So you wanted to start working out, you want to get stronger and fit, and possibly lose a bit of body fat.
You join the local gym; you’re motivated and ready to get to work. You sign up for a personal trainer thinking, ‘this will be great!’ You will have a trainer, your workouts will be fun and exciting and you are going to see great results come quick.
You do an assessment and you and your trainer have gone over your fitness goals, the day arrives and you start you first workout. All is good and the workout is some what challenging, but not too hard.
The exercises are easy to do and your form gets better and better with each set. You’re goal is to train three times each week and you have given yourself six months to achieve your fitness goals.
However, a week into your program you start to get bored and the workouts do not seem to be much fun. It’s the same exercises, sets and reps each workout, over and over again.
So, getting discouraged, you get up enough nerve to discuss this with your trainer, and in an ideal situation, if your trainer has the right experience, he or she would explain the value in sticking with the program for awhile until your body adapts.
But you do not want to hear this, you want your workout program to be fun like the ones you’ve seen on Instagram or Tiktok. You convince your trainer to mix it up and change things up each workout. Your trainer, not wanting to lose a client, and pressured by the gym to keep his or her client happy, starts to put you on different machines each time you come in and you start enjoying your workouts again.
Unfortunately, life gets in the way and you start to miss a day here and a day there and are not very consistent with your training. But you have been able to maintain good nutrition through out the program so you don’t think anything of it.
Another two weeks have gone by, but you are not getting any stronger, your weight has not changed much, if any, and your conditioning has not gotten any better, in fact, it has become worse.
So, due to the lack of results, you begin to get frustrated; you start to miss more days and soon, like a lot of members in a large big box gym, you become you become unhappy and you quit.
So what really happened here? Lets break it down.
A few things are going on but lets start with the most important factor; consistency. To see good results with a training program, you need to be consistent. Of course, maintaining good nutrition and giving your body time to adapt to the training program is important but if you are not consistent in your workouts, the results will never come (or at least as fast as you may want them to). The good news is, if you are new to training, you should see some good results quickly as your body adapts to the training stimuli as long as you are patient and you are consistent.
Another positive – for those who struggle with boredom of doing the same workouts over and over – is that most training programs can be changed and adjusted every three to four weeks, depending on how much time you have given yourself to reach your fitness goals, to keep things fresh and new. In my experience I have found this 3-4 week mark is the sweet spot.
This next factor may not be what you want to hear but, while the latest viral workouts seen on social media may be tempting, the reality is that your training program should be fairly simple.
It should consist of a few good compound movements and challenge you with each set. Make sure to work hard, be sure to increase the weight (on average, five pounds for upper body and ten pounds for lower body) if it becomes too easy.
Make sure you can complete the required number of sets and reps for each exercise, you should have a bit of a struggle towards the end of each set, for each exercise. Make sure to have good form when doing your exercises in a good controlled manner and stick with the program until your body starts to adapt. Once you’ve hit this mark, only then you can make a change to your workouts however, be sure to keep your goals in mind. Whether you are training for strength, to build muscle, or lose weight, the changes in your program should be adjusted appropriately.
At the end of the day, don’t worry that the program is not fun or that it does not have fancy exercises. Train hard and make the right changes to your program at the right time. Along with this, remain consistent in your training and in maintaining good nutrition through your diet. If you do all this, I promise that you will get the results you are looking for.
“Remember the old saying, slow and steady wins the race”.