Make Progress With Your Strength Training
Our fitness objectives may be different, but all of us strive to make progress with our strength training workouts. Perhaps you desire to build muscle mass using bodybuilding techniques. Your success depends on progressing in the weight room. Perhaps you are an athlete interested in strength and power. Clearly, you strive to improve your strength training. Even those of us focusing on losing weight and fat want to make gains in our strength training workouts. Making advancements in the weight room will increase our metabolic rate, resulting in more calories burned.
Here are a few excellent ways to progress with your strength training. They apply to all of us, regardless of our goals.
Add More Weight. Although this is fairly obvious, when to add weight to our lifts is not always clear. Here is a good rule of thumb to follow. Let’s say you are performing your final bench press set. After you finish your last repetition, you know you could do 1 or 2 more. If you can do more reps, then it is time to increase the weight you are using. Your final rep of your final set should be very strenuous if not impossible. That’s when you know you are at the correct weight.
Add More Repetitions. This can be an option for your lifts. Instead of adding weight, you may want to add repetitions. You will progress using either method. Adding reps becomes very relevant with your bodyweight exercises. Doing more pushups, pullups, dips, or lunges is a great way to advance when adding weight is more difficult. The same goes for abdominal exercises. Add more reps to progress.
Add Sets. Instead of doing 2 sets for a partuclar exercise, do 3 sets. When you add sets to your workout, you will build more muscle, increase your strength, and burn more calories.
Add Intensity. In other words, take less rest between sets. This is a little more relevant for those focusing on fat loss and weight loss. Shorter rest periods result in higher heart rates. Higher heart rates mean higher metabolism and more calories burned. Adding intensity can also help bodybuilders and athletes as well.
All of us should strive to make some progress every time we go to the gym. Even a tiny increment will help. Any of these strategies will help to progress with our strength training workouts.
