Four Reasons You’re Workouts Aren’t Working
1. You aren’t going (enough). To get results in the gym, you have to actually go to the gym… Easy concept to understand, but I find it interesting how often it’s ignored. At minimum, you should be going 3 times a week, and ideally doing other non-gym physical activity the rest of the days of the week. Any less than this, and you’re not giving your body enough of a stimulus to change.
If you aren’t able to get to your gym 3x/week or more, I strongly suggest you find another fitness avenue. Fitness should be fun, not torture.
2. You Aren’t Doing the Right Things The vast majority of people I talk to about their fitness habits admit that they go to the gym, but they have absolutely no idea what to do when they’re there. They spend some time on the treadmill, lift a few weights and basically log their 45 minutes and go home.
This usually leads back to situation 1, where they stop going out of frustration, or they stay in a place of stagnation forever.
An effectively designed program will eliminate boredom, provide accountability, and ensure success.
3. You Aren’t Doing Things Correctly A lot of people have just enough experience to be dangerous in the gym. They know they should squat, they should bend, they should push, they should pull, they should do some core/ab work, and they should do something to get your heartrate up.
But, they often don’t know how many of each, how many sets of each, how long to rest, how to pair the movements, how many they should do in a day or how many days they should have to rest in between each. This leads to undertraining, overtraining, or overuse injuries.
Worse, they don’t know how to do them with correct form, potentially leading to all of the above, or worse, injury.
4. You Are Being Pushed Way Too Much or Not Nearly Enough Quite frankly, people are pushed too much in improper ways. People are pushed in ways that cause them to fall into all of the pitfalls above.
They’re pushed in a way that makes the gym torture. Very, very few people want to be yelled at, despite what common stereotypes of good coaches or good training partners show.
They’re pushed in ways that force them to do things too fast, with too much weight and with way too many reps without nearly enough rest. Once again, this commonly leads to injury, overtraining and an unsustainable pursuit of fitness.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, people are often not pushed enough to ensure that they are using enough weight, doing enough reps or doing enough overall work. For progress, you’ll need to make sure you’re giving your body enough new stimulus to elicit a response and positive changes in your body. Doing the same weights, same reps and same program you’ve done for years is going to end up giving you the same results.
Somewhere in the middle lies the balance you should seek. Enough to cause a response, but not so much that you burn out, get hurt or hate the gym.
So how do you solve these problems?
Seek advice from a qualified coach. Someone who has the professional qualification to help you with what to do, when to do it, how to do it, how often to do it and provide you with appropriate motivation and coaching is invaluable to providing results in the gym.
A coach can be found in a variety of settings.
You can hire an in-person coach to do personal training. If you don’t envision working with someone for years and years, you can tell them that you just want to do sessions together to get you started on the right foot, but then continue on your own.
You can hire a coach to write programs for you. You’ll tell them what your goals are, where you workout, how often you can workout and report back to them. Since you won’t be seeing them in person, this comes in a lot cheaper, albiet with a lot less help. This will help with everything listed above, minus the form work. You can certainly submit videos back and forth, but it’s just not quite as effective.
You can hire a coach for you and a friend to split the cost. This comes with all of the benefits of personal training, but you’ll be able to pay a little less. Just know that your time will be divided with a friend. A major plus here is the added accountability of a workout partner.
Lastly, you can go to group classes. There are so many options these days that you should definitely be able to find something that works for you. Traditional fitness, classes, martial arts, dancing, running groups, etc. There are a million ways to do this. You’ll split your time with everyone else in the group, and you won’t get the individualization of a program just for you, but you’ll have the eyes of a coach on you, you’ll make new friends, you’ll get accountability, and you should have fun!
We can help you get there, from Personal Training to group classes our experienced coaching staff can design a program to help you reach your goals and stop wasting time in the gym. If you’re ready to make your workout the best hour of your day, schedule a No Sweat Intro with one of our coaches here.