20 Tips & tricks to get the most out of your workout
Getting a workout done is great but it is just half the equation for optimal gains.
You need to know how to optimize everything around your workout to have the best results as soon as possible.
There are many tips and tricks that you can apply to your workout to get the most out of it. Here are the most important ones:
1- Warmup and cooldown probably
If you don’t already know it, you should warm up and cool down before and after every workout session to avoid injuries and improve your performance. Most us of already doing it but not good enough, at least in my opinion.
there are certain things that should be included to say you had a good warmup and cooldown routine.
Here is what I think is the best warmup and cooldown routine:
Warmup routine
- Start with 5-10 minutes of light cardio (walking on a treadmill or stationary bike).
- General dynamic stretches for the whole body.
- Easy lightweight high-reps exercises for the whole body.
- A couple of warmup sets (light weight/high reps) for the body part that you are going to train.
PRO TIP: Avoid any static stretching before your workout as it decreases your strength by 20%
Cooldown routine
- do 5-10 minutes of light cardio (walking on a treadmill or stationary bike).
- General static stretches for the whole body.
- foam rolling for the trained body part.
there are many other things that you can add to this routine but this one should be good enough for someone just starting and had no previous injuries that need special care.
2- Eat the right food before and after your workout
What you eat before and after your workout can make a huge difference in terms of strength, muscle building, recovery, and general performance.
That’s why I wrote a whole article about workout nutrition and how to eat around your workout for the best results possible. Check it out by CLICKING HERE
In short, you should eat a high-carb meal 1-2 hours before your workout along with moderate protein and less fat.
As for the post-workout meal, have high protein, moderate carb, and fat 30 minutes after your workout.
3- Build a mind-muscle connection
One way to make each and every exercise more effective is to think about the muscles you’re trying to engage, rather than mindlessly going through the motion.
This could be hard for a beginner as you are still learning the moments and don’t have much muscle to feel but as you keep lifting, you should focus more on building a mind-muscle connection for better gains over time.
For example, if you’re doing a biceps curl, actually think about your biceps and look at it with each rep to make sure you’re using good form and the muscle is engaged instead of going from point A to B.
4- Use free weights more than machines
Weight machines are great for helping gym newbies learn the correct form or for someone who is injured, but once you’ve got it down and ready to go, it’s time to move to free weights.
According to a 2014 study, exercises using free weights like dumbbells, kettlebells and barbells lead to greater hormonal responses compared to similar exercises performed on exercise machines.
That’s probably because free-weight exercises target multiple muscle groups with a single exercise.
With that being said, a perfect routine should also include some machines here and there but not as much as free weights if your main goal is building the most muscle mass as soon as possible.
5- Take a pre-workout supplement
I was one of many people who is against taking a preworkout until I actually tried it. IT WORKS!
Don’t get me wrong, preworkouts will only add 10-20% to your performance but this small extra boost may be what you actually need right now to take your strength and muscle gains to the next level.
As there are many shitty products on the market right now, make sure you are getting these key ingredients in the one that you are buying:
- Creatine
- Caffeine
- L-Citrulline
- Beta-Alanine
If you feel overwhelmed by the wide variety of products nowadays, here is a list of the top 10 preworkout for each goal.
6- Workout more frequently
Exercise is a skill, and like any other skill, the more you practice it, the more you will be good at it.
With that being said, if you want to be great at a certain lift or build a weak body part, you have to workout more frequently.
Also, doing tonnes of sets and reps for a specific body part once a week was found in many research to be less effective than splitting this volume into 2-3 sessions per week.
7- Log your workout numbers
logging and tracking your workouts is a great way to make sure you’re always challenging yourself.
If you are old school, using a physical notebook may be your thing, but for me, I use an app called Repcount on ISO.
It is a great app if you already know what you are doing in terms of exercises, weights, sets, and reps and you just are in need of an app to log these numbers.
When you go to the gym to perform that day’s workout, note how many reps and sets you completed for each move, as well as the weight you used for each The following week, you’ll perform the same workout, but increase the difficulty by tweaking one or more of the elements: reps, sets, weight, or another variable. Also, over time, you’ll get to look back at your progress and see how much you’ve improved.
8- Have enough rest between sets
Cutting the rest time between is great in challenging your cardiovascular system and burning some extra calories but if your main focus is building the most muscle size and strength, this approach will do you no good.
After a hard set, your muscle will not perform at its best in the next set unless you give it enough time to recover. try it for yourself!
For optimal muscle recovery after a hard set, rest between 1-5 minutes depending on how hard you push yourself each set.
9- Drink enough water during your workout
During your workout session, you are losing between 2-6% of your body fluids (some lose up to 10%). this amount of fluid loss is found to be reducing your exercise performance and reduce your body’s ability to recover after you leave the gym, according to a review from the University of North Carolina.
therefore, It is recommended to drink between .5-1 liter of water during your workout session to help rehydrate your body during the workout session.
10- Pick the right weight, sets, and reps for you
Going to the gym without knowing what to do is a big mistake that most people make. you will end up doing too little to cause any significant improvement or too much to the point of hurting yourself.
There are a lot of helpful resources online but you have to choose the right program that works for you depending on your fitness level.
I personally think it will be in your best interest if you hire someone to build a customized program for you.
If you can’t afford a such program, here are some general guidelines to follow in building your own workout plan:
- Aim for 10-20 sets per muscle group and separate them across 3-6 different exercises.
- Choose a weight that you can do at least 10 reps with it before reaching muscle failure.
- your rep range for most exercises should be between 8-20 reps if your main focus is building muscle mass, higher than that builds endurance, and less builds strength.
- Do each muscle group 2-3 times per week in a workout split as upper/lower or push/pull/legs.
11- Try some advanced lifting technique
As you keep lifting weights, your body will get used to it and you start seeing less results over time.
In order to shock your body and force it to make more gains, pro-bodybuilders invented some advanced weight-lifting techniques.
some of these techniques are Dropsets, supersets, partial sets, pyramid sets and many other techniques that you can learn by CLICKING HERE
12- Push your limits with HIIT cardio
If you don’t already know, HIIT cardio stands for High Intensity Interval Training.
It consists of periods of all-out effort interspersed with short, low-intensity breaks.
It’s widely used for fat burning purposes but it was actually developed to help elite athletes push their limits during this short period of all-out training.
If you want to utilize this method, follow this workout protocol:
Perform as many reps as possible for 20 seconds, rest for 10 seconds and repeat for a total of four minutes. Rest for one minute, then repeat for a total of four rounds.
13- Listen to motivational songs
If you are not already listening to motivational songs during your workout, you are missing a lot!
Playing your favorite song can get you fired up and take you from being tried to smash your workout.
Another way that gets me fired up is listening to motivational audiobooks. I recently started listening to these books during my workout and found them more motivational than ever!
14- Use straps and fitness support equipment
There are two types of powerlifting competitions, equipped and raw. If you know that, you might already know that equipped competitors lift much higher weights than the unequipped ones (raw).
This indicates that using straps, belts, and sleeves not only gives you extra support but also helps you add more weight to the par or at least a couple extra reps.
A study conducted at the Weider Research Group found that when trained bodybuilders performed a back workout while using wrist straps, they completed an average of 1-2 more reps per set for all sets of all exercises in the routine.
15- Separate cardio and weight training sessions
Doing cardio and weight lifting in the same session is a mistake that most people make especially if your main goal is building size and strength.
There is nothing wrong with doing cardio to burn some extra calories but it doesn’t have to be around your weight lifting as it burns a significant amount of your blood glucose and muscle glycogen which is used in fueling your workout.
If you have to do cardio with weight training, keep it after. personally, I do cardio in the morning after a drinking protein shake and weight lifting in the evening to restore what I lost during this time.
16- Have high protein meal before bed
Protein is your workout buddy when it comes to building muscle bigger and stronger after a heavy workout session. But, some people believe that you shouldn’t be eating before bed even if it’s only a high-protein meal.
Research from Maastricht University in the Netherlands shows that a nighttime snack rich in casein, a slow-digesting protein, keeps amino acid and muscle protein synthesis rates elevated all throughout the night.
This could be done simply by eating greek yogurt or cottage cheese after your workouts and before you turn in for the night.
17- Try different recovery techniques
You could have the hardest workout session in the world but without a good recovery period after, you won’t be seeing any results, actually, you might lose muscle!
that’s why applying recovery techniques such as massage, foam rolling, sauna, or chiropractic adjustment can aid in the recovery process in many ways:
- Improve blood flow
- Increase flexibility
- breakdown adhesions and restrictions
A massage gun for the trained muscle is what works best for me.
18- Avoid Fancy and unstable exercises
walking into the gym, you might see someone doing a really weird and uncomfortable exercise as squatting on a Bosu ball. he saw someone else do it or someone told him it’s much better than the regular squat.
luckily, Canadian scientists reported that doing dumbbell chest presses on an exercise ball resulted in a 40% decrease in strength compared to doing the exercise on a bench.
And a study from Appalachian State University (Boone, NC) found that when athletes performed squats on instability discs, they had less force production and muscle activity of the quadriceps compared to when they did squats on firm ground.
Since any marked increase in strength or muscle mass is going to come through moving progressively heavier weights on key lifts, you might want to avoid exercise balls and instability boards.
19- Workout in the evening if possible
Everyone is always asking when is the best time to workout.
Researchers from the University of Southern Mississippi (Hattiesburg) discovered that when subjects worked out after 6 p.m. for 10 weeks, they gained more muscle and lost more body fat than a group that trained before 10 a.m.
But, this doesn’t mean you won’t have an effective workout if you train in the morning. It’s just slightly better as you may have more energy during this period from eating and being active all day.
20- Have a high-quality night of sleep
A quality night of sleep is vital to getting the most out of your workout time.
According to one 2015 Sports Medicine review, poor sleep hinders not only your exercise performance (and the number of calories you burn) but also your body’s ability to come back stronger after every workout.
Without appropriate sleep, symptoms of over-training, including fitness plateaus, set in. Aim for seven to nine hours of sleep every single night.
All these tips and tricks are meant to help you take your workout a bit farther if you already have your workout routine, nutrition, and supplementation on point. So, make sure you have these in line first!
References
2- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2908954/
