Going to the gym or doing your exercise at home can be a good thing. But what if you are not maximizing your effort? What if you are not optimizing your time at the gym because there are bad habits in your routine? We’ve come up with some of the most common bad fitness habits that you can easily fix today to ignite your progress.
1. Undertraining
A lot of people go to the gym only to do workouts that don’t push themselves enough. Keep in mind that the body will most likely adapt if you are going to do the same workout every time. While sticking with the same routine for a couple of weeks is ideal; you’ll need to make weekly adjustments in your intensity for progress.
To increase the intensity of your workout, what you can do is to tweak the difficulty of your workout. You can add reps, load more weights, or maybe slow down each rep to increase the time under tension.
If you are doing bodyweight exercises or if you have limited weights available, what you can do is increase the time under tension by going slower and pausing during muscle contraction. There is a study that supports this claim. According to its researchers, prolonged muscle time under tension affects the acute amplitude of muscle protein subfactor synthesis.
To make sure that you recruit the right muscles during your workout, you can also focus on form rather than on just doing the reps to complete each set.
2. Not getting enough sleep
Rest is often overlooked. People can easily lack sleep given the number of distractions that we have, plus the busy schedules that we also have to meet.
Ideally, a person should be sleeping at least eight hours every day. What happens if the body is sleep-deprived? For one, it tends to make the brain feel exhausted, which means that you will have a harder time focusing on the tasks at hand. This means that it can also affect how you are going to do your exercises. Also, those who are sleep-deprived may tend to feel hungrier since the body produces more ghrelin.
3. Not eating the right amount of protein
A lot of people tend to think that doing their workout is enough. In reality, that’s just half of the story. If you want to optimize what you are doing in the gym, you have no other choice but to also eat the right food before and after the workout.
And if you feel that your results are slow even if you are doing everything right in the gym, maybe it’s time that you assess your diet. Protein is necessary to get your muscles to recover.
To build muscle, it is necessary to consume around 1 gram of protein for every kilogram of bodyweight. At times, you will need to eat more protein especially if you get older.
4. Not doing your warmup
You often see people in the gym go straight to their weightlifting routine without wasting any time. A warm-up routine is just as important as the actual workout. It signals your brain that you are going to be doing the workout. Plus, you get the blood pumping in the muscle groups that you will be using for the day.
Make it a habit to grab the lightest weight in the gym and perform exercises on the muscle group that you are going to work on. This can prevent injuries and could even make things easier for you.
5. Not getting yourself hydrated enough
Your body will sweat to maintain its temperature whenever you are doing your workouts. Not drinking enough water during intense workouts can make you prone to lightheadedness, and even more vulnerable to accidents. Make it a habit to drink lots of water especially if you are doing challenging workouts.
6. Not logging your progress
Nowadays, there are lots of tools that can help you track your progress. If you are trying to lose weight, there are weighing scales that make use of apps where you can monitor your progress. On top of that, you can also have a breakdown of your body composition to know whether you are gaining or losing muscle or fat mass.
7. Listing unattainable/unrealistic goals
Goal setting is important whenever you are going to visit the gym. However, you also have to be realistic with the goals that you are going to choose. You need to make sure that it is attainable based on the deadline that you set.
Final Thoughts
These are just some of the bad habits that you can easily change to get the most out of your fitness journey. Pick one bad habit a week to focus on improving. These small changes won’t disrupt what you do. Instead, these are things that you can adjust without any problem.