Why You Shouldn’t Be Able To Finish Your Exercise Routine Every Workout
© Doug Champigny, http://flirtingwithfitness.com
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
If you’re involved in lifting weights at the local gym, or training in a home gym and getting your fitness info from the Internet and/or magazines, you’ll no doubt run into a lot of information that seems to make sense, until you stop and think about it a little deeper. Here’s a very common one that’s most likely holding back your progress…
On your best days, you should be pumped but exhausted
by the end of your workout. Model: Devon Peacock
Photo © Teri Champigny, Champigny Photography.
You hear and see the advice that you have to finish every set of every exercise in your routine every workout for maximum results in the gym. That’s utter nonsense – if you can finish every workout completely, your workouts are simply too easy. And here’s why…
First, your energy levels vary each day, right from the moment you step out of bed. Attribute it to had much sleep you had, biorhythms, what you ate yesterday or even what your dreams were, but the fact is everyone has ‘good’ days and ‘bad’ days when it comes to your energy levels.
Then there are all the external factors that wear you down. Your energy can be depleted by relationship issues, workplace conflicts, financial worries, poor nutritional choices at breakfast and lunch, problems with your commute – and the list goes on and on. By the time you hit the gym for today’s weightlifting session, how much energy do you have left available?
Contrast that situation with this scenario: Picture yourself waking up comfortably on a Saturday morning, having a healthy breakfast & then scooting off to the gym. You’re ready to take on the world, happily humming to yourself all the while. Or at least teach the squat cage who’s boss today, right? Along the way your favorite tune comes on the car radio and you crank it as you drive, wind streaming in the open window as the sun shines brightly. You can already see, hear and feel – even smell – that it’s going to be just a SUPER day, can’t you?
So do you really expect to be able to perform the same work in the gym both days? Obviously not, since your energy and motivation are much higher in the second instance. That workout routine that seemed torturously long and hard that first day is going to be a breeze on the good days, so if the workout is the same for both you’re really short-changing yourself.
To ensure you’re getting the most out of every workout, you need to be taxing yourself that heavily on your good days too – and since you don’t know in advance which days those will be, you have to build your workout routine to be taxing on your best days.
And what does that mean on an average day or a bad day? You simply won’t have what it takes to get through your whole workout on those days. But it doesn’t really matter, does it? Because you’ll still be getting in a great workout, still pushing yourself a far as you can reasonably go that day. You won’t move as much weight, or maybe will have to skip a couple of the isolation movements, but you’ll still get maximal muscle growth since you’ve taxed your muscles to their current limit.
Just don’t use this as an excuse to stop your workouts too early, but make sure you go as far as you can each day. Be sure not to skip any of the big compound exercises, but if you simply don’t have the strength or are running out of energy then skip the last isolation exercise in your routine – for that day only… You have to be your own marshal on this one, monitoring yourself closely to be sure you’re not guilty of slacking off in the gym. But once you truly get a feel for this type of instinctive training you’ll really start to see your muscle-building potential – quite possibly for the first time ever!
The main thing to take away from this is that you can’t take generic fitness advice at face value, regardless of the source. Even if the info is 100% accurate for most people, it doesn’t mean it’s right for you, or for your exercise routine. Engage your brain before designing or altering your workouts or, better still, hire a certified personal trainer who’ll build a series of workouts customized to YOUR body type, metabolism, current physical state and future goals.
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Great points Doug. No need to destroy yourself just to complete what you have written down on paper. If you’re done, you’re done!
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