When it comes to getting results, it’s not exactly as simple as lifting things up and putting them back down.
There’s 3 key factors you must implement to ensure you continue to achieve more.
Whether your goal is fat loss, toning, or even muscle building these principals will still apply.
Often we identify one or more of these things when chatting with new members as to why they haven’t been getting results up until now.
In a nutshell here they are:
No Structure - so often people go with the ‘RANDOM’ approach. Meaning that overtime they train the exercises are different, the reps, sets, weights are random. There’s no congruency from the week prior or for future sessions. The biggest issue with this is that the body never actually learns the movement patterns, therefore restricting the ability to progress because there’s nothing to build on. And when your body hasn’t learned the movements from the most basic level, when you add load or change the reps and sets etc, often they will be recruiting the wrong muscles or the right muscles ineffectively.
No Tracking - Further on from the previous point, often those that take the random approach aren’t tracking anything. And when you don’t track what you’ve been doing, you have no point of measure to go from. The key to continual improvement is to progressively overload, as a general rule 5% increase each week will be sufficient for most, this will ensure there its a constant stimulus on the body, creating micro tears in the muscles which will cause the body to repair and adapt - therefore getting stronger, further performance improvements and higher metabolic rate (improving fat loss). There are a number of ways to progressively overload - increase the load, the amount your doing (reps, sets) or do things in less time (higher intensity). When you know what you’ve been doing previously it’s much easier to know how much you need to increase.
Time Under Tension - Whenever I venture into other gyms I see this regularly, the mindset of many is that you need to lift the heaviest weight possible as quickly as you can. However this actually only recruits a fraction of the muscles fibres. The key to stimulating your muscles is time under tension. Meaning a lighter weight lifted with a very slow and controlled temp will be far more effective than lifting a heavy weight quickly. So next time you’re lifting, SLOW IT DOWN and focus on the muscles you want to be recruiting.
Watch this video to learn more about these 3 key mistakes you must avoid to continue to get great results with your training.
