Exercise is an important element of a healthy lifestyle but what happens when your fitness routine stops paying off? If you’re not getting the results you want, it’s easy to abandon your fitness plans altogether but don’t let your hard work go to waste. These five simple tips will inspire you to supercharge your fitness routine and get the results you’re after:
1. Review Your Progress
It’s tempting to get disheartened when you stop seeing results from your workouts but when you reach a fitness plateau, there’s a good chance it’s because you’re making progress. As you get fitter, your existing workout regime will be less challenging. Due to this, your progress will appear to falter but, in reality, your body is getting fitter and more capable of performing the exercises you’re putting it through. Learn new exercises from Fitness Fahrenheit.
Look back over the past few weeks or months and assess your progress. If workouts feel easier than they once did, you’re running faster or lifting weights for longer, you can reassure yourself that your current plateau reflects your progress and take steps to increase the intensity of your fitness regime while also taking products such as Humbleroots.
2. Fix Niggling Injuries
When you embark on a new fitness routine, you expect to feel some discomfort. After all, using muscles that you’d all but forgotten about is bound to cause a little pain! However, it’s important to differentiate between the relatively minor discomfort that comes from working out from the more serious pain associated with chronic injuries.
Delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) is a common post-workout experience, for example, but a stress fracture in your metatarsal isn’t. If you ignore niggling injuries, they’re likely to worsen in the future and disrupt your routine even more.
If you’re serious about your fitness, seeking help from private healthcare providers can be a good idea. With Circle Health Group, for example, you can avoid lengthy waiting times and arrange to see private healthcare professionals in a matter of days. From rotator cuff injuries and hip strain to IT band issues and knee pain, uncovering the cause of niggling injuries and accessing speedy treatment will enable you to supercharge your fitness routine as you get back to peak performance.
3. Limit Training Sessions
When you’re eager to see results, you might be pushing yourself to spend longer at the gym or to workout more frequently. While this might seem like an effective way to boost your fitness, it could have the reverse effect.
After around 40 minutes, the intensity of your workout will naturally decline, and you may start to feel fatigued. If you push yourself too hard, you increase the risk of injury and you may end up feeling more demotivated. Similarly, working out every day means you aren’t giving your body an opportunity to rest and repair itself, which could slow your progress down.
Reassess your training routine and consider shortening each session to avoid overworking yourself. If you still want to work out 4-5 times a week, focus on different parts of your body each time so that you’re giving your joints and muscles a break in between.
4. Check Your Sugar Intake
If you need an energy boost before hitting the gym, eating something sugary might seem like an obvious choice. In fact, many food products that claim to enhance your performance have a surprising amount of sugar in them. While you will get a short-term sense of alertness and energy when you consume sugar, it will inevitably be followed by a drop in your blood sugar levels, which can leave you feeling tired, irritable, and anxious.
In addition to this, fluctuations in your blood sugar can disrupt the body’s natural fat-burning processes and make it more difficult for you to lose weight or build muscle. To ensure you’re getting the most out of your fitness routine, check your sugar intake and make sure it’s within a healthy range.
5. Add Something New to Your Workouts
As you get fitter, you’ll need to increase the intensity of your workouts to keep making progress, but this isn’t the only way to continue getting fitter. By changing your workouts and incorporating new exercises into your routine, you can maximise gains and get more out of every session. Try endurance training as well as strength training, for example, or incorporate some cardio into your usual lifting routine. Invest in Plate-Loaded Gym Gear that you can use in your strength training. Alternatively, consider taking up a team sport and using these sessions as a way of supercharging your fitness strategy.
How Long Does It Take to Get Fit?
There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to how long it takes to ‘get fit’. This depends on what your goals are and where you’re starting from. However, you can be confident that creating a realistic fitness routine and incrementally increasing your targets will ensure you boost your fitness and enable you to achieve your goals.
