While you might think of fall as a great time to sit back, relax, and start getting into ‘winter mode’. When it comes to getting fit and working out, it is anything but the time to relax!
In fact, the warm weather fading and shorter nights makes it easy to give up on your fitness goals. However, fall is especially important for our health goals as you know that the winter holidays are going to pack on a few pounds. This is why fall is the ideal time to speak to a trainer and workout ata boutique fitness studio, like Housefit, to learn about how you can turn up your workouts. Doing so has many benefits for your health and in helping you work towards your fitness or physique goals:
- Increased intensity is a more efficient means of working out, giving you better results in a shorter period of time. Perfect for if you are trying to transform your body this fall!
- Improving your cardiovascular fitness through more cardio activities reduces your risk of heart related health problems.
- Working out more offers you increased benefits for your mental health, supporting better self-confidence, decreased stress and a better perspective when tackling challenging tasks.
To take advantage of these increased health benefits, try the following techniques en route to turning up your fall workouts!
Increase Your Intensity
If you have heard of high intensity interval training (HIIT), and it’s effectiveness in helping the body get in shape and its efficiency in helping users reach goals, you likely aren’t surprised that one of the best ways to take your workouts to the next level is to up the intensity. If you are a runner, this might mean running faster or adding more hill workouts.
You can also increase the intensity of your workouts by doing proper HIIT sessions, Tabata sessions, or a combination of all of the above. A higher intensity effort should drastically elevate your heart rate, put you out of breath, and definitely leave you unable to converse while you are doing it.
Try Something New
The body is incredibly adaptive and when we do something on repeat for a long period of time, it gets good at it! Just like anything you practice and do regularly, doing the same exercises at the gym or tackling the same type of fitness all the time means the body has lots of time to practice it, getting more efficient and in the end, yielding less appreciable results for you.
The solution? Try something new. And fall is the perfect time, because you can take advantage of the fall weather and get into some outdoor activities. For example, you can try running or hiking. Get out your bike that you haven’t ridden in a few years and go for a ride. Or, ask your local boutique fitness studio about whether they offer outdoor classes and try out a new class!
Add More
Whether it is more reps, more weight or more minutes, there are a lot of ways you can ramp up your workouts through adding on. If you lift weights as your exercise of choice, take some time to look at the exercises you are doing to see where you are ready to add on weight, change the duration of the eccentric or concentric movement, or where you could benefit from adding more sets. Likewise, if you are into cardio, is it time to go for longer, or add increased distance onto your run?
Mix it up, make it intense or add on more, and pretty soon you’ll have taken your workouts to the next level and be smashing your goals. Who said fall was only for being lazy and sitting in the sun?