…3 Ways To Make A Change When You’re Not Seeing Gains In Your Exercise Routine…
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You don’t need us to tell you that in order to change your life a fitness routine can give you balance, structure, and a clean bill of health! But the one problem we all have with regards to our fitness routine is that we can get into a slump of sorts. Shaking it up is crucial because we need to find ways to either get back on track or adapt to something new. From a biomechanics perspective, the human body is fantastic. It adapts very quickly depending on what we throw at it. But this is why people experience plateaus. And if you’re not getting bigger or stronger you need to think about what you can change, not just physically, but mentally, in order to start again.
Taking Rest
Let’s get this out of the way, most people don’t want to rest! But it’s one of the most crucial components to giving your body the opportunity to recover. It doesn’t have to be about sitting on the couch all week; it can be about making sure that you have “active rest.” If you’ve been going hell for leather in the gym on a strength routine for months on end you might be doing your body more harm than good. You need to take the opportunity to rest while you can. But also having that chance to rest up can give you a renewed sense of perspective. This is the chance to put some additional time into making your gym routine better. Now might be the perfect time to carry out a nutritional cleanse that will allow you to hit the ground running when you do come back. There’s so much you can do with this opportunity. You can use it as a way to prepare new routines. But it can also give you a chance to think about other components of your fitness lifestyle, from the internal to the external. Perhaps you now have time to contact an activewear manufacturer to get more outfits but you can also think about what you’ve been doing up to this point that is really harming your progress. We can get into a very strict routine and this isn’t always a good thing. Because if we have been training our muscles in a certain way and we don’t shake up the routine this is not doing us any favors. Rest isn’t just beneficial for your body but it gives you the chance to really think about what you’ve been doing and incorporate other things that can benefit you.
Focusing On Functional Strength
Many people are addicted to CrossFit training and they go whenever they can because they love the fact that they are pushing themselves to their limits. But doing this too much can have a negative impact on your body, especially your joints. Focusing on functional strength is, in many ways, bringing it back to basics. When you are looking at strength from a biomechanical perspective you only need a handful of movements. And these compound movements can help us to discover more functional uses for our strength. This means we could just focus on the deadlift, the overhead press, the bent-over row, chest press, and the squat. If you haven’t been doing squats with a weights bench or you focus more on cardio, these compound movements can make you realize just how strong you are (or are not)! There’s a lot to be said for these functional movements because they can be all we need. If we spend a lot of time focusing on isolation exercises in our normal workout this can be a futile effort. But this is where training programs like the 5×5 workout come into their own. By focusing on these key compound moves, not only are you exercising every part of your body but you are encouraging your body to do what it was meant to do in a biomechanical sense.
Ditching Cardio
For some, this can be a cardinal sin, but hear us out! When the intensity increases you are doing as much for your body as cardio is. A very good example is when you are doing incredibly intense sessions with weights. If you are pushing yourself you will fatigue quicker and your heart is working harder to pump the blood around. Right now there is a big focus on super slow as a cardio replacement. This protocol pioneered by Ken Hutchings was meant to replace traditional weight training as well as cardio because technically you don’t need cardio. And the modern equivalent of this is the Body By Science method. The idea that you do one set of compound moves, preferably on a Nautilus machine, to complete fatigue is all your body needs! There are plenty of resources on this, which we will include at the bottom, but if you focus on the intensity rather than the reps this can give you a completely different focus. A lot of the super slow workout sources talk about the “time under load” or “time under tension.” When you’re doing exercise incredibly slowly it focuses your efforts on the task itself but it’s so fatiguing that you don’t need to go back to the workout for another 7 to 10 days (or even longer depending on your level of fitness)! If you think that cardio is incredibly boring and you are just looking for the health benefits, this could be an ideal option! There is also the X3 Bar, which is a popular product right now. This operates under a very similar approach to Body By Science but without actually going to the gym. But this is something that you don’t have to follow religiously. In fact, X3 is a protocol that uses resistance bands and encourages you to fatigue the muscle by using constant tension.
Our bodies cannot tell the difference between a weight, a brick wall, or a very intense exercise. And if you are looking to change your approach to workouts you don’t necessarily have to think about getting the desired number of reps. This could be doing your body more harm. But when you are looking to make new adaptations and want to start again, your fitness routine can give you a clean bill of clarity in a mental sense. It’s crucial that we change our routines on occasion not just for our bodies, but for our brains as well.
