Listening to your body: what it actually means when you train

The signals worth telling apart

Most of the confusion comes from lumping different sensations together as 'my body is telling me something'. They are not all the same message.

• Effort discomfort: burning muscles, heavy breathing, a racing heart during hard work. Normal, temporary and part of getting fitter. It stops when you stop.
• Muscle soreness (DOMS): a general ache across muscles a day or two after training, usually on both sides. Normal, especially after new exercises. Our guide to DOMS explains it.
• Fatigue: heavy legs, slow bar speed, everything feels harder than it should. A signal to reduce the load today, especially if it lasts several days.
• Low motivation: you do not fancy it. Often unrelated to how recovered you are, and frequently gone ten minutes into the session.
• Pain: sharp, stabbing or catching pain, pain in one specific spot or a joint, or pain that changes how you move. A signal to stop that movement and reassess.
• Illness: fever, chills, aching all over, chest symptoms. A clear signal to rest.

Once you name the signal, the decision usually becomes obvious. A general ache after Monday's legs is not a reason to skip Wednesday. A sharp pain at the front of the shoulder during pressing is a reason to change the exercise.

Your body can mislead you in both directions

Bodies are good at sending signals and less good at explaining them. Beginners often read normal effort as danger: a racing heart or burning legs feel alarming if you have not trained for years, and it is easy to stop too early. Experienced trainees tend to have the opposite problem. They are so used to discomfort that they push through pain that should have made them stop, and adrenaline during a hard class or race can mask it until later.

Mood plays tricks too. After a stressful day, a session can feel impossible before you start and brilliant by the end. After a good week of sleep, you may feel invincible and add far more than you planned. Neither feeling is a reliable guide on its own, which is why a bit of structure helps.

A simple daily check-in

A quick check-in turns vague feelings into something you can act on. It takes less than a minute, and over a few weeks it shows you patterns you would otherwise miss.

1. Each morning, rate five things from 1 (bad) to 5 (great): sleep, energy, muscle soreness, mood and stress.
2. Add them up for a score out of 25.
3. Around 18 or above: train as planned.
4. Around 12 to 17: train, but adjust. Lighter loads, fewer sets, or easier conditioning.
5. Below about 12, or a single score of 1: consider an easy session, a walk or a rest day, and look at what has changed.

The numbers are a rough guide, not a rule. What matters most is your own trend. If your score has drifted down for a week, something needs to change, whether that is training, sleep or stress. If you wear a tracker, our guide to heart rate variability explains how to combine its data with how you feel, and our guide to overtraining and under-recovery covers what a long downward drift can mean.

Adjusting inside the session

Listening to your body is not a single decision at the door. It continues through the session. The most useful tool for this is rating effort as you go.

• Reps in reserve: after each set, ask how many more reps you could have done with good form. Most sets should end with one to three left.
• Warm-up sets as a gauge: if a weight that normally feels easy feels heavy and slow, reduce your working loads by 5 to 10% today.
• Conditioning by feel: if you cannot hit your usual pace at your usual effort, hold the effort and accept a slower pace.

Our guide to RPE and RIR explains effort ratings in more detail. In a class, tell your coach what you are feeling. At Lycan Strength every class is scalable, and coaches adjust movements to the person, so a rough day does not have to mean a missed session.

Consistency beats perfection here. Turning up and adjusting, week after week, gets far better results than perfect sessions some weeks and none in others. Our guide to staying consistent has practical ways to keep the habit going through rough patches.

When a signal means get help

Some signals are not about training decisions at all. Stop exercising and call 999 for chest pain or tightness, fainting, a racing or irregular heartbeat that does not settle, or severe breathlessness out of proportion to the effort.

Pain that is changing how you move, getting worse week by week, or not improving after about two weeks of modified training deserves an assessment. Our guide to training with a niggle explains how to manage it in the meantime. Persistent tiredness that does not lift with rest, sleep and food is worth raising with your GP, who can check for things like low iron or thyroid problems.