9. Take Baby Steps to Make Exercise More Challenging
The fourth strategy to unlocking your fitness potential is to take baby steps in making exercise more challenging. In the field of exercise science, this is the principle of progression. It states that a systematic increase in the workload over a period of time will result in improvements in fitness without risk of injury. 27 In other words, your body will continue to get stronger while avoiding injuries if you increase the challenge gradually.
You’ll notice that the exact same workout routine will begin to feel easier over a period of days or weeks, depending on how hard you push yourself. You should be proud of this: it’s a sign that your body has adapted to exercise. But once your body has adapted, you won’t experience much more improvement if you continue to perform the same workout exactly as before. For your body to continually increase its strength and endurance, you have to make your routine more challenging. You can achieve this by adding a new exercise, increasing the repetitions, upping the pace, or decreasing the rest time during exercise.
I recommend taking baby steps toward making exercise more challenging. For example, you might increase the number of repetitions for a particular exercise from 10 to 12 or decrease the rest time from 30 seconds to 25. At first, you’ll notice that these changes will make exercise feel more difficult. But with consistent effort over a few days or weeks, your body will adapt and exercise will feel easier again. Your goal is to repeat this process of making your exercise more challenging every time you feel your workout has become easier. By doing this in baby steps, your body will continue to get stronger and avoid injuries at the same time.
Of course, injury can result if you increase the challenge too steeply. For example, if performing 5 repetitions of exercise is difficult for you, jumping to 15 repetitions the next day would be attempting too much, too soon. Instead, you should consider taking a baby step from 5 repetitions to 6 repetitions and sticking with this until it starts to feel easier before taking another step to seven or eight repetitions.
To avoid injuries, it’s important to take baby steps and to spend a day or two and, sometimes even a week or more, with the more challenging workout to ensure that your body has fully adapted to it.
It’s important to mention that taking a day or two off every week is also important to help your body adapt to exercise. However, it’s been my experience that working daily for the first two weeks of this program is a powerful way to kickstart change without increasing the risk of injury.
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Action Steps