These days everybody knows that working out is good for us, we know that it will help us loose weight, make us feel better about ourselves, help us be become healthier, more energetic and overall increase our enjoyment of life. But still, most of us don't exercise. Sure, every now and then we decide that now we're going to start a daily workout regime, we are going to start lifting weights or run a mile a day, or, if that's what it takes, join a local gym. But after a couple of weeks (or maybe even days), we'll probably be back to sitting in front of a TV, eating potato chips and telling ourselves that next week we'll really start out workout - this time for good. So, what can we do to avoid repeating this pattern?
The first thing you need to do is create a solid workout plan. You need to know which exercises you're going to do, how many times you're going to repeat them, on which days of the week you're going to do them and at what time. But that's not all. You must change this plan almost weekly. You have to adapt your workout plan to your new level of fitness, or your muscle growth will stop and your routine will start to bore you.
Basically, there are two ways in which you can increase the intensity of your workout. One way is to increase the number of repetitions. For example, if you were doing 20 push ups a day last week, you can now start doing 30. The other way is to increase the difficulty of each repetition. For example, you can still do 20 push ups a day, but with your legs resting on a chair instead of the floor. This way, each push up will be a bit harder to complete and the intensity of your workout will be increased.
So what should you do - more repetitions or harder sets? Most people never give this much thought, but I believe that this is one question that really has to be addressed. If you simply increase the number of repetitions, you have to be aware of the fact that the length of your workout will increase accordingly. So if you started by working out for just 15 minutes a day, you will have to workout for an hour or more after just a couple of weeks. Since most people don't particularly like working out, it will be much easier for them to endure a 15 minute workout than a 60 minute one. So the answer is clear - always increase the intensity or difficulty of each of your exercises.
This only leaves us with one problem - finding the right exercises. You will need to find exercises for every part of your body and you will need different variations for each of these exercises, so you can adjust them over time. For this, I would recommend a site called WorkoutPass. It is owned by Ryan Lee, who has collected over 100,000 workouts, divided them into different sections and put them on 43 different workout sites. These sites are now known as a Workout Pass network. I don't know if this is the best site for you, but I do know that constantly finding new exercises can be a tedious work.
|