Get some structure to your workouts!  

You may have noticed a lot of new exercise classes that simply try and compete with each other to be the most intense workout out there. They’ll be marketing things like “never do the same workout twice” or “shock your body every workout”. Although this can sound very appealing, especially to those people who have found exercise boring in the past, it actually goes against all the basic principals of training!  

Unfortunately, these concepts have generally been thought up by great marketers not great trainers, so whilst they are brilliant at pulling you in they are considerably less effective at delivering the results that you deserve. 

It’s long been known in the real training world that, in order to see physical improvements, your training needs structure and, once your programme has been set out, you’ll need to repeat the same workouts over a number of weeks whilst tracking your results before changing the programme.   

In fact in one of the most industry respected training books ‘Supertraining’ it is noted that after initial improvements from randomized training, not only do results plateau over time they then start to deteriorate!  

SOURCE: Supertraining (Verkhoshansky & Siff, 2009, P87)

A structured programme doesn’t need to be boring, the likelihood is, if you train three times a week you’d have three different workouts which are then repeated each week for about 4-6 weeks, before being thoughtfully changed and progressed. During these 4-6 weeks you should be tracking the weights lifted or the amount of reps/time achieved and looking for incremental increases each week.   

You’ll be amazed how much you’ll improve over a six month period following this approach rather than turning up week in, week out just picking up weights and trying to ‘smash’ yourself. So get yourself a decent programme, track everything you do, look for small improvements each week and renew your programme every 4-6 weeks.   

Simple advice we know, but adhere to this and see what a difference it will make!  

Happy Training!  

The Fitting Rooms Team