As TechRadar’s Senior Fitness and Wearables Editor and someone with 10 years of fitness writing experience, I know (on paper) a thing or two about the gym. At one point in my life, I had made considerable strength gains: I could crank out a set of 10 strict-form pull-ups, and I was very happy with what I saw in the mirror.
Alas, life happens. Due to a combination of moving cities (losing my old gym community in the process), age and changing my priorities from building muscle to running marathons, I’ve lost a lot of my old strength gains. I’ve switched my best gym shoes for my best running shoes.
However, 2025 has become my year to get a grip on the iron once again. I’ve joined a new gym and intend to claw back all the strength I’ve lost – and go beyond my old achievements to hit personal bests in all my biggest lifts. Here’s how I’m going about it, using the advice I’ve gleaned from a decade in the fitness biz to craft sustainable gains.
1. Going in with goals
Beyond building muscle, after my first few sessions, I knew I needed some tangible goals to aim for. Aesthetic goals are a problem, as the human body is a fickle thing: I know from my years writing for magazines like Men’s Health that bodybuilders and superhero actors aim to look their best on the day of competition, photoshoots or filming via careful dieting, dehydration, and pumping up their muscles moments before showtime. For some, there are chemical enhancements involved too.
Instead of structuring goals around looking a certain way, I’m opting for a goal weight to lift. On my return to the gym, I weighed 73kgs / 161lbs. I’m rounding that number down to 70kgs, and I’m using that as a benchmark to inform my training. I’m aiming to bench press my starting bodyweight (70kgs / 155lbs), back squat 1.5x my starting bodyweight (105kgs / 230lbs), and deadlift 2x my starting bodyweight (140kgs / 308lbs). Throw in 10 pull-ups too, a long-time training goal I managed to hit once upon a time, but have sadly lost the strength to do so again.
I’m basing my training on those four moves: gym sessions will be divided into pull days to train the muscles used for deadlifts and pull-ups, leg days to train the muscles for squats, and push days to train my chest muscles, necessary for bench pressing. By starting with those four core moves and then working backward to isolation exercises, I can structure my gym sessions effectively.
For example, I start every push day with either dumbbell or barbell bench pressing, and follow it up with accessory movements such as shoulder presses, chest flies, and tricep extensions before moving onto cardio.
2. Keeping records
To hit these goals, I must keep accurate records of my progress, which is one of the biggest reasons I’ve struggled in the past. How much weight I’m lifting during each session can tell me whether I’m getting closer to my goal, or whether my progress is stalling, at which point I can look for things to change, possibly consulting a PT or strength coach. The best Garmin watches kept my records for running, so I knew what to change as I approached race day: I’m using the same principle for buffing up.
The Whoop app has been great for this, as it’s got a comprehensive library of movements I can access as well as all the statistics I can monitor, such as muscular load, stress, and recovery. However, as I frequently swap between wearables during testing periods, I also use Google Keep to jot down notes during my session.
My notes consist of the exercise performed, reps and sets, and weight lifted. If I go up or down a weight, I’ll make another quick note with a second or third weight. Some of the best fitness apps, such as Stronglifts and PUSH, are great at making notes and organizing them, often using AI to achieve a more comprehensive overview.
Whoop’s exercise library makes taking notes easy, but every now and again, issues do crop up. For example, Whoop can only add weight to a pull-up, and I’m unable to factor in using resistance bands to make the exercise easier once I’ve expended all my energy on strict-form reps. Again, swapping between so many devices makes consistency in note-taking more challenging for me, so a simple solution like Keep works best.
3. Mind-muscle connection
Research indicates that concentrating on your muscles during the exercise, instead of looking around or chatting to your gym buddy, can increase the muscle’s activity, provided you’re using a load of up to around 60% of your one-rep max. If you’re doing sets of between 8-12 reps, as I’m doing on most exercises after periodic max strength tests on the compound movements listed above, 60% ends up being quite a good benchmark for me.
It’s one of the best tidbits I came across during my tenure as a fitness writer: to use a Gen-Z term, once that rest period’s over, I’m Locking In. That means using a weight I can lift under control, but one which could become a bit of a fight to the first for the last couple of reps, lowering it slowly to maximize gains on the way down as well as up, and using creative visualization to help get the most out of my reps.
During chest flies, one celebrity PT taught me to imagine squeezing a pencil between my pectoral muscles. When doing lat pulldowns, I imagine the same pencil pressing directly between my shoulder blades, so I can draw them down effectively during the movement. Putting my brain “into” the muscle and staying aware of my effort helps me determine if a weight is too easy – or too hard. If my form starts to wobble too early in a set, I know to drop the weight down and focus on form.
4. Less training, more often
One of my favorite tips I ever received from a coach was to cut down the amount of time I spent training and to train more often. If I spent 90 minutes training my legs in the gym back in the day, I’d feel very sore and wouldn’t train at all for two days afterwards. I’d also have to wait until I felt like I had the time to commit to a gym session, and as a busy adult, time is a precious commodity.
These days, I keep my training sessions short, around 45 minutes per session, focusing on four exercises and five minutes of cardio before hitting the showers. I’m still testing many of the best running watches myself, so I run twice a week on top of my strength training, and I’ll often squeeze in a boxing class or do a yoga flow at home.
Even though I’m spending less time in the gym each day, I’m currently managing to exercise between five and six times a week, accruing more overall exercise time than I used to – and it feels more sustainable than destroying a single muscle group for 90 minutes and hobbling into work the next day.
I’m very fortunate to have found a gym a short walk from my office, allowing me to better fit gym sessions and runs into my day, so I’m aware this isn’t doable for everyone – but the principle of shorter sessions more often is one I recommend applying to your training schedule, depending on your goals.
5. Keeping supplements simple
It’s easy to overcomplicate things when it comes to eating right, and it’s especially easy, once you start, to fall down the rabbit hole of grams of protein per pound of bodyweight or calorie-counting, to the point where fitness fans are almost encouraged by the industry to develop an unhealthy relationship with otherwise healthy food.
I’m determined to enjoy my life alongside getting healthy, so I’ve kept my supplementation very basic to avoid the obsessive nature of dieting. I don’t use MyFitnessPal or any similar calorie-counting software, but I have made an effort to clean up my diet, reduce refined sugar, cut down alcohol and increase my protein intake.
I have a shake a day, consisting of one large scoop of 100% whey protein powder, one 3g scoop of micronized creatine monohydrate, some water, a splash of milk, and usually a dash of coffee. There are plenty of vegetarian and vegan options available.
I have one of these after strength training out of habit and one mid-morning on rest days, but I learned when researching an article several years ago that the concept of an ‘anabolic window’ (the theory that you have to have protein around an hour after exercise for maximum effectiveness) is now considered outdated. Overall protein intake and cumulative muscle saturation when it comes to creatine is more important than when exactly you take your shake.
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matt.evans@futurenet.com (Matt Evans)
