Your Workouts Are Personal
When it comes to your workout, things are personal. Or at least they should be. Personalizing your workout can help you stay on track, get the most out of your time in the gym and keep you from hating them. Tailor your routine to fit your goals, your body type and the things you like to do and you’re setting yourself up for success. Specialise your diet and you’re giving yourself an even better leg up when it comes to meeting your fitness and physique goals.
Your Workouts Should Fit Your Goals
Why would you consider doing a workout that isn’t going to help you meet your goals? That would be a disaster and a surefire way to frustrate you so much that you end up not doing anything at all. A workout that doesn’t personalize itself to the goals you’re setting out to achieve simply isn’t going to help you in the long run.
When you’re thinking about your workouts, you always need to have your endgame in mind. A premade gym routine might be a good place to start, but when you’re trying to find your stride, play around a bit with the format and length to see how your body responds best. Men’s Fitness suggests starting with customizing your sets to get the most out of your workout. “There’s an easy way to know how many sets you need: let your body decide.” Do as many sets as needed to achieve “technical failure,” which is the point at which there’s a break in your form. “That’s your signal that you’ve worked the muscle sufficiently in order to stimulate maximum growth.”
Play around with the weight you’re lifting, too. “Each time you train,” suggests Men’s Fitness “your first task (after you warm up) is to test your repetition max for that day. This determines the amount of weight you’ll use.” Use your previous workout as a baseline, but don’t feel the pressure to up the ante every time you lift. Be true to your strength and stay safe. Personalize how much you lift each workout to meet your goals quickly, efficiently and safely.
Don’t Fight Your Nature
Just like Popeye said, you are what you are. There’s no point fighting your nature when it comes to working out. BodyBuilding.com points to different body types that can make an impact on how you train, what training works best for you and how to structure your workouts to get the most out of them.
The three basic body types are ectomorphs, endomorphs and mesomorphs. BodyBuilding.com spells it out like this: Ectomorphs are hardgainers looking to pack on muscle, but are having trouble adding size to their frame. Endomorphs tend to be a little heavier and need to lose body fat as they build muscle. Mesomorphs have the best of both worlds, able to put on size without adding body fat.
Once you work out which body type you are, you can start tailoring your workout to fit your natural strengths and weaknesses. BodyBuilding.com suggests a weight that will cause failure after six to eight reps for ectomorphs, one that mesomorphs will be able to reach 10 to 12 reps with and one that endomorphs will be able to bang out 15 to 20 reps with. Use your body type and the weight test from before to determine what works best for you and you alone.
Do What You Like To Do
There’s no point in doing a workout that you hate. If you’re not a runner, don’t force yourself to train for a marathon just because you think it’s going to get you in shape. If you hate working out in the gym, find a way to sweat outside or in your home. The point is, you need to fit your workout to the activities you like or you’re never going to stick to it and meet your goals.
When you’re trying to find a workout that you’re going to love (and one that you’re going to stick to), use your motivation to guide you. According to the American College of Sports Medicine, you should start by evaluating your priorities. Think about what you like to do, what’s important to you and where you want to end up. From there you can personalize what you’re doing to get you there.
And you don’t have to stick to one kind of exercise either. Switch up your workouts to keep things fresh and exciting. This will keep you motivated, keep your body guessing and keep you from getting bored.
Don’t Forget About Your Diet
When you’re talking about personalizing your routine to help you get the most out of your fitness and reach your goals, you can’t forget about personalizing your diet. According to a study from the International Journal of Epidemiology cited by Men’s Fitness, having a personalized diet can make you more successful in sticking to it. “At the end of six months, 80 percent of participants successfully completed the study and their diets, eating less red meat and more fruits and vegetables,” says Men’s Fitness. “Those randomized to the personalized nutrition treatment groups had significantly better and bigger improvements in their eating patterns; they experienced double the improvement when it came to the overall healthiness of their diets measured using the Healthy Eating Index compared to the control group.”
Eating a personalized diet that matches your tastes, your routine, your dietary concerns and your specific goals is going to get you a lot farther than just Googling “what I should eat” and finding a generalized diet online. Consider what you want to be putting into your body. What works for one person might not be what’s best for you. Play around with the foods you eat, paying close attention to how they make you feel. If something’s not working for you, cut it out. And don’t be afraid to incorporate new foods.
So don’t be generic. Your workout and your diet should be personal. Tailor your workouts to be in line with your goals, your exercise preferences and you body type. Find a diet that makes you feel great, regardless of what the latest internet fad diet tells you to do. Take pride in personalizing your fitness and you’ll be well on your way to crushing your goals.
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