How Personalized Weekly Targets Keep You Progressing
Know exactly what you need to succeed with targets tailored to your goals and recent workout history.
Strength training is a personal journey. While you can enjoy the benefits of resistance training no matter your age, gender, or experience level, your particular goals and training history make your fitness journey unique to you. By taking your selected Training Goals and training history into account, Tonal’s new weekly targets give you a personalized roadmap detailing the exact amount and type of training you need to do to get the results you want.
Why are Weekly Targets Important?
Each Training Goal on Tonal has an associated key metric (or measurable unit of a training stimulus) that’s directly correlated with achieving that desired outcome. For example, if your focus area is muscle growth, you’ll want to track volume lifted, since studies show that the more total weight you lift in your workouts, the more you’ll stimulate hypertrophy.
When you’re aiming to achieve a specific goal, you want to maximize the type of training that’ll help you reach it—without doing so much that you risk overtraining or injury. Tonal’s personalized weekly targets identify that sweet spot for each of your Training Goal metrics based on your recent training history.
If you’ve been feeling great and keep hitting or surpassing your target, it will automatically adjust, following the principle of progressive overload, or a gradual increase in training stress over time to promote sustainable progress.
Progress isn’t always linear, though, and it’s normal to have weeks where you don’t meet your target whether it’s because you’re traveling, dealing with illness or injury, or choosing to take a deload week to get some active recovery in between tough training phases. Taking this time to rest and recover can ultimately help you make progress by allowing you to return to your workouts refreshed instead of burnt out. To meet you where you’re at and ensure you don’t push yourself too hard when you come back, your weekly target will be slightly reduced after a period of lighter training.
“Ideally, you want to reach your target by the end of the week. This indicates that you are receiving an adequate amount of exposure to training stimuli that will help you reach your goals,” says Jacob Rauch, CSCS, PhD candidate, and Performance Manager of Applied Training Science at Tonal. “If you are below the target, you might consider performing workouts for your goal. If you have been training a lot recently and you see you’re way beyond the target, [then] consider checking in with your body to see how you are feeling and do a recovery workout if needed.”
By using the workout details screen to find workouts and programs that are highly rated for your goals, you will be exposed to the right type of training to move you closer to your target range. You can easily find these by filtering for workouts or programs for your goal.
How Are Your Personalized Weekly Targets Generated?
Your weekly target for each particular goal is based on the average of your past eight weeks’ training for that specific metric, and more recent performance will have a greater impact. The target range spans from just below to slightly above your average to keep you in the zone for sustainable progress. Your weekly targets will be reset every Monday to take your previous week’s performance into account.
If you are new to Tonal, you’ll see a target range based on your initial strength calibration and performance of members similar to you. As you do more workouts, this target will become personalized to your performance based on your habits.
Where Can You Find Your Weekly Targets?
On the Tonal mobile app home screen, you can view your personalized weekly target for each Training Goal you’ve selected, the progress you’ve made so far that week, and how much additional training you need to accumulate to reach your target. Plus, you can monitor the percentage change in your weekly target compared to the previous week.
You will also have the option to view weekly targets related to goals that you did not select. Performing well-rounded workouts will inherently help you accumulate other types of training stimulus, so check these out if you’re curious, but remember that focusing on your selected goals will optimize your training for the results you want.
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