It should be a given that if you spend any time doing resistance training, you are doing it for one reason: results. Yet so many people forget to do some very basic, very rudimentary things that might be the difference between seeing muscle gains week after week and suffering constant frustration in the gym. If you are serious about making the most use of your time in gym, follow these basic guidelines.
Take Your Time - With each weight training workout, you want to try and put as much stress as possible on each muscle. It’s a bit difficult to achieve this when you swing the weights around as fast you can. When you do this, you muscles aren’t actually moving the weight, momentum is. You should seriously slow things down, taking at least two seconds to lift the weight and two seconds to lower the weight. This helps to force you to lift with better technique and puts the maximum amount of stress on your muscles.
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Make Your Workouts Brief But Intense - Your resistance training sessions shouldn’t last too long, ideally about forty-five minutes or so. If it goes on for over an hour, you are just wasting your time. But just because these sessions are designed to be short, don’t think they are supposed to be easy. You should be lifting enough weight, and expending enough energy, so that you feel fairly spent by the time the session is over.
Limit the Rest Time Between Sets - Don’t make the mistake of taking a break that lasts a few minutes in between each of your sets. The muscle failure that you experience at the end of each of your sets is caused by the build up of lactic acid. When you put the weights down, the lactic acid is cleansed from your muscles very quickly. To ensure that you work you muscles as hard as you can, you want to start the next set as soon as most of the lactic acid has been cleared from the muscles that you are working. This typically should take no longer than ninety seconds. If wait two minutes or more before starting your next set, you cheat yourself out of potential muscle gains.
Pay Attention to Post Workout Nutrition - For about half an hour after your workout, you are offered a window of opportunity where you can give your muscles the rush of carbohydrates and amino acids that they need to jump start the muscle building process. Because your muscles need fast acting carbs and protein, many choose a shake with whey protein and some sort of fruit. If you don’t have these on hand, chocolate milk can be an adequate, but by no means ideal, substitute.
Christopher William McCombs runs Positively Fit Personal Training in Orange County California. One day while he walked out of an OC fish taco restaurant Chris stumbled onto a radically different approach to losing fat which he helps people all over Orange County do today. Chris is also a Fitness Trainer Marketing Expert and helps fitness professionals all over to triple their income and cut their work hours in half.