The single biggest flaw I see way too often in gyms is people cruising through 1, 1.5 and even 2 hours of a gym session. There’s no true work done just a series of exercises that generally isolate a muscle group or 2 and that underpin the misconception that doing loads and loads of reps gets the job done – “I felt the burn!”

Traditional training methodology tells us that we do sessions around chest and biceps, back and triceps, legs day and shoulders and calfs and split it all up over a week.

If you’re a pro bodybuilder or your coach is and one of you knows what you’re doing then you have a chance of looking good on a stage or when you walk along the beach.

For anyone else looking to eliminate an old sports injury or that bad back suffered a few years ago, wanting to improve muscle mass and get leaner, sleep better, think better, work better and just be better, then your approach needs to be different to this.

When you structure your training properly the biggest winner in your body is your hormonal balance.

Hormones effect sleep, your ability to concentrate, your moods, how well you digest food and if your body will put on lean muscle and lose fat to name a few of the important functions hormones influence.

A lot of hormonal balance is dictated by stress. If you’re mentally stressed at work your body releases cortisol, the stress hormone and here is what WebMD says about it –

Too Much Stress

After work if you then go to the gym and physically stress yourself the body doesn’t know the difference between mental and physical stress and continues to release cortisol. You think you’re doing the right thing and “releasing” your tension, having a bit of a blow out and it’ll all be ok when in fact you’re doubling down on the worst hormone you could be doubling down on.

But I have good news for you. Change your routine to complement your stress levels. Frequently on this blog I have provided the evidence for high intensity interval training (HIIT) and heavy resistance training (HRT) because of the positive hormonal effect of these types of training. Engaging in a session of HRT and HIIT can lower cortisol levels but the proviso is you must do these types of training properly so educating yourself about what constitutes this type of training is very important.

A lot of people including qualified trainers get it wrong so what are the basics?

For a start both HRT and HIIT are easily done within 45 minutes so endless sets of 4 different exercises all for the chest and then having to do the same for biceps are a thing of the past.

I suggest you look at 3 or 4 compound movements first, squat, deadlift, chest press and hip thrusters. Do them Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday or pair up hip thrusters with one of the other exercises during the week if the gym isn’t your thing on the weekend.

Do 5 sets of 5 reps of each of the exercises and take at least 2.5 minutes or even 3 between sets. Lift a weight that strains you so that if you needed to do a 6th or 7th rep it would be almost too hard to do.

Once the compound exercise is done then do a 10 minute EMOM (every minute on the minute). Minute 1 do burpees for 30 seconds rest for 30 and then minute 2 do air squats or push ups, you could even do a loaded exercise here such as dumbbell chest press (if you want to improve your chest) or deadlifts (with a lighter weight than if you were doing HRT to improve muscular endurance) and again work for 30 seconds and rest for 30 and then minute 3 go back to burpees for 30 seconds, 30 seconds rest and then minute 4 back to the strength exercise and continue for 10 minutes/5 rounds of each.

Anyone that tells you you can do this type of thing for 15 or 20 minutes is either a professional athlete or a liar because quite simply most humans cannot output high intensity for anymore than 10 minutes and even this involves frequent rests of equal length to the work periods (W:RR at 1:1).

The fact is HRT and HIIT are proven to provide the best bang for your buck training-wise and even more so as you get older and your Circadian Rhythm gets more and more out of whack with the influences of the aging process.

The challenge is truly understanding the concepts and then how to apply them to your exercise schedule. Because if you don’t you won’t be testing yourself the right way and will not be gaining the most from your time.

Take the guess work out and check out my very affordable, at home training solution or email me and start a conversation on how you can benefit most from changing up your exercise!