The Process for Sustained Results

• Determination of goals and objectives. What do you want to accomplish in your training?
• Intelligent workout "programming" or design.  The design of the workout should support your goals.
• Supervision and Instruction. For best results, resistance exercise should be supervised.  This theme emerges in research with 20-year old athletes and 60-year old Type 2 Diabetics: We produce far better results when our strength training is supervised.
• Analyze the experience.  As the trainee, you need to make an assessment on how you are responding to the training stimulus.  Questions to consider include: Do I feel recovered between workouts? Am I experiencing any joint pain? Should I be increasing or decreasing my workout frequency? Am I getting stronger?
• Assess progress.  Is your workout-to-workout form, technique, movement speed improving?  Is your intensity of effort improving? Are you getting stronger during your most recent workouts?  Are you making progress over the long haul? Is your body composition changing (most effectively assessed via Bod Pod)? Regularly consulting your data around these questions provides tangible answers.
• Modify the plan.  The workout design and execution should be modified based on the above assessments.  Regular, intelligent modification to the workout programming ensures an engaging training experience, a continual challenge, and persistent health and fitness results.  The process should then continue to repeat itself.

Most importantly, the above process only works when it is built upon a foundation of evidence-based exercise.  That is, the exercise prescription should be a representation of the preponderance of scientific research.  This is the only way to guarantee safe and result-producing exercise.  If you aren't using an evidence-based approach, you are just making it up as you go.