What do people say stopped them?
Asked in the moment, people named more than tired muscles, and their reasons differed between exercises.
Published: PeerJ, 2020 (lead author)
Participants: 22 trained lifters, 11 women and 11 men
Data: 158 spoken statements, recorded and transcribed
Methods: Open question within 20–40 s of stopping; two independent coders; five-category codebook; mixed-effects logistic regression
The question
Training programs often prescribe sets taken to failure and assume the target muscles are what give out. We wanted to hear, in people’s own words, what actually made them stop.
What we did
Trained lifters did squats and bench presses at two loads, 70% and 83% of their one-repetition maximum. Within 20 to 40 seconds of stopping each set, we asked one open question: what limited you, and why couldn’t you do another repetition? We recorded and transcribed every answer. Two raters coded each statement independently into five categories and resolved disagreements by discussion. We then modeled the coded categories to compare exercises and loads.
What we found
Muscle fatigue came up most, followed by general fatigue. Pain, cardiovascular strain and negative feelings each came up in roughly one set in ten. Negative feelings were more common in the squat, and at the lighter load pain and cardiovascular strain tended to come up more often. In the squat, 27% of muscle-fatigue statements pointed to the upper body or lower back rather than the legs, a detail a fixed checklist would likely miss.
What it shows
The same pattern works for products: ask at the moment of the behavior, keep people’s own words, code them with two people against a shared codebook, then count. It turns open feedback into something a team can compare across versions or segments.
Read the paper: An analysis of the perceived causes leading to task-failure in resistance-exercises (PeerJ, 2020).
