Anybody who wants to have a strong and toned body would consistently workout, eat a healthy and balanced diet, and keep themselves hydrated.
If you want to see the results of your hard work soon, you may want to check out the negative effects of pre-workout supplements and employ some techniques to ensure that you get the best of your workout.
Here are ways to safely maximize your workout:
Plan and List Your Exercises
Before heading off the gym, ensure that you have a list of your exercises and their corresponding times. This will give you a more efficient workout and minimize delays since you no longer have to think about what routine to do next. You’ll most probably have time to do all your exercises if you prepare your list ahead of time.
Every week, prepare a list of weight amounts and times for each exercise. With this technique, you’ll know what exercises you’re making great improvements on and which ones you must improve on.
Learn the Correct Form
The best way to maximize your workouts is to ensure that you do the exercises in the correct form, while ensuring your safety. Incorrectly doing the exercises will work the wrong set of muscles and place you at high risk for injury.
For this, you may need to research the correct workout forms on reliable fitness websites or even consult a personal trainer.
Stretch Before and After Workouts
Before every workout, it’s important to stretch and warm up your muscles first. This will not just prevent injuries and give your muscles more flexibility, it’ll also help you focus on the workout ahead. A warm-up and cool-down routine consists of low to moderate activity using large muscle groups for five to ten minutes.
If you’re doing plenty of cardio exercises, try adding a pre-workout walk and loosen up your leg muscles. Also, adding a cool-down routine after your workout will help relax your muscles to avoid pooling of lactic acid into your legs.
You can also try massaging your arms and legs after a workout to improve circulation, increase joint flexibility, and reduce cramping.
Spread Your Workout
If it’s difficult to fit your exercise schedule into your daily schedule, try breaking your cardio workout into two. This technique is believed to promote higher fat loss. Concentrate on intense, short, and more frequent cardio exercises if you need results fast.
In case you can’t do workouts twice a day, you can try interval training. This is done by breaking up those lifting exercises and running for three minutes in between. This is known to keep your heart working while strengthening your muscles, too. This way, you’ll burn calories even when you’re done working out.
Try Weight Training
You can’t have the body that you want just by doing cardio exercises alone. This is because of a reduced metabolism, which will make losing weight more difficult.
Doing weight training, however, will build more muscle and improve your metabolic rate.
Add Relaxing Music to Your Playlist
While upbeat music can fire you up for exercising, those who listened to soft, relaxing music after working out had faster recovery times than those that didn’t have music. Soft music will help increase dopamine and serotonin levels of the body, which will help ensure recovery.
Thus, after your workout, listen to a few relaxing tracks to help your heart rate and blood pressure return to normal and eventually lead to better recovery.
Modify Your Routine
You can avoid hitting a plateau by modifying your exercise routine every 4 to 6 weeks. Aside from keeping you from getting bored with your routine, changing up your routine also allows you to find workouts that your body likes.
If you don’t get measurable results in six to eight weeks of doing the routine, it’s best to stop the program and find something else. Additionally, if the scales aren’t budging even with consistently doing the routine and eating healthy, it’s best to find something new.
Cover Trouble Areas
Sometimes, consistent exercise isn’t always enough to achieve a perfect figure. As with other traits, genetics plays a big role in achieving your desired body.
If you find it hard to make your midsection smaller, try improving your shoulders and hips instead.
Have a Back-up Plan Ready
As suggested, it’s best to plan your routine for more efficient training. Even then, you need to have a back-up plan ready in case something comes up, such as the equipment you plan to use is not available.
Create a “library” of workouts that you can choose from when the need arises. Consult various fitness magazines, books, or websites in creating your library.
Don’t Hold Back on Nutrition
Maximizing your workout also means making the most of your nutrition. It’s ideal to have protein and carbohydrate intake an hour before working out and another set of protein and carbohydrate food or drink 30 minutes post-workout.
Doing this will help improve your body’s recovery after a workout, reload your energy stores, and repair muscles that you just used.
Always Hydrate
The ideal daily recommendation is one-half to one ounce of water per pound of body weight to ensure that your body is hydrated. When you lose even just 2 percent of your body fluids, your performance will be compromised and your body’s ability to recover after working out is reduced.
To ensure that your daily water intake is sufficient, you can weigh yourself before and after working out. Ideally, you shouldn’t lose more than 2 percent of your total body weight.
Get Enough Sleep
Quality sleep is essential in maximizing your efforts in working out. Poor quality sleep not only affects your performance negatively, but it’ll also hinder your body’s ability to recover after exercising.
As a result, your body weakens, making exercising ineffective. Lack of sleep leads to overtraining and fitness plateaus. Ideally, you should have 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night.
Have Chocolate Milk Post Workout
In addition to other recovery beverages, drinking low-fat chocolate milk after working out will help the body to recover.
The carbohydrates in chocolates replenish your energy and aid better protein absorption in the muscles. Also, the protein in chocolate milk will help in muscle repair, making it a great recovery drink.
Final Thoughts
Getting the best out of your exercises needs more than just spending time at the gym. Aside from ensuring efficient exercise by creating a library of workouts, you also need to keep an eye on your nutrition and sleep. Not only will these tips help you achieve your fitness goals, but it’ll also allow you to enjoy better overall health.
