Barring injuries, illness and overtraining…there comes a point when you look yourself in the gym mirror and say.. “hey, not much is changing here.” When it starts warming up outside, and we start showing more skin, the desire to change heats to an all-year high.
Use this motivation to make your biggest gains in cardio and muscle fitness by upping the intensity of your current exercise program. These little intensity tweaks over time add up to make a leaner, faster, and better performing you. Now that’s hot.
The good news…If you’ve worked with a pro trainer, they will gradually amp the difficulty over time and the results just seem to roll on out. This makes change possible even when your appointments are the same length of time. Increasing intensity does not require extra workouts… instead we’re going to basically help you find ways to trick yourself into exerting a little more energy here and there. Push hard enough and you may even be able to workout for less time.
When you’re on your own and ready to bust up to the next level, here are simple ways to rev up your intensity just in time to sizzle for Summer: (Remember your 5-10 min cardio warm-up before you make any drastic intensity changes.)
1. Use the 2-for-2 Rule: As you’re going through your strength work out, see if you can bump out an additional 2 repetitions at the end of your last set. If you’re able to do this for two workouts in a row on a given exercise, it’s time to increase the weight.
2. 400 m Challenge:After you’ve warmed up, push yourself on any cardio piece for a quarter of a mile (or 2-3 mins of work) and then recover for the next 400 m. Repeat back and forth 4x and build up to 10x. This will train you to increase your speed and will help to truly condition your VO2max (or the efficiency of your cardiovascular system) by pushing intensity.
3. Drop the Reps: Have you been doing 12-20 rep workouts for a while?? Try dropping down to 6-10 reps and giving yourself more rest to help climb the strength ladder. Ladies.. this will not make you get huge, I promise (unless you’re eating way too much protein). Email me if it does.
4. Push your body weight: Head outside and hill climb, run stadium stairs, find a park with bars you can do hang downs, pushups and body weight rows, jog, run sand dunes, grapevine across fields. Break out of the gym and play. Moving your own weight is often the greatest fitness challenge you can provide yourself.
5. Sprint with your Strength: Superset (pair up) an upper body and lower body exercise. Go through 3 rounds of each at 8-10 reps and hop on a cardio piece for an all out 45 second sprint. Walk or recover on that cardio piece for a minute. Pick your next pair.
5. Finishing Kick: This rule can be applied to strength or cardio. When you are at the tail end of your sets or the last 5 mins of your cardio, take a moment to think about how much gas is left in the tank and try to use almost every drop of it. You can do this in your resistance workouts by dropping the weight down a little bit and repping out (doing as many reps as possible in a given movement.) With cardio, imagine yourself nearing the finish line and wanting to put out your best effort for the last 5 minutes of the race. Gun it. Cool down properly. And watch your speed and strength climb over time.
