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It Never Gets Easier...

By Alex Gold

A few clients have made a similar comment recently to me, along the lines of (best delivered in a style similar to De Niro in the Godfather....)

"Just when I thought I was getting fit, you made it even harder!"

The fact is, to progress in training you have to be continuously pushing your limits. Go to the gym and do the same workout for a year, and you'll probably look pretty similar at the end of the year! Therefore, it is a good plan to change up the stimulus regularly to ensure you keep making progress. This is a concept my clients are only too familiar with!

This is only one of the many benefits of personal training - it's all too easy to forget how hard the workout you are doing now was the first time you did it or overestimate how hard you are working now and stagnate. If you are training with me or any good trainer you will never reach this stage.

Here are some basic ways to progress with cardio, or aerobic training. For instance, if you are running for thirty minutes twice a week, you have a few options to progress. You can do the same work in less time (run faster), do more work in the same time (run further) or do more sessions per week (run more frequently). I like to set upper and lower limits on each variable and adjust within these limits. For instance, you might run your thirty minute distance until you can do it in twenty minutes, then try and increase the distance before finally adding in a session per week.

A similar progression can be used for interval cardio training. If you do 5 ‘work’ intervals of 30 seconds and 5 ‘rest’ intervals of 30 seconds, you can reduce the time and/or increase the speed of the rest or the work period, add more work periods and so on. You should ensure that whatever you did last week, you do a little more this week.

For resistance training, you may think increasing the weight is the only way to progress. However, there are many other variables that can be changed. You can change the speed you move the weight in either or both directions, hold the weight at the bottom position, do more repetitions with the same weight, spend less time resting in between sets and so on. Even with just one weight you can continue to make very real progress for months if you train in an intelligent manner!

I hope this article has given you some good ideas on how to break the monotony if you are stuck in a rut, or how to avoid not making progress if you plan on starting a fitness regime. Always remember - If you are not moving forwards, you're standing still!