Listening to Your Body Instead of Using Quotas
As long as I’ve been an Austin personal trainer, I still scratch my head when I see how some people approach their workouts. I’m not talking about novices to fitness, but rather experienced lifters, and often times even professional athletes, including, of all things, bodybuilders! I’m not referring to their choices of exercises, the frequencies, or even the techniques employed. What I’m referring to, is the cliche approach of satisfying numerical quotas.
For example, how many times have you decided to do a certain exercise, and your goal was to do 3 sets of 10? Why is 3 sets of 10 seemingly everyone’s go to? What happened to feel? Stopping the set because you have reached the self chosen quota you established is a complete misdirection of where your focus needs to be. What happens when you make 10 reps, for example, an approximation instead of a non negotiable commandment, is that you will be able to end the set before you have reached those 10 repetitions if you have fatigued to the point that your form is suffering, and injury could occur. Conversely, if you find that once you’ve reached those desired 10 repetitions, you still have some more energy, and a few more quality reps is a definite possibility, you’ll recruit more muscle fibers by doing so, and thus maximize your gains.
Listening to your body is something that does not come easily to a lot of people. They do, however, understand meeting quotas, such as a mandated 10 reps per set, for example. Knowing the difference between fatigue and pain, where there is a musculature imbalance that needs addressing before carrying on, is an example of when pushing through something, to satisfy your numerical quotas, can result in injury. If it hurts, stop.
If you spend too much time thinking about the numerals and quotas involved in your workout, as opposed to the workout itself, you’ve missed out on your chance to capitalize on your gym time. Instead, perhaps you have satisfied an egotistical need to have lifted a certain amount of weight for a certain amount of times. Unless you are a powerlifter competing in a meet, this is a pointless approach. Building your ego is one thing, building your body, however, is something entirely different.
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Andy
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