When it comes to working out, there are a lot of misconceptions about how to get started and what to do. As a personal trainer in Schaumburg, many of my daily conversations revolve around clearing up a lot of this misinformation with clients and on various online forums. If you are going to start working out on a regular basis, there are three things you need to keep in mind before you begin exercising. Each of these points goes against what is commonly thought to be the more important aspects of exercising, but, like I said, dispelling exercise and fitness myths is part of my job.
Three things to keep in mind for when you start working out:
1.Exercise should be used to build your body, not break it down.
A lot of times when you start working out, you are super jacked to get super jacked, or at least get to your health and fitness goals. While this excitement is AWESOME, it can cause you to try to do too much too soon. Understand that exercise is a lifelong process, and the longer in your life you are able to exercise consistently the greater the benefits you will reap from doing so.
With this is mind, try to plan your workouts so you are building up your body, not just breaking it down. Sure, there will be days where you go to the gym and just crush your workouts, but make sure to build up your tolerance for exercise prior to doing so.
One of the top mistakes I see people making is they try to workout really hard at the start and end up achy and sore. Eventually, they stop exercising because they don’t like feeling beat up all the time. However, if they would have progressed themselves appropriately from the beginning, by focusing on building their body instead of breaking it down, they would be able to keep their momentum going from the start.
One suggestion on how to do this is to use the Rule of 50%. If your workout leaves you feeling sore or achy in the days following, reduce what you do by 50% the next time you exercise. In other words, use half the weight, do half the reps, or go for half the time/distance they next time you workout. Continue to reduce your workouts by 50% until you can exercise and not feel achy or sore the next day(s). Then, progressively increase the challenge of your workouts at a rate of about 5–10% every 2–4 weeks.
Related: Organic Exercise
2. Keep your focus on what is happening inside your body — that’s where the results are!
Another mistake I see people making when they start working out is they are focusing too much on what is going on outside of their body and not enough on what is going on inside. This is most notably seen when people are focused on how many reps they are trying to do or how much weight they are trying to lift.
Remember, your body doesn’t know how much weight your are lifting, nor does it know how many reps your are doing. The two things it does know, however, are challenge and time. Do not confuse these with weight and reps. Weight can be a measure of challenge, but it is only one aspect. Reps can be a measure of time, but, again, that is only one aspect.
Think about the difference between challenge and weight like this: bend your elbows to 90 degrees and just let your hands kind of float there. Now, keep your elbows bent at 90 degrees but squeeze your biceps as absolutely hard as your possibly can. Pretend like you have 1,000 pounds in your hands and you cannot drop it.
Likely, you are going to notice a difference in sensation between these two scenarios. Did the weight you were lifting change? Nope. But the challenge did. By focusing on squeezing your biceps as hard as you can, you had to also squeeze your triceps really hard in order to keep your elbows bent at 90 degrees. Now, all of sudden, your triceps are providing resistance for your biceps, making the challenge significantly higher than it was before.
Furthermore, it is taking your focus and placing it exactly where you want it to be — within your body. Not only will this allow you experience the sensations of exercise in a completely different way than before, but it will also allow you get better results. This is called using an internal focus of attention. There are a number of papers to show that using an internal focus of attention when you workout increases the signal that is being sent to the muscles. This, in turn, leads to greater adaptation of the tissue by speeding up something call signal transduction pathways.
Now, instead of thinking about reps, focus on time. Why? Because the amount of time you spend challenging your body is a large determinant in how much your body adapts. A lot of times people who are new to exercise get caught in the trap of “I need to do 3 sets of 12 reps for this exercise”, for example. The issue with that is that not all reps are equal. What would be far more appropriate is to say, “I am going to do 3 sets of 60 seconds of this exercise.” Then, you can play around with how fast you are moving during the 60 seconds. I would strongly recommend doing exercises where you are not moving at all, called isometric exercises, so you can just focus on squeezing your muscles instead of lifting the weight. These exercises can be done for all areas of your body and can be made as easy or as difficult as you would like.
Related: The Struggle of Exercise
3. Emphasize your recovery as much as your workouts — if not more.
Finally, going along with points 1 and 2 above, make sure you are spending at least as much time planning how you are going to recover from your workouts as you do your workouts themselves. Points to consider would be: what you are eating, how much you are sleeping, how well you are sleeping, how much water you are drinking, and how your mental/emotional state is, just to name a few.
Remember, exercise is something that you should be able to do for the rest of your life, but in order to do that, you need to make sure you are recovering from your workouts. This will allow you to get more from your workouts when you hit the gym.
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* This answer was originally posted as a response to a question on Quora.com. Follow all of Charlie’s answers on Quora here!