3 Ways To Make Your Workouts More Effective

Working out is incredibly good for us, with benefits from boosting mental health to improving heart function and overall fitness. If you’re keen to find a way to integrate exercise into your life in a positive and manageable way, we’ve compiled our top tips on how to balance your workouts so that you’re able to get the most from them.

1. Make sure you have an exercise plan. Especially if you’re new to working out, it’s essential to have a plan in terms of how you want to approach your sessions. Without this you may not show up for yourself and it will be difficult to measure your progress. One of the simplest ways to do this is to commit to whatever workout programme you’re going to do for a minimum of three months. This is long enough to get into the swing of the exercise – and to be able to see the benefits. If you’re looking to create sustainable change when it comes to how you exercise then this will be based on establishing new long-term habits and three months is the ideal time to help you do this. Identify your goal for the end of the programme, commit to 45 mins per workout and stick to the days that you plan – for many people, Monday, Wednesday and Friday work best.
2.  Start lifting at a level that is going to give you the chance to grow. Particularly if you’re just beginning with weights it can be a mistake to start lifting too heavy. This not only increases the chances of injury but can also make it difficult to see progress for a long time. So, instead, start out at the lower end of the weight spectrum. From there you can begin to work your way up through each weight until you’re at around 70% of the weight you can lift in one repetition with good form (your maximum). A slower start and gradually increasing weight every week will produce a lot more progress than going in heavy at the start.
3. Learn the language of reps and sets. These basics will ensure that you have a good understanding of how you’re working out – and how to build this up over time. Reps are essentially how many times you repeat a certain exercise while sets are the number of rounds of reps that you do. So, for example, lifting five times would be five reps. If you take a break after each five and do this four times then you will have done four sets. The number of reps and sets you do will depend on your exercise goal – more reps at a lower weight produce endurance results while fewer reps at a higher weight build muscle mass.

If you’re keen to get more from your workouts and balance how you integrate them into your life then these 3 tips are the simplest place to start. Discover more tips by downloading our MyLife365.Me app today.