13 Aug Getting the Most from Your Workout

Are you trying to determine the best workout routine to suit your needs? If you are like many people, you aren’t quite certain how far or how hard you should push yourself during your workouts. After all, you want to work your body out hard enough to get results. At the same time, you don’t want to work out so hard that you burn yourself out our cause injury to your body. So, what is the answer?

If you talk to experts, most would recommend that you “train to failure.” Training to failure involves performing repetitions until you simply cannot do them anymore. In other words, if you are performing a bench press, you would continue to do the bench press until you simply can no longer lift the weights rather than having a pre-determined number of reps in your mind.

This is not to say, however, that you shouldn’t pay attention to the number of reps you are doing as you work out. In fact, your target should still be anywhere from seven to twelve reps. Therefore, if you find yourself able to do more than twelve reps before you have exhausted your muscles, it is probably time for you to increase the weights you are lifting.

Although training to failure is a great way to push your body and to get the most from your workout, it is also important for you to implement this strategy as safely as possible. The reality is that training to failure can easily lead to injury, particularly if you are inexperienced or out of shape. It is also possible for training to failure to result in overtraining if you do not provide your muscles with adequate time to rebuild after your workout.

The bottom line is that you want to be able to “feel it” when you get done with your workout. But, if you are feeling pain from your workout the next day, chances are that you over did it. Therefore, listen to your body and don’t push it so hard that you cause injury, but push it hard enough to encourage it to push through to the next level.