Intensity and endurance are some of the most important elements of working out and will commonly decide how rapid muscle growth will occur within an individual. Whether you have discovered a lack of results or wish to step up your game and muscle developments during your workouts, these two factors are exactly what you need to establish in a workout.
Today, I wish to explore some of my strategies and others that I believe can help to increase both your endurance and intensity when working out.
Intensity is a mindset-based-factor of exercising and is completely dependant on the attitude and perception that someone has towards working out. If someone has little care for working out and the results they want, then naturally they will have less ambition and therefor less drive to work hard.
Before you read the following tips, ensure you have established a solid goal that will help to give you the ambition you need in order to make changes to your lifestyle and intensity. This goal may be about gaining a certain amount of muscle mass, losing fat or even just feeling more proactive about your life. Once you have created and visualized this goal, you are now prepared to make major changes to your workouts.
Motivation is a large part of intensifying and enduring your workouts and if you need help with initiating this drive, you can read the following blog: 5 Strategies I Use to Motivate Myself to Workout
Less Rests
As unfortunate and painful it is to hear this, taking less rests is one of the most direct ways to increase intensity in a workout. By reducing the time taken to rest between individual exercises, you are able to increase the number and size of micro tears within your muscles resulting in increased protein synthesis ultimately producing more muscle.
Taking less breaks will also help to increase fat loss for those who are continuously on the grind to shed some extra weight
Drop Sets
Drop sets is a perfect strategy designed to increase intensity through focusing all effort on a single muscle group or exercise. Drop sets are a great strategy that can be used on muscles that have lacked results over previous workouts and promote extreme muscle development in almost any muscle that can be exercised.
The idea behind drop sets is to slowly reduce the weight being lifted or resisted against with each set of reps so that you can endure the exercise over a longer of period of time while still continuously straining the muscles.
For example, if I were doing bicep curls, I would lift 20 pounders till failure. I would then reduce the weight to 15 pounds and lift till failure. Constantly I would reduce the weight that I lift until I reach almost complete muscle exhaustion. Its important to know when to stop though as well. If you begin to feel any unnatural or sharp pain, stop immediately to reduce injury and further pain.
Listen to Music
Music! How will that help? You’d actually be pretty surprised about how music can have an effect on your work out.
To me, music is very important to accomplishing my daily activities thus causing me to implement it into my workout. Through school, chores and other activities, I am almost always listening to music and since reading a small article about its effect on exercising, I have never left it out of my weekly work out schedule.
While listening to music, chemicals such as dopamine are released causing an individual to feel good and even ignore some of the pain felt while exercising. This can help to add a little bit of fun to your workout and even create further motivation to start building up those muscles!
By listening to music, I always find myself exercising to the beat and rhythm of the song causing me to rep faster and invoke even more passion into my movements.
The endurance of muscles is also greatly increased while listening to music due to the feel-good chemicals released by the brain. This will usually allow you to get in a few extra intense sets of exercises that will build that muscle in no time.
Obviously, the idea is to groove to that up-beat kind of music as both the tempo is higher and the song sounds more exiting causing a larger release of dopamine. Alternatively, listening to sad or low feeling songs may not be the greatest idea as your emotions may cause you to go into a minor depressive state. Trust me, this will do nothing to give you those energetic and passionate vibes and will likely make your workout routine even more agonizing.
Reduce Visual Distractions
Originally, when beginning to work out, you may decide to do it while watching TV or maybe doing some reps while watching your favourite YouTuber, but it won’t be long before you realize it was a mistake.
By watching TV and surrendering to distractions, you begin to focus on things other than your exercising. This will result in a loss of intensity and decrease the vigor and level of strength you place into your movements ultimately causing you to work a lot less harder than what is required to gain muscles.
If you haven’t taken notice to this and you do regularly workout while watching TV, I challenge you to switch up your habits. Maybe start listening to music as suggested previously instead to create more positive changes in your intensity and exercise endurance.
Personally, I also used to workout while watching videos, but I swear, once eradicating the visual distractions from my routine, I began feeling far greater burn in my muscles and became more satisfied with the results I’ve gained.
Thank you for visiting the blog and hope you have found at least some of the above tips useful. If you wish to leave a comment or question, please post them in the section below and I will try my hardest to answer them as in-depth as I can. Subscriptions are also available through E-mail which can be entered below if you wish to be notified weekly about the content I post to help you continuously work to build your muscles and figure.
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