Start Your Workouts Right

The gymnasium, a place of titanic struggles, classic distances, blood, sweat and occasionally tears! It's a place you go to enhance yourself. As a trainer I put 100 percent effort into my exercise programs and expect the same from my clients.

Did you know that a great 60 percent of adults in the US are obese? That concerns me, seriously, how could things have got this bad. The fast food craze appears to have taken over. People very often will go for speed and convenience over planning and preparation.

With that in mind, the people who do attend the gym and make the attempts to reduce this figure or at the very least not let it get any worse. Wretchedly though it does take a bit more than simply turning up to the gym to actually get a hold of your fitness and health and improve it.

I'm very aware that my readers are inspired, educated and active folk. So our workouts will be fairly extreme, involving heavy weights, long distances and fast movements. At the end of the session we are frequently the ones on our knees in a pool of sweat!! Does it provoke you when you look up and see half of the people in there looking fresh as a daisy and having a talk! Most of the time these sort of folk would possibly not be in the very best of shapes.

You see it is not about simply going to the gymnasium or going for a run, it is what you do while you train. Many people do not have the information on how to train correctly, this isn't their fault if they haven't been shown. So in this week's post I'd like to share with you five ways to boost your workouts, turning some of your gymnasium sessions from a walk in the park to a constant physical and mental battle.

1] Do not be uninteresting in the warm-up. The warmup - Try to avoid a straightforward 5-10 minutes on a cardio machine followed by some lacklustre stretching. Use the cardiovascular machines to really boost your pulse and prepare yourself for some activity. Do some mobility exercises and some dynamic stretching. Mimic the movements you'll be doing in the session with your stretches. Also try one or two warm up sets using lighter weights to tune up your system and get the muscles ready for the movements.

2] Take a day off - It may appear peculiar that one tip in 'ways to power up your workout ' is to take a day off, but it's critical. As you train you put your muscles thru a bit of a torrid time, they pick up tears which must be fixed. Rest and good nutrition ( protein ) helps to recover the muscles the most efficiently and permit them to return stronger. This is basically how we improve, we test our muscles to the edge, permit the muscles time to recover, then we go again.

If we do not allow our muscles sufficient time to recover then we are not coaching to our total potential and we increase our chance of picking up an injury. Folk combat this by training different muscle groupings on separate days. If you don't wish to rest just go out for a nice walk / jog / cycle or go for a swim.

3] Progression - Do you do the same workout all the time? It is vital to improve and to keep a healthy interest in exercise that things are mixed up a bit. When bench pressing sixty kilograms 10 times begins to get simple it isn't the time to pat yourself on the back, it's time to up it to sixty-two / 64 / 65kg and try again. It truly is all about progression , your muscles need to consistently be acclimatising to new things and then pushed again. This is how we build and get better.

4] Go Intense - By adding some high intensity interval coaching ( HIIT ) to your exercise sessions you can really boost your cardiovascular fitness. Varying high speeds with low speeds over a short time period will truly test your fitness level and help to lift your VO2 max. This also means you can get a full cardiovascular workout in 1/2 the time of your typical same paced run / cycle, and push yourself far more.

5] Go for big movements - Machines in gymnasiums are excellent for isolating muscle groups and give a great start to beginners learning to use weights. When you need to truly test yourself then free weights will be better. Free weights training incorporate many alternative muscles into the exercise simply by driving them to work industriously to stabilize the muscles round the joint to hold the weight up.

The best types of exercise are the ones which work the most muscles. If you compare a concentration bicep curl with a clean which one do you think will involve more muscles? Yes clearly the clean, it has 1 or 2 phases and will work your lower body and upper body.

If you don't have weights then exercises like burpees or certain adaptations of press ups are great exercising involving the big muscle groups. These routines will tire you out lots more than your isolation exercises so it can be best to do them early on in your session while your muscles are fresh. [AJSCRB].