When you start your workout journey, you don’t want to see mediocre results after a few months of workout. You want to see yourself beginning to reach your fitness goals, whether you want to lose weight, tone up, or build a certain muscle group. You want to know going into each workout that you’re giving it your all. If you want to see faster, better results over time, there are several things you can do to make your workouts more effective. Here are 10 important tips to help you get to your fitness goals faster.
This first tip might seem a bit odd, but listening to music can help you stay focused on your workout. By eliminating all distractions and background noise, music will help you focus on the task at hand. Additionally, music can help you motivate and hype yourself up. Try listening to more upbeat music while you’re doing your workout to help keep yourself focused. However, make sure that you are not using your phone too often to change your music. Using your phone a lot when working out can be extremely distracting and could take time away from your workout or lower your heart rate if you take too long of a rest between sets.
While it might seem like stretching might be an excellent way to warm up your muscles, there are more effective ways to warm up your entire body while also burning a few extra calories. Incorporate a more indepth warm up routine with stimulating, but not difficult exercises to get your muscles activated and ready to lift heavy or run the extra mile. This can be especially helpful when you’re working muscle groups that can be difficult to build.
Even if you just want to lose weight, you should incorporate weight training into your routine, even if it’s once a week. Building muscle is extremely important when it comes to getting fit and building muscle. Sticking to only cardio or high intensity interval training will burn your muscle along with fat. You can incorporate weight training into your workout routine to keep your muscle while you’re reaching your fitness goals, helping you become stronger overall.
One of the most important things you can do during your workout is staying hydrated. During your workout, you can sweat out a lot of the fluids in your body. Losing even 2 percent of the fluid weight in your body can make your workouts feel significantly more difficult. Most people don’t drink enough water in general, so keeping yourself hydrated during your workout and throughout the rest of your day will help you feel more energized and will help you lift heavier and workout for longer.
If you want to maintain energy throughout your workout, eating a good, nutritious meal beforehand will be a huge help. Unless you’re working out first thing in the morning and you practice intermittent fasting, eating before your workout is essential to help you lift heavy and get the most out of your workout. If you don’t eat enough, it’s possible that your body will exhaust much quicker. Even though you might be doing the same weight, reps and sets, your body might not have the energy to properly exhaust your muscles. Make sure you get enough to eat so you can head into the gym with enough energy and substance in your body.
If you exercise consistently enough, adding some additional fitness supplements into your routine can help you maintain energy levels and help you build more muscle. Whey protein isolate can be incredibly helpful to help build muscle by increasing your daily protein intake. Creatine can help boost your muscle mass and help you maintain energy levels throughout your workout. Pre-workout can help give you an energy boost and can help you stay focused on your workout.
Many people do two to three sets per exercise to help maximize muscle activation and exhaustion. However, sometimes people don’t push themselves to near failure, which is when there is the maximum amount of stress on those muscles. You can maximize the effectiveness of your workout by completing the reps of your exercise until failure, just in one set. Keep going until you cannot complete a rep of your exercise while keeping the proper form for your exercise.
One of the easiest ways to make sure you build muscle and keep a balanced diet is to eat enough protein. Whether you eat more protein-heavy foods, or incorporate protein supplements or powders into your diet, eating enough protein is key to building muscle and staying lean. You can increase your protein intake through meats, poultry, or even vegetables and other plant based foods. If your goal is to build muscle, you should aim to eat your bodyweight in grams of protein each day.
When people normally lift weights, they lift slowly, and release quickly. While this might feel easier when it comes to lifting weights, it’s not the most effective way to exhaust and build muscle. If you want to get the complete activation and engagement within your muscles, release your muscles at the same speed that you contract them during your workouts. This ensures that your muscles are completely engaged throughout each rep of your workout.
One of the best ways to make sure that all of your muscles engaged throughout your workouts is to incorporate more compound exercises. These movements engage multiple muscles within the same exercise. Instead of strictly doing isolation exercises, compound exercises will consistently work the same muscles throughout your workout, and will overall be more effective for building muscle.
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