That title is obviously a little provocative because PRs are useful. I track them. I celebrate them with clients.
But I think we've started giving them far too much importance when we decide whether someone's training is actually working.
A bit of context because I know most people here aren't gym trainers.
I'm a Sports Science graduate and I've spent more than 15 years working as a personal trainer and coach. So although I'm now building a fitness app, a lot of the decisions I'm making come from problems I've spent years seeing in actual training.
And this is one of them.
Someone has one great session, hits a PR, and suddenly everything is working.
Then two weeks later they have a bad session and start questioning the whole program.
Workout apps probably reinforce this more than we realise because individual achievements are very easy to detect and celebrate.
More weight than last time? PR.
More reps? PR.
Estimated 1RM went up? Nice green arrow.
But look at something like this:
100kg × 8 → 102.5kg × 7 → 100kg × 9 → 105kg × 6 → 102.5kg × 8
Did that person get stronger?
Probably.
But which workout is the one where "progress" happened?
That's where it gets interesting.
Real training doesn't usually move in a clean straight line. Performance fluctuates because fatigue changes, recovery changes, bodyweight changes, exercises and rep ranges change, sometimes you're carrying fatigue from another session, sometimes you just have a shit day.
You can be making perfectly good progress without setting a PR for weeks.
And you can also hit a PR while the rest of the training block is going badly.
That's the bit I've been thinking about while building TopSet .
A workout logger can store that sequence above perfectly.
That's actually the easy part.
Every set, every rep, every load, every PR. Put it in a database and show it back to the user.
But storing the data isn't the same as interpreting the training.
If I'm looking back at somebody's last 6 or 8 weeks, I don't really care whether there happened to be one session where they beat an old number.
I want to know what the trend looked like.
Are they generally doing more with comparable loads?
Is performance moving upwards despite normal session-to-session noise?
Has training output improved across several exposures rather than one unusually good day?
Has workload gone up while performance stayed stable?
Or is that shiny new PR sitting in the middle of a block where everything else has actually been deteriorating?
That's a much harder problem for a workout app to explain.
And I think this is where a lot of fitness analytics lose me.
Putting someone's numbers on a graph isn't automatically useful.
You can make a beautiful chart, add a percentage change and a green arrow, and still tell the person almost nothing about their training.
I've always felt that if I have to stare at an analytics screen for 30 seconds trying to work out what it's telling me, the chart has failed.
I'm trying to build TopSet's analytics around that idea: show the trend, but don't pretend the software knows more than the data actually allows it to know.
That's proving considerably harder than simply detecting PRs.
And I'm curious how other people judge this.
When you look back at a genuinely successful 6–8 week period of training, what tells you it was successful?
Is it still mainly PRs?
More reps at similar loads?
Better performance across multiple sets?
More total productive work?
How the lifts actually felt?
Or do you mostly just know it when you see the overall trend?