How to Maximize the Benefits of Your Workout

When you’re putting in effort at the gym, you deserve to get something out of it. Here’s how to maximize the benefits of your workout, every time.

You’re here, make it worth it.

You’ve given up part of your morning/afternoon/evening to go to the gym. This is time, energy and will-power that you could have used to do one hundred other things. Even if you’re not sure you want to be here, even if you don’t LOVE being at the gym, you’re here. Make it worth your while.

How to Maximize the Benefits of Every Workout

Set a Goal and Train for It

While it sounds straight-forward, most people don’t actively train for a specific goal, even if they have one in mind. If you’re working out but your workout is designed to support your goal, you won’t get the results you desire. If you’re workout doesn’t support your goal, you’re not maximizing the benefits of that workout.

Related: If You Want to Achieve Your Goals, Set Smart Ones

You will find hundreds of thousands of workouts and workout plans on the internet. They’re everywhere and readily available. Most of them work! What doesn’t work is bouncing from one plan to the next to the next to the next without a real idea of how to reach your goal.

If your goal is to run a marathon, your workouts should focus on running increasingly longer distances and improving your cardio-respiratory health. While it will probably benefit your goal to throw in a day of total body strength training each week, it’s might actually be detrimental to your goal to power-lift on your off days.

Make a Plan and Follow It

Once you know your goal, make a plan. Then follow it.

Understand what you want to do before you walk into the gym to ensure that you have maximized your benefits by the time you walk out.

How many days a week can you fit in a work out? How long can you spend at the gym per workout? Pull out your planner or calendar and block off those time slots.

What exercises do you want to focus on? How many sets and reps of each will you aim to reach? The answers depend on your goals.

Not sure how to make that plan? Ask for help.

Get Rid of Distractions

Math problem: you spend one hour at the gym. You take 10 minutes to chat with your friends, 5 minutes to figure out what you actually want to do at the gym and 10 minutes to scroll through Facebook in between sets. How many minutes have you spent maximizing the benefits you want from this workout?

When you walk into the gym, put all distractions away. That includes the physical distractions as well as the mental distractions. If you know you’ll get onto social media in between exercises, leave your phone in the locker room. If you are stressed from a long day at work, leave that in the locker room too.

Gym time is your time…your distraction-free time to focus on you (not work, not other people’s posts, not your to-do list).

Have you heard the phrase “mind-muscle connection”? It’s exactly what it sounds like – it’s the connection between your brain signaling a muscle to move and the actual movement of that muscle. It’s a bit heady (see what I did there), but it’s an important part of maximizing the benefits of you work out. When you’re distracted (by Facebook, by work left undone at work, by a problem at home), you’re not focusing on that connection and you’re losing out on some major benefits.

Fuel Your Body

Food as fuel = the unsung hero of maximizing the benefits you are getting out of every workout.

You do not build muscle when you lift weights.

Woah, I know.

You do not build muscle when you lift weights; you build muscle with the fuel you ingest after you lift weights. The force of lifting weights makes micro-tears in your muscles. Lifting weights actually breaks muscle down. It’s the nutrition that you consume after (and before), that builds stronger, bigger muscles.

Which is why nutrition is so crucial to your goals.

The best way to refuel post-workout is with a carbohydrate/protein shake. Why carbs? Carbs restore your glycogen levels that you depleted during your workout. Restoring glycogen with carbs is vital to letting protein do its job – building muscle. Why a shake? It’s easy to carry and it’s easy for your body to ingest rapidly (and restore energy levels and start rebuilding).

Eating to maximize your results goes beyond your post-workout shake. A balanced diet, rich in high-quality nutrients helps to keep you healthy and energized throughout each day.

What does balanced diet mean?

Lean protein. Heart healthy fats. Complex, fiber-rich carbs. Lots of vegetables.

Grab my Healthy Eating Grocery List here.

Prioritize Recovery

If you want to maximize the benefits you reap from your workouts, you need to take time off from those workouts. Counter-intuitive? Maybe. More is better, right? Not in this case.

Workouts put stress on your body. Just like your mental game on stress, your physical game ain’t so strong when constantly faced with the pressure to perform. You compromise your immune system, open yourself up to injury and risk burn out.

While nutrition is a big part of recovery, it’s not the only part. Sleep (7-8 hours minimum per day), and taking days off from high-intensity workouts play a role as well. You don’t have to be a slug on your days off (in fact, that’s not highly recommended). But certainly take it easy. A 30 minute yoga or stretching session or a leisurely walk or hike are ideal active rest day activities.

Always Warm Up

Your warm up and cool down are undoubtedly the least glamorous and least ego-pumping portions of your workout but they are imperative to your routine if you want to maximize the benefits of your workout.

I mentioned stress and your workout. Stress stimulates a specific response from your body: hormones are released, body temperature changes, muscles relax or tense up. Your warm up helps to ease your body into that stress response (think walking slowly into the pool instead of diving in). Light cardio and active stretching and/or foam rolling play a big role in preparing your body for work mode. It also stretches tight muscles out – an important pre-workout process for anyone asking the body to get low into a squat or move in any other way that is out-of-the-norm.

If you head to the gym but aren’t seeing results you want, it’s possible you’re not taking the right steps to maximize the benefits of your workout. Start following these tips, and you’ll start seeing those results.