The Set You Didn't Log

I want to talk about the least interesting field in Sequence.

Not goals. Not your grade pyramid. Not the charts. Effort — the little number you put against a set to say how hard it actually was.

Almost nobody fills it in. I know this because I can see it, and because for about a year I didn't fill it in either.

Here's why it matters. Go and look at your training history from six months ago. You'll see numbers. 4x5 at 60kg. Three sets of repeaters on the 20mm. Whatever your thing is. What you won't see is that on one of those days you'd slept four hours and it was the hardest session of the month, and on another you walked out feeling like you'd left three sets in the tank.

Those were completely different training days. In your history they look identical.

So when you sit down in November trying to work out why the last block didn't do anything, you've got nothing to work with. The weights went up on paper. You did the sessions. And yet.

The uncomfortable version of this is that most people's logs are a highlight reel. We're diligent about recording the PB attempt. We're much less diligent about the Tuesday where everything felt heavy — which is a shame, because the Tuesdays are the data. A PB tells you where you got to. A run of sessions at RPE 9 for work that used to sit at RPE 6 tells you why you're about to get injured, and it tells you three weeks before the injury does.

I'm not going to pretend this is a fun habit. It's two seconds per set and it feels pointless every single time, right up until the moment you're staring at eight weeks of training trying to reconstruct what happened.

Sequence records effort per set now, planned and actual, and it feeds through into your exercise metrics. Use it or don't. But if you're going to log anything beyond the number on the bar, log that.