The single most important aspect in your workout should be intensity. The reason why people do not see results with their workout is because it is easy and comfortable to them. I love the people who do an exercise and after their set, they rest for 3 minutes looking up into space or talk to their gym friend. A professor at my school told me that, “if you are in the gym for more than an hour, you are making more friends than you are making muscles.”
The best tip to intensify your workout is to stop resting in between sets. There are a couple ways to do this.
1. Superset: Take two exercises and perform them back to back until you achieve the amount of sets you strive for. My favorite is the deadlift – pull up combo. After I do a set up deadlifts, I jump right into doing pull ups. After I’m done with pull up, I go right back into doing deadlift and so on.
2. Active rest: Let’s say you just finished a set of heavy squats, the worst thing you can do is just stand there. Proceed to do some crunches or something less demanding on the body but you are keeping your heart rate up.
3. Time your rest: After you are done with your set, hit your stop watch and rest for 30 seconds. When those 30 seconds are up, go back into doing the exercise. As the weights get heavier, you can take longer rest periods to allow your muscles to recover.
4. Tabatas: Take a multiple joint exercise like a squat and do 8 sets of 20 second squats as fast as you can and then rest for 10 seconds. A Tabata only takes 4 minutes to complete but, it will be the hardest 4 minutes you will ever experience if you do it correctly.
5. Heart Rate: Is the single best indicator to measure intensity. You can purchase a heart rate monitor or you can simply check it by placing two fingers on your carotid artery (neck) and see how many beats per minute your heart is generating.
High intense workouts will allow you to burn more fat, increase lean muscle mass, and increase cardiovascular endurance in half the time it used to take. The harder you push yourself…the faster you will achieve your goals.
- Intensity!
Thanks for writing, I very much liked your latest post. I think you should post more often, you clearly have talent for blogging!