What constitutes an effective workout? Is it when you feel a pump in the targeted muscle(s)? Is it when you work up a good sweat?  Do you need to be sore the next day? Do you need to go to failure? What about tasting your previous meal a second time as you are about to vomit? Does this sound familiar? Does it sound like you? Unfortunately the fitness industry does a terrible job at helping people understand what constitutes an effective training session. Unless something is worthy of a YouTube upload, can honestly own the title of beast-mode and foster water cooler talk the next day you are wasting your time. There are coaches that come back from conferences and can't wait to show their clients the newest, latest & greatest exercise guaranteed to leave them sore for days. Is this what we really want? After almost 20 years I have yet to have a client come to us asking for soreness. Or to be physically crippled from exertion. Or sweaty and out of breath. That is no one's goal. Soreness, fatigue and sweat may be side effects of a training session. But these shouldn't be the primary goal of training. Better health. Better movement. Increased fitness. Enhanced performance. These all make for better reasons for training. Yet we still see more businesses delivering 'all out fitness'. You are encouraged to push the intensity to the 'red line'. And everything should be done as high intensity interval training or HIIT. While there are benefits to increasing the intensity and testing yourself from time to time it isn't the best option all the time. But rather than take my word for it let's look at a few examples to show that 'red line' or 'all out' is not your only or best option....