7 Ways to Tell If You’re Getting Stronger or Stagnating

As a personal trainer with more than three decades of experience, it’s my job to help my clients get in the best shape possible. This invariably involves designing and leading them through what I believe are the most effective workouts for their needs and goals.

During our time together, I assess my clients’ progress and adjust the workouts based on their results. This is an ongoing process, as a program that delivered great results last month may not be so effective today.

But what if you don’t have access to a trainer?

After all, most people train without guidance from a personal coach. Instead, they write their own workouts or follow programs from websites – like those in the Fitness Volt Workout Library.

How can YOU determine if your training program is delivering the results you want, or if it’s wasting your time and energy?

Related: 8 Ways to Tell If Your Cardio Routine Is Effective or Not

In this article, I share seven ways to tell if you’re making strength gains or are stuck in a progress rut. Based on your observations, you’ll soon know whether your program is working or if you need to trade it in for a new one.

1. Your Repetition Count is Increasing  

Most lifters, especially bodybuilders, train in the 8-12 repetition range. That’s because, for many years, this was considered the best way to build muscle. However, more recent research suggests that higher rep sets – as many as 35+ – are also effective for building muscle and strength (1).

How does this information help you determine if you are getting stronger and building bigger muscles?

Simply put, even if your weights remain the same, provided your rep count is increasing, you are getting stronger. This is a very useful indicator for anyone who trains with fixed weights, e.g., you only have 25-pound dumbbells, or do mostly bodyweight exercises.

Think about it like this: If you previously did 10 reps with 100 pounds but, over a couple of months, work up to doing 15 reps, that’s a 50% rep increase. While your absolute strength may not have increased by the same amount, it’s still a reliable indicator of progress.

You can use these repetition increases to estimate surges in strength by predicting your one-repetition maximum. This is called an estimated one-repetition maximum, or e1RM for short.

For example:

• 10 reps with 100 pounds = 133 lbs. e1RM
• 15 reps with 100 pounds = 150 lbs. e1RM
• Use this calculator to discover your e1RM for any exercise and see how much your increased rep count is making you stronger.

Summary: Gradually being able to do more reps is a reliable indicator of progress. Even just an extra rep or two a month will add to big increases in strength and muscle mass over the course of a year.

2. You’re Lifting Heavier Weights

While doing more reps per set is an effective way to drive and measure progress, I know that not everyone enjoys doing high-rep sets. I mean, speaking as a former powerlifter, I used to think that anything above five reps was cardio!

So, instead of chasing more reps, a lot of people prefer to gradually increase their training weights. For example, if you keep your rep count roughly the same but add five pounds to the bar every week or two, it’s a good sign that you are getting stronger.

Unfortunately, adding more weight is not always practical. Machine weight increments are often quite big, e.g., 20 pounds, and the smallest weight plates usually weigh 2.5 pounds. Depending on the exercise, this may be too big a jump.

The good news is that you can use microplates that weigh as little as 100 grams to imperceptibly increase your training loads. While such small increases will probably go unnoticed, over a year they really add up.

Related: The ‘Microloading’ Method: How Adding Just 100 Grams Per Week Transformed My Lifts

For example, imagine adding 200 grams a week to your bench press for a year. The result would be a bigger bench press by 10.4 kilograms or approximately 23 pounds. Considering that a lot of lifters struggle to increase their bench press by even a few pounds, that’s pretty decent progress.

Of course, there is one caveat for increasing your weights; it should never come at the expense of good form. Poor exercise technique can cause injuries, even if you think you have “earned” those extra plates. It’s usually better to lift less weight with good form than more weight sloppily.

Summary: Lifting more weight for the same number of reps is a reliable indicator that you’ve gotten stronger. However, your form should remain unchanged. Cheat reps do not count!

3. You Need Less Rest Between Sets

How long you rest between sets is an important part of any workout. Rest too little and you’ll be too tired to do justice to the coming set. But, rest for too long and you’ll start to cool off, may lose your focus, and won’t be able to perform at the optimal level.

Consequently, most training programs specify not only the number of reps and sets you should do, but also the length of your rest periods. For bodybuilding, this can be anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 to 3 minutes depending on the exercise.

Getting stronger means you’ll probably feel more recovered in less time. For example, instead of needing two minutes of rest between sets of pull-ups, you feel ready to go after just 90 seconds. Over time, this may come down even more, e.g., 60 seconds between sets.

Recovering faster shows that your muscles are adapting to the demands of your workout and are more capable than they were before. It’s for this reason that some workouts actually prescribe gradually shortening rest periods as a form of progressive overload.

For example:

• Week 1 – 2 minutes rest between sets
• Week 2 – 1 ¾ minutes rest between sets
• Week 3 – 1 ½ minutes rest between sets
• Week 4 – 1 ¼ minutes rest between sets, etc.

Summary: Recovering more quickly between sets is a good sign that you are becoming stronger. Gradually reducing inter-set rest periods is also an effective way to make your workouts harder without adding weight or reps.

4. Your 1RM Has Increased

In the truest sense, strength is your ability to generate maximal force. It’s usually expressed in terms of your one-repetition maximum, or 1RM for short. While there are calculators that you can use to estimate your 1RM, these are not always accurate.

That’s because there are numerous formulae for approximating a 1RM, so your results will vary depending on which one your chosen calculator uses. Such calculators also become less precise with higher reps.

That’s not to say that using a calculator to estimate your 1RM – and therefore strength increases – is a waste of time. However, it’s not entirely reliable and your results won’t be 100% accurate.

The alternative to all this guesswork is to test your 1RM in the gym and see how much weight you can lift. Your 1RM is the amount of weight you can lift for one repetition but not two.

Testing and retesting your 1RM every few months will reveal if you are getting stronger or if your progress has ground to a halt.

It’s beyond the scope of this article to tell you how to perform 1RM testing but, suffice it to say, this is only really suitable for experienced exercisers and requires both a thorough warm-up and competent spotters. Even then, 1RM testing can be risky so make sure you consider the benefits before you try it.

Related: 1RM vs. PR — Definition, Differences, Benefits, Tracking & Tests

Summary: The ability to lift more weight, expressed as your 1RM, is one of the most obvious signs that you are getting stronger. However, 1RM testing is very strenuous and can be dangerous, so it’s best left to very experienced lifters.

5. Your Form Has Improved

While I always tell my clients and readers to strive for perfect form, I also know that “perfect” is open to interpretation and there are degrees of what is acceptable. However, if you find that your form is improving even if you aren’t getting more reps or lifting more weight, it’s a good indicator that you are getting stronger.

For example, let’s say you are doing sets of 12 squats with 175 pounds. The first time you do this workout, your last three reps are slow and ugly; you really have to grind them out. But, as the weeks pass, your form improves until, eventually, the last rep of each set is identical to the first.

This improvement shows you have gotten stronger even though you aren’t doing any more work. You can apply this metric to any fixed-weight exercise and it’s especially useful during bodyweight training.

Think like a gymnast and not a weightlifter – award yourself a score for every set you do, working toward getting tens across the board. This is a quality vs. quantity approach to strength training.

Summary: If your form improves, even though your weights and reps remain unchanged, you’re probably getting stronger. Better quality reps are invariably the result of increased strength, especially during bodyweight exercises.

6. Your Work Capacity is Higher

Beginners generally only need a couple of sets of a couple of exercises per muscle group to get good results from their training. This is because they have a relatively low work capacity and doing more will probably cause overtraining. Consequently, beginners often begin their strength training journey with 2-3 full-body workouts a week.

However, work capacity is trainable and improves alongside strength and muscle mass. In other words, as your muscles get stronger and more capable, you will be able to do longer, more voluminous workouts.

Because of this, most beginner exercisers eventually graduate to split routines, which allow them to do more sets and exercises per muscle group than full-body workouts. Ideally, these split routines should increase in frequency and difficulty as your strength improves.

For example: 

• Months 1-3: Full-body workouts
• Months 4-6: Upper/lower split
• Months 7-9: 3-way “bro” split
• Months 10-12: Push/pull/legs split

Unfortunately, a lot of lifters jump too fast into split routines or follow routines that are too advanced, e.g., designed for a pro bodybuilder. As a result, they miss out on all those “newbie gains,” often doing more training than they need or can effectively handle.

That said, gradually doing longer, more demanding workouts as your conditioning improves is a good way to drive and measure your progress.

Summary: Getting stronger is usually accompanied by the ability to train harder and longer. You may also notice that you are recovering faster between workouts. These are all good indicators that your hard work is paying off.

7. You Are Noticeably More Muscular

Strength training is arguably the best way to improve the performance and work capacity of your muscles. In other words, lifting weights makes you fit and strong! That said, stronger muscles tend to be larger and firmer – what’s properly called hypertrophy and tonus – than weak, untrained muscles.

So, while you won’t be able to measure strength changes by your appearance, your body should start to look more muscular as you get stronger. Taking progress photos is a good way to track how your body changes over the coming weeks and months. I know that a lot of people find such photos very motivating.

Of course, if you want well-defined muscles, you may need to drop some body fat by combining your workouts with a sensible diet. However, even if you can’t see the outline of your muscles, you should be able to feel that they are firmer and larger.

Summary: If your muscles are bigger or firmer, they’re probably stronger, too. But, if you want to see these improvements in detail, you may need to lower your body fat percentage by manipulating your diet and shedding the excess fat covering your muscles.

Closing Thoughts

There are few things more frustrating than working hard in the gym without seeing results. However, in a lot of cases, progress IS being made but you’ve just got to know where to find it.

For example, just because your weights aren’t increasing doesn’t mean you aren’t getting stronger. Other indicators of progress include being able to do more reps, improvements in form, and feeling less tired at the end of your workout.

So, before you write off your program as ineffective, look for the seven signs in this article to see if you are really stuck in a rut. You may find that, in reality, you are making progress, albeit in a way that you hadn’t expected.

That said, if you aren’t getting the results you want, it may be time to overhaul your workout and take a closer look at your diet.

Questions? Comments? Drop me a line below and I’ll get back to you ASAP!

References:

1 – Lasevicius T, Ugrinowitsch C, Schoenfeld BJ, Roschel H, Tavares LD, De Souza EO, Laurentino G, Tricoli V. Effects of different intensities of resistance training with equated volume load on muscle strength and hypertrophy. Eur J Sport Sci. 2018 Jul;18(6):772-780. doi: 10.1080/17461391.2018.1450898. Epub 2018 Mar 22. PMID: 29564973.

---