How to get the most out of your training

If you feel like you’ve hit a bit of a plateau in your training, like you aren’t quite making as much progress as you’d like, or not making progress as fast as you did when you first started, you’re not alone, so here are some useful tips to help you get out of that rut and back making the progress you want.

There are many aspects to training that affect how our body responds, and while some involve being in the gym, not all of them do. Here are some things that you need to focus on improving so that you can continue to set PB’s and get fitter and stronger overall.

Some smaller things that can make a significant change to your overall training quality are things such as specific warm ups and tracking your progress. These things don’t take much time or effort but will help make a difference in the long term.

Doing extra warm ups that are specific to you will help you stay injury free and training for longer. Tracking your progress in the gym (for example using SugarWOD everyday), will help you stay on top of your numbers, so that it's easier to identify where you are lacking and what needs work. It also helps you better understand RPE by having lots of data to look back on, giving you better opportunities to make the most out of the class workout for the day. So don’t forget to do these two things if you want to make sure you’re doing the most you can to improve.

Recovery is arguably just as important as your training, specifically, your nutrition and your sleep. Put VERY simply, your body gets stronger and fitter by being broken down and built back up, better than before. Training is the breakdown, sleep is the build up, and nutrients are the building blocks. If you are training hard each day but not eating or sleeping sufficiently, you are constantly breaking down your body without giving it what it needs to build back up stronger, this very commonly leads to burnout and more importantly injury. So have a think about what your training, nutrition and sleep balance is like and if it needs to be shifted in a certain direction to be better optimized.

Now inside the gym, two important aspects are consistency and intention. Consistency is a simple one, if you train five times one week, and two times the next, it’s going to have a big impact on your progress. Pick a training schedule that you can handle over a long period of time and do your best to stick with it.

Intention is a little more nuanced, sure you can come to the gym five times a week every week, sleep 8 hours a night, eat plenty of good food, but still struggle to make progress. It might be because you are just going through the motions when it's time to train, just getting it done to get it done. If you really want to progress, being intentional with your training each day is a massive factor. Come into the gym completely focused for that one hour. Think about each set and each rep constantly trying to improve upon the last, give your best effort in every strength piece and every metcon, and I guarantee you will start to see the improvements you want to make.