These are workout tips I wish I had known when I started working out. The majority of them I discovered along the way in my journey. All these tips are things I have incorporated into my fitness plan in one way or another.
Always be sure that you talk to your doctor if you have any health conditions before beginning a fitness program.
[Table Of Contents]
1. Make Sure You Warm Up
2. Make Sure You Cool Down
3. Stay Hydrated
4. Bring a Friend to Workout With
5. Have a Plan
6. Listen to Music
7. Put Your Phone Away
8. Carb Load Before Your Workout
9. Watch Your Nutrition
10. Learn How to do the Exercises
11. Use Good Form
12. Focus on the Muscle You’re Training
13. Don’t Ego Lift
14. Try High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)
15. Do Workouts You Enjoy
16. Don’t Skip Body Parts
17. Listen to Your Body
18. Be Consistent
19. Change It Up Once In Awhile
20. Get Good Sleep
21. Make Sure to Rest
Continue reading to learn what workout tips you can incorporate into your fitness journey.
1. Make Sure You Warm Up
It’s important that you never skip the warm up before your workout. There are a couple of reasons for this.
The first reason you should warm up before your workout is that it will improve your overall performance. The warmup will help speed up your heart rate, breathing, and increase your core body temperature. [1] These things will allow your muscles to perform better.
The second reason you should warm up before your workout is that it will help prevent injuries. Trying to train cold could lead to injury if your muscles are still stiff and unready for performing. An injury can set you back days, weeks, or even months, so make sure you warm up!
Warm up for at least 5-10 minutes before beginning your workout. [1]
2. Make Sure You Cool Down
Just like warming up, performing a cool down after your workout is equally important.
The cool down will help prevent muscle cramps and dizziness. In other words, the cool down will help prevent possible injuries. It also helps you relax and slow your heart rate. [1]
Again, spend at least 5-10 minutes cooling down after your workout. [1]
3. Stay Hydrated
You need to stay hydrated when working out for optimal performance.
Making sure to drink enough water or whatever sports beverage of your choice will help regulate your body temperature and blood pressure. It will also help nutrients reach your muscles quicker and more efficiently. [2]
Make sure to hydrate before, during, and after your workout.
4. Bring a Friend to Workout With
Bringing a friend is a great way to get started on your fitness journey.
I was nervous about going to the gym at one point, but having a friend made it seem less intimidating. Having a friend with you at the gym is a great way to get past the nerves of stepping into a public gym for the first time.
Another good reason about having a friend to workout with is that they can help keep you accountable. Early on, it may be difficult to stick to a workout schedule if you don’t have someone who is willing to train with you and help keep you on track. By having a friend or multiple friends to train with, you can all keep each other accountable.
Ultimately, the key to succeeding in fitness is being able to motivate yourself and be your own gym partner. You have to be able to have the discipline to go with or without a friend. It’s good to have one early on to help you ease into a fitness routine.
5. Have a Plan
Having a plan is important to making progress in fitness. Basically, don’t go to the gym and just start doing random exercises. Your progress will be very minimal if you’re doing it that way.
If someone asks you what you’re going to be doing at the gym, you need to know exactly what exercises you’ll be doing, how many reps, sets, and what weight you’re going to use if you’re going to be lifting. If you’re doing cardio, same thing–know exactly what exercises you’re going to do, for how long, and how intensely you’ll be doing them.
If you’re a beginner, you may not have a workout memorized yet or even know how much to lift if you haven’t picked up weights before, so it’s okay to experiment a little and go from there. The most important thing is knowing your workout, so if you need to, bring a notepad with your workout written down in it or have the workout saved on your phone.
If you know what workout you’ll be doing, you’ll make much better progress and you won’t waste time doing unnecessary exercises.
6. Listen to Music
Listening to music tends to make us more productive and makes our workouts more enjoyable. It will also help keep us from getting distracted.
When you workout, having a good playlist ready to go will help you get pumped up and in the zone so that you focus better on your workout and may even help you workout harder.
A very important reason to listen to music is that it will help keep you off your phone so that you stay focused on your workout and won’t waste time. The key here is to pick a song and stick with it. Don’t spend a lot of time picking a song.
7. Put Your Phone Away
Your phone can be a major distraction to you when working out.
I have been guilty of getting distracted using my phone in the middle of a workout, resulting in a 30 minute workout taking over an hour. Using your phone during a workout, and especially at the gym is unproductive. If at the gym, you also have the added possibility of hogging a machine or equipment that others may want to use.
The best idea is to stay away from your phone while working out to stay more productive and focused. You won’t waste time and you’ll get a better workout if you’re undistracted.
8. Carb Load Before Your Workout
Carb Loading is eating a meal rich in Carbohydrates before your workout.
Loading up on Carbs by eating things like Bread, Fruit, and Pasta (among other things) has the potential to increase your workout performance. [3]
To get the benefits of Carb Loading, make sure to eat a meal rich in carbs at least an hour before your workout. [3]
9. Watch Your Nutrition
The majority of fitness is your nutrition.
What you put in our body is what determines how well you reach your fitness goals. Knowing about your nutrition is crucial to your success in fitness, whether you’re trying to lose weight, gain weight, or gain muscle.
You can workout as hard as you want in the gym, but if you don’t give your body the proper nutrients, you will not see the progress you want. There are free apps that exist to help you meet your nutritional needs.
Take the time to learn more about nutrition to reach your fitness goals.
10. Learn How to do the Exercises
Knowing how to do the exercises in your workout plan will give you a more effective workout and help prevent injury.
If you don’t know how to properly do an exercise, you could potentially injure yourself or you may not even work the muscle you’re trying to work. Basically, not knowing how to do an exercise could lead to you not getting the results you want. Generally, weight lifting techniques tend to require a greater amount of technique in order to do the exercises.
You can find plenty of online sources for how to do just about any exercise you can think of. You can also consult a personal trainer or the gym staff if you’re in a gym to learn how to do an exercise.
11. Use Good Form
Using good form goes in line with knowing how to do an exercise properly.
Again, good form is important because it reduces your chances of injury and allows you to actually work the muscle you’re trying to work. Oftentimes, trying to cheat to get the weights up may cause you to incorporate muscles into an exercise that you don’t want to work. A good example of this is leaning back when doing bicep curls to get the weight up. By doing this, you’re working your lower back trying to do a bicep exercise.
To use good form, you generally want to be able to do the exercise slow and controlled. So if you are doing a bicep curl, you want to do 2 seconds on the way up, and 2 seconds on the way down. This is a good way of preventing you from doing a lot of things that would cause you to cheat. The other thing is to make sure you actually know how to do the exercise. Most importantly, make sure you pick a weight you can actually lift.
Good form will prevent injury and give you a more effective workout.
12. Focus on the Muscle You’re Training
When you’re lifting weights, you want to make sure that you actually focus on the muscle you’re trying to work. If you’re doing a chest exercise, don’t focus on your triceps, even though they may be being worked by the exercise you’re doing.
This is where something known as the “Mind-Muscle Connection” comes into play. It is the idea of intensely focusing on the contraction of the muscle you’re working for the duration of the exercise. It’s almost like meditation, where you only focus on what that muscle is doing. By doing this, you can effectively work a muscle even with lower weights.
By concentrating your attention to a particular muscle, you can get a more effective workout on that muscle. [4]
13. Don’t Ego Lift
Ego lifting is a common problem among beginners in the weight room.
Whether you’re trying to impress somebody else or fool yourself into believing you’re stronger than you are, ego lifting is of no benefit to you. Ego lifting is when you perform an exercise with more weight than you can handle for the aforementioned reasons. There are no expectations from anybody in the gym for you to perform. Everyone is there to do their own thing and often are not interested or focused on what you are doing. Only at the elite levels are people impressed with how much you can lift.
Ego lifting can lead to injury at worst and will give you minimal results at best. It’s okay to start with the smallest weights in the gym if that’s all you can do. It’s okay to walk on the treadmill with the slowest setting if that’s all you can do. What matters is consistency. Watch your nutrition and keep showing up to train and eventually you will be stronger. Keep showing up and watching your nutrition and eventually you will lose the fat you’re trying to lose.
Remember to do your workout for you. You will make progress if you do things right.
14. Try High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)
High Intensity Interval Training is a simple, yet effective workout that’s beneficial for just about anybody. [5]
To do HIIT, simply pick any exercise (cardio is often used) and do it for a certain period of time. That can be 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes, and so on. The way you’re going to do it though is you’re going to do the exercise for a high intensity for that period of time, rest, and then do it again for a low intensity. Then you alternate between high and low intensities until you can’t anymore or until you’ve done it for a certain period of time, such as 30 minutes.
Don’t make every workout a HIIT workout. Perform HIIT once or twice a week and do your regular workout on the other days. [5]
If done with cardio exercises, HIIT will be a great way to burn a ton of calories to help you lose fat if that’s your goal.
15. Do Workouts You Enjoy
This one is surprisingly important. If you don’t enjoy the workouts you do, you’re not going to want to keep doing them. If you’re skipping workouts because you hate doing them, then you need to change it up or find a way to make them more enjoyable.
You can make your workouts more enjoyable by listening to music while doing them, picking exercises you like doing, or bringing friends along.
16. Don’t Skip Body Parts
This is another huge one. You’ll often hear jokes about skipping leg day for a good reason. It creates muscle imbalances and your body will look weird if you skip leg day.
When you workout, you need to make sure you workout your whole body, not just the parts you like. Many guys like to focus on their upper body and many girls like to focus on their lower body. In both cases, focusing too much on one area can lead to muscle imbalances and your body will look odd due to part of it looking well developed and another part looking undeveloped. This is what people mean when they talk about men (or women) with chicken legs.
By skipping body parts, the resulting muscle imbalances can lead to injury. Many exercises also require a strong body overall, such as the deadlift or benchpress. For this reason, you must ensure you workout your whole body.
17. Listen To Your Body
You’ll hear this one a lot, but what does it mean?
Listening to your body means that you shouldn’t workout when you feel sharp pains. You shouldn’t workout if you feel overly fatigued. You shouldn’t workout a particular body part if you can barely use that body part. You shouldn’t workout if you feel sick.
If you feel for some reason that there’s something wrong with you that would prevent you from doing a workout, then you need to stop what you’re doing. You can modify your workout at best, or you may have to not workout depending on how you feel. Ignoring the signs your body is giving you is a surefire way to end up injured, which can prevent you from working out for a long time.
18. Be Consistent
This is critical to achieving your fitness goals.
You have to keep showing up time after time in the gym if you want to see results. You have to keep eating well if you want to see results. Fitness is a marathon, and to succeed you have to be in it for the long haul.
The key to being consistent is discipline. You have to discipline yourself enough to do your workouts even when you don’t feel like it. Trust me, there are days when you’re not going to feel like working out. If you stay disciplined and do your scheduled workouts, you will see results. Also, you’ll eventually make working out a habit and you won’t have to try as hard to make yourself go. You’ll just do it. On days where you really don’t feel like working out or don’t have the time for a full workout, just do an easier or lighter workout. Something is better than nothing and the results of doing this will compound over time.
Consistency is the biggest key to success.
19. Change It Up Once In Awhile
This goes in line similar to ensuring you do a workout you enjoy.
From time to time, it’s okay to change up your workout routine. This can be adding new exercises to it, taking away old ones, adding sets, or adding reps. By doing this, you can keep things fresh so that you’re not doing the same workout over and over again.
The important thing is to not change up your workout too often. By doing so, you can actually hinder your progress.
20. Get Good Sleep
Believe it or not, sleep is immensely important to building muscle.
The majority of muscle growth actually occurs when you sleep. If you’re not getting 7-9 hours of sleep, you’re hindering your progress. Less sleep means your body will secrete less muscle growth hormones. [6]
Not training is often just as important as training.
21. Make Sure to Rest
Rest is similar to sleep. It’s important to make progress.
Resting means giving your muscles enough time to recover between workouts. When you work out, you’re breaking the muscle down so that it can regrow. You need to give your muscles at least some time to rest after training them. You can work the same muscle multiple days in a row, but you have to give it time to rest sooner or later.
To rest, don’t work out a particular muscle for at least a full day before hitting it again. [7]
What Next?
Now that you’re familiar with these workout tips, it’s time to start applying them to your workouts!
