Most gym patrons spend around an hour a day plugging away at the weights and various cardio equipment. A short stretch here, a warm up there, as they continue on their familiar and monotonous fitness path. It seems gym enthusiasts have their routine timed out to work perfectly with their schedules.
Doesn’t that get boring?
Sure it does and our bodies think so too! Just like our minds, our bodies need stimulation and proper nutrition to positively respond. An hour at the gym is more than plenty to pack in a fat burning and muscle building session. But without various stimuli, our excitement for working out and our body’s response will fall short.
Make sure to have a plan when stepping into the gym and acclimate yourself with the weight room. This way you aren’t aimlessly wandering around machines looking at the diagrams. You’re just wasting time and the extra leisure decreases your heart rate and peak fat burning capabilities.
How about we take this to the next level?
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Starting your workout with stretching and a warm-up is essential for proper muscle activation and injury prevention. Not only that, but raising your body’s core temperature allows for optimal calorie burn during any workout. Typically, you should warm up for at least 10 minutes to get your blood flowing and to heat up that body temperature. Raise that to 20 minutes and you’re in optimal fat burning mode.
All fitness methods have their benefits. It’s a great idea to mix in machines with free weight- and body weight-driven exercises. This allows your muscles to have the constant stimuli they need to respond, and it helps you from getting bored with your daily routine.
Be creative, but be challenging. Superset and compound sets (exercises done back to back; sometimes targeting the same body parts) are perfect for this type of workout. A great example of this is:
Cable Chest Fly
2. Decline Push-Ups
3. Squat Jumps
Do three full sets of this type of workout and you’ve hit nine sets altogether in a short amount of time. You can get results quicker with multifunctional exercises and target different angles of your muscles all in one circuit.
Mixing in bootcamps, spinning, and other classes will also stimulate a desired response. These are perfect to pop in a few days out of the week to keep your body guessing.
Fuel for prime result is the most important component to our power hour at the gym. BCAA’s (branch chain amino acids) are a way to keep muscle endurance firing during an intense workout. They go to work right away giving your muscles much needed energy and recovery.
Have a protein shake with glutamine (rebuild and recovery supplement) ready to consume post workout. As our bodies naturally go into repair mode when injured, it acts the same after we workout. We tear apart our muscles with every contraction and thus we need to rebuild using the proper fuel. Your sweat-drenching workout will have not done any good if you aren’t refueling with the right nutrients.
Before you get to the gym, be prepared:
Make a plan for what body parts you are targeting that day.
Proper stretching and warm-up is essential to your power hour in the gym.
Change up your routine and challenge yourself.
Have your post workout fuel ready.
You are sure to see the response you’ve been working out so hard for!
The Phoenix Effect, a metabolic bootcamp that gets you in shape fast, is offered exclusively at Mansion Fitness, 7914 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood.
Glücklich
Variety is the spice of life. Trouble is, I use machines as a crutch for the exercises I don’t like to do, like lifting overhead and squat-like movements. Those are the main reasons I go to a trainer, to make me do things correctly I probably wouldn’t do or do well on my own. Cardio’s the easy part.
Admittedly, I am one of those gym nuts who goes religiously at 0-dark-thirty (not there to make friends) unless I’m on a plane or have a call. Insecurity does have currency, and I own that my inner ugly zit-faced kid drives all of my gym-going (and clothes and spa, etc.). But I also own that none of that, on me, exists in nature.
socaliscorpio
I’m one of those people that wanders aimlessly around the gym lol . That’s because it also depends on what equipment is free! Great reminder of mixing it up though, and also the warm up. I often run in and go straight to the bench press, which can’t be as good for you.