Despite working out for a while, you may not be seeing the results that you desire. You may be able to trace this to any number of reasons, which will depend on your individual habits, needs, and goals. The fact that you may need to exercise in your home instead of a gym because of COVID-19 risks can also throw a wrench in your progress. Oftentimes, though, you can advance the value of your exercise sessions with a few seemingly small, yet highly impactful changes. Determine how to make your workouts more effective with our pointers.
Create Structured Plans
Before you get moving, doing some planning will help you get the most out of your exercising. You should go into each session already knowing exactly what you’ll do so that you don’t waste time or end up doing less than you want to. Set up some short-term, incremental goals and some long-term goals to give you direction. Then, write down the specific exercises and movement that you’ll do in each session.
You can research what to perform on YouTube or other websites during this phase. Based on the exercise, you should also write down the numbers of reps and sets, distances, or times that you’re aiming for. You’ll then know exactly where to increase the intensity and where you need to improve a bit more.
Start Off With Dynamic Stretches
The conventional approach to stretching is to get into certain positions and hold them for brief periods of time. This loosens and warms up your muscles so that they’re ready for your workout and won’t be prone to getting injured. When you want to know how to make your workouts more effective, however, dynamic stretching is a better alternative to this.
With dynamic stretching, you move your body through different stretch positions that mimic how you’ll be moving once you begin your actual workout. You’ll get your blood flowing and increase your range of motion with these just like you do with static stretches. But the advantage is that your muscles retain more of their elasticity as well, allowing you to output more strength.
Keep Track of the Time
Cardiovascular workouts lose their efficacy when you take rests that are too long. The same goes for exercises where you’re trying to increase muscular endurance. It could be that you’re unintentionally waiting too long between intervals or sets because you get distracted by your phone. The antidote to this is to keep track of the time. For this purpose, you could use a wall clock that shows seconds, the timer in your smartphone, or a dedicated timer that you can set up right in your home workout space. The dedicated fitness timers are advantageous because they won’t tempt you with distractions as phones do and can send audible signals to let you know when to rest or start moving again.
