How to progress in your fitness journey?
Once you have started exercising, in order to make progress and keep seeing results, you need to keep challenging your body week after week.
Following a program with progressive overload is the solution however it can be hard to build your own program without help.
They are several variables you can play with to get stronger, faster and fitter overtime:
Increasing the weight
If you are lifting weight, and don’t feel fatigue in your muscle anymore, increasing the weight will help you make progress. Make sure that you master the correct form first before lifting heavier to avoid injuries.
Start your first set at your usual weight and increase on the 2nd and 3rd set for exemple.
Increase the number of reps/sets
If for some reasons you don’t want to increase the weight or you only train with body weight, you can increase the number of repetitions or sets.
Adding a few more reps per set or an extra set will challenge your muscle to produce the same effort for longer.
Decreasing the rest time
this apply mainly to endurance training as you want to keep your heart rate low for strength training and therefore take as much rest as needed to lower your heart rate.
For endurance, this technique will teach your body to recover quicker from high intensity and therefore will adapt to be more efficient at this type of training.
Increasing the number of training
Increasing how many times per week you are working out is also one of the best way to challenge your body even more.
However make sure to not overtrain by adding too many sessions, you should at least have 1 day of rest per week. Recovery play a huge part in muscle growth.
Increasing the length of your sessions
This one is not achievable for everyone as we are all very busy during the day and sometimes 30 minutes during the day is all we have to exercise.
However if you have an extra 15min, you can increase your training length which will help you to get closer to your goal.
Being consistent
Last but not least! Being consistent is the main thing you need to do in order to see results.
In order to be consistent, you need to find an activity that you like as it will be much easier to practice it several times a week if you enjoy it and look forward to it.
Involving friends is also a great way to make sure that you don’t skip you training sessions as you will less likely cancel on them