Hobart Personal Trainer | Hobart Fat Loss | Hobart Personal Training

1. Prioritise your Health and Fitness

Every time you eat or drink you have an opportunity to do two things. You can either help yourself towards reaching your goals or you can make things harder by working against your goals. If you are prioritising your health and fitness it makes sense to be making positive choices that are going to make achieving that success easier.

I like to think of it this way. When you are training hard and you are almost at that level where you are going to vomit, have a think about what you are fuelling your body with. I can guarantee that you aren’t thinking about giving your body rubbish, all you want to do is make sure that you are giving your body the best fuel you can so that it make the workout easier!

Think that same thought the next time you are reaching for a food that isn’t going to help your health or fitness. Suddenly the ‘pleasure’ of eating this food isn’t worth the pain of getting it off again.

So each time you eat or drink, ask yourself if you are putting your health first and helping yourself out. If you aren’t tell yourself that you are making it harder to achieve your goals by making a negative choice. Trust me here, you won’t want to be telling yourself all the time that you are making life harder for yourself. You are suddenly accountable for all your actions and will make better decisions that will impact on your health and weight loss goals.

2. Do Something Everyday

You’ve got the eating and drinking under control, now its time to get some movement happening. The key here, the minimum you are working towards, is to do something everyday. Now before you go telling me all your problems and how you don’t have time, revisit number 1 and get to prioritising your health and fitness. The same goes for exercise, if you want to do it, and you are making it a priority then you will make time for it. Do you watch any television? Facebook and other time killers online. There is at least 5 minutes per day when you can get some exercise in. And if you think you can’t get anything done in 5 minutes that is beneficial, knock out 5 minutes straight of burpees and get back to me.

Ideally you will be spending more than 5 minutes per day on exercise, but the point is to do something everyday, and it will add up. Spend some time with the family at the park, walk there and back, go for a ride, whatever. The more you can do, within reason, the better, but lets just tick off the basics first. Something everyday.

Now get out there and make it happen. Give yourself positive reinforcement each time you make a positive choice and actively question yourself when you are making bad choices. Your habits will change and so will your body.

When I write a customised gym program I expect that it only represents the starting point for an individual. Your first session of any new program should, relatively, be the easiest of the cycle. You may feel at the time that is has whooped your ass but that should only be because it is different to what you had previously been doing.

Now when I see someone two or three weeks into a new program and they are doing exactly as they were the first session it does my head in. Your body will have adapted to the change in stimulus already so that feeling of being whooped you got first session has gone.

You need to progress your output at every possible stage if you are going to get the maximum possible result.
“How do I do that?” Well I’m glad you asked. There are four simple ways to increase the output and intensity of your workouts to ensure you get better results in less time.

1. Increase Weight

Oh really. Seems obvious enough, but the number of people who do the same weight for the same exercises week in and week out would amaze you. There will be a time when your reach the weight limit for a particular exercise and this is when you can use one of the other techniques.

2. Increase Reps

Another blast from Captain Obvious. This technique is the most common at being implemented and is probably overdone at the expense of number 1. When using this technique try to stay within a certain rep range (say 3-5, 8-12, 15-20) so that you are not just adding more and more reps. When you can get the target reps on any exercise bump up the weight, drop the reps and start the cycle again.

3. Decrease Rest

First of all I have to say that in order to decrease your rest periods, you need to know what they are to start with. If you tell me they are 60 seconds and you don’t have a stopwatch, second hand or any other timing device available to you then I’m calling you out. 60 seconds is exactly that. When you actually time it you might find it is quite a bit shorter than you expected. If all you did was decrease the rest between sets (keeping the weight and reps the same) your workouts will be more intense, not to mention,  finished in less time!

4. Exercise Order

This is probably the most overlooked aspect of a program. It is however one of the easiest ways to change the flow and intensity of your workouts. If you only did three exercises (lets say chin ups, deadlifts and dips) there is a possibility of six different exercise orders, all of which will give you a different intensity because they are essentially different workouts.

So there you have it.  Four easy to implement strategies that will keep your workouts at a high octane level for weeks on end.

James