2022 Workouts

Recently, I’ve become more serious about working out and I’ve found listening to how my body feels instead of following a strict schedule has helped me gain muscle faster.

For a long time, I believed humans were very fallible, biased, and prone to post-rationalization and irrationality. I still believe these things, but I also believe that I know whether or not I’m pushing myself while working out better the app I’ve been using. When I first looked for a way to workout, I distrusted humans and trusted technology, so I found a workout app that gave me a workout whenever I opened it, slowly increased the intensity and mixed up the workouts to let my muscles recover. For two years, twice a week, I did what my workout app told me. For the most part, baring a few particularly difficult workouts, the workouts given to me by the app were pretty easy and I would tell the app to increase the difficulty next time. At the end of those two years, I was stronger. I could do more pushups and squats and I consider this a success. However, I’ve transitioned to a much more efficient workout style. I do the same exercises from the app, but now I listen to how my body feels and I adjust the repetitions or difficulty based on how I feel. I’d always aim to reach that difficult, pushing feeling and make my last two sets difficult. It sounds obvious, push yourself, but I missed it because I was biased against human judgement. I thought the app could tell me the right pace, but listening to my body over the past 6 months has given me way more gains than following the app.

I’m not saying I messed up when I chose the app two years ago, I’m happy I started down this road. I did what I could with my mentality at the time. I believed in technology and the technology was good enough to get me started. What I’m saying is that if you’re able to listen to your feelings, you can gain a lot of useful information about yourself and how you can improve.