How do you know you are doing an exercise right?

Where you feel it

Every exercise has muscles it is supposed to work. A row should be felt across your upper back, a bench press across your chest, a squat in your thighs and backside. If you are feeling a chest press mostly in your shoulders, or a row mostly in your arms, something in the setup is off, usually the angle, the grip width, or the weight.

This is the single most useful check available to you, and it needs no equipment and no observer. Before a set, know which muscles it targets. After the set, ask where you actually felt it. When those two disagree, that is information.

Whether rep one looks like rep eight

Good technique is consistent technique. If the first rep of a set is smooth and controlled and the last one is a different movement, bar path swinging, back rounding, hips shooting up first, the set went past the point where it was teaching you anything useful.

You do not need a coach to notice this. You need to be paying attention to the shape of the movement rather than only to the count, which is difficult while you are also counting. It is one of the reasons having something else do the counting is worth more than it sounds.

Working versus hurting

• A muscle working is a spreading, burning, heavy feeling in the meat of the muscle. It builds through a set and fades within a minute or two of stopping. This is what you want.
• A joint hurting is sharp, specific, and located at a knee, shoulder, elbow or lower back rather than in a muscle. It often appears on one side only. Stop the set. Do not push through it.

If something is sharp, one-sided, or still there the next day in a joint rather than a muscle, that is the point at which a person who can see you is worth more than any app.

Soreness is not a scorecard

Delayed soreness peaks a day or two after a session and mostly reflects how unfamiliar the movement was, not how effective it was. Beginners are sore after almost everything. Six months in, you can have your best session in months and feel nothing.

Do not chase it, and do not read a session with no soreness as a wasted one. The measure that means something is whether the weights and reps you can handle are going up over weeks.

Record one set

If you genuinely want to know what a movement looks like, film one set from the side, once, and watch it back. It takes thirty seconds and it answers questions no amount of reading will. Almost nobody does this, and almost everybody who does is surprised by something.

It is also the only sensible thing to send to a coach if you have access to one, because it is the thing they would have looked at anyway.

What OneMore does about it

Before each set it shows the movement and a figure with the working muscles lit up, and it says out loud what good form looks like and where you should feel it, so the check above is something you have been told before the set rather than something you have to remember afterward.

It deliberately does not claim to judge your form. A phone on the floor cannot see whether your back rounded, and an app that scores your depth from that is guessing. What it does tell you is what it can actually measure: whether you hit the prescribed reps, and whether the last reps of the set slowed against the first ones.