log has limitations: it can only tell you what you've been doing. It can't tell you what all of that doing has actually produced. For that, you need something else, a test. Not a test in the clinical sense, but an honest external measure. A race. A benchmark. A structured event where the conditions are fixed and the outcome is real. Something you can't negotiate with.

This is the real value of events like Murph, obstacle course races, or today's Berserker at the gym. They aren't just workouts with an entry fee. They strip away the story you've been telling yourself about your fitness and replace it with a result. You either moved well under fatigue, or you didn't. You either had the grip strength when it mattered or you didn't. The course doesn't adjust for how hard you've been training or how tired you were last week. It gives you a number, a finish, a tangible experience of your actual current capacity.

Research on goal orientation in sport makes clear that having a concrete event on the calendar changes how people train in the weeks and months leading up to it, more focused, more consistent, and more honest about gaps. But the event isn't just a training motivator. It's a calibration tool. The athletes who use events well aren't looking for validation. They're looking for data, the kind of data that only comes from being tested against something fixed and external.

Taken together, the log and the event form something most people never actually have: a feedback loop. The log looks backward. It tells you what you've been doing and whether it's consistent. The event looks forward, or more accurately, it reveals where you currently stand relative to where you thought you were. One lives in the gym, captured in real time. The other shows up a few times a year and tells you whether the accumulated work has built anything real.

Most people have neither. They train by feel, assess themselves by feel, and wonder why progress is so hard to identify. The feeling that training is going pretty well is not the same as knowing it. And the gap between those two things is wider than most people want to admit.

So pick one to start. Sign up for something, a race, a benchmark day, a structured event that requires you to actually perform. Or buy a notebook and start writing down what you do in the gym. Either one will immediately show you something about your training that you didn't know before. Both together will change the way you train, probably for good.

You don't need more information about exercise science. You need a record of your own and something worth training toward.

See you in the gym.

If you ready to get started. Or need help picking a test. Hit me up!

—JG