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Intensify To Succeed
Wherever you look in a gym you will notice people floating around a little aimlessly, having extended water breaks and in some cases reading the paper or a book whilst sitting on a machine! It is more than likely that these are the same people who can't quite get the results they are looking for and don't really know why! Simply put your exercise needs to be both planned and intense.
Wherever you look in a gym you will notice people floating around a little aimlessly, having extended water breaks and in some cases reading the paper or a book whilst sitting on a machine! It is more than likely that these are the same people who can’t quite get the results they are looking for and don’t really know why!
Simply put your exercise needs to be both planned and intense. When you visit the gym (or wherever you exercise) you should know exactly what you intend to do, why you are doing it and how long it will take. It is also important to make the most of your time exercising, a 45 minute gym session should be 45 minutes of good quality consistent exercise and not 25 minutes of exercise and 20 minutes watching a documentary on 18th century architecture that has just become really interesting.
So here are a few pointers to help keep your exercise intense and stop you wasting so much of your valuable time in the gym:
- Aim for between 30 minutes and 1 hour for your sessions, if you spend over 1.5 hours in the gym then you need to have a rethink on what you are actually doing
- Take a water bottle with you, the temptation to waste 5 minutes at the water fountain is too easy.
During resistance work rest for about 1 minute between sets and when you finish one exercise move straight onto the next
- Resistance machines tend to isolate muscles making them fairly ineffective for intensity, try free weight exercises that use more than one major muscle group (e.g. squat to shoulder press, clean and press or lunge with lateral raise)
- Try interval training for your cardiovascular exercise, this can be as simple as 1 minute fast walking and 1 minute steady walking
- Exercise such as swimming and rowing use the whole body and are ideal for shorter workouts
- Set some measurable goals (target weight, 2000m rowing time etc..) There is nothing like a goal with a target date to focus the mind!
And finally remember, if it didn’t feel like a tough workout then it probably wasn’t!