Three Tips to Improve Your Workout

Three Tips to Improve Your Workout

A good workout doesn’t need to be complicated, nor does it need to be full of hundreds of exercises, hitting muscles from different angles and intensities. Your workout doesn’t even need to be long. Quality is far more important than quantity. Use these three tips to improve your workout…

1. Reduce the weights you lift by 10%.

Reduce the weight? That sounds counter-intuitive! Here’s the reason…

It improves form, which is a vital component of weight training. Far too often I see terrible form in the gym which results in the target muscles not even being used – a waste of time and a potential injury risk. Drop your weights, slow down your lifting tempo (take 3-5 seconds to lower your weight, then explode into a powerful lift) and watch your physique and fitness improve.

Of all the tips to improve your workout, making sure you lift a weight you can cope with properly is arguable the simplest and safest – even if it does give your ego a kick in the nuts!

2. Add an extra set per exercise.

When it comes to muscle building and fat loss, there are few better training weapons than increasing volume of work done. This tip works in partnership with the first one – with slightly reduced weight you can increase the amount of sets you can do.

An extra set per exercise soon adds up. If you typically perform 6 exercises per session, that’s an extra six sets. If you typically perform sets of 10, you have added an extra 60 reps in your workout.

If you train 4 days per week, that’s an extra 240 reps per week – it’s like a whole extra workout per week, just by adding an extra set.

3. Reduce your rest to 30 seconds between sets.

With my personal training clients I enforce a strict work:rest ratio. It’s a way of increasing the intensity of a workout by a huge order of magnitude. In fact, I’ve had this conversation a few times….

Personal Training Client: “why am I the only person sweating in the gym?!”

Me: “Because you’re the only person actually working hard in here!”

Depending on the exercise, the workout and our training goals I will manipulate rest. Your rest period should be long enough to allow you to recover enough to perform another good quality set. No longer, no shorter. For most people, their rest period is the amount of time it takes to check Facebook or chat with their friends. Doing this usually results in a slow, pointless workout.

I would be willing to bet I could improve the results of most gym goers simply by reducing their rest periods. To make sure you keep your rest periods strict, buy yourself a decent sports watch.

These three tips to improve your workout show how just a few simple tweaks can be the difference between a poor workout and a fantastic one. It’s the difference between making a significant improvement in your health and fitness or staying the same.