Today I will share with you my golden five tips. Many of my clients already try them, let’s see how fast you will notice amazing changes in your training?
Believe in Yourself
If you go into a set thinking you aren’t going to get it, chances are you won’t. You should be fully committed and have a distinct (and realistic) goal in mind, and there should be no doubt in your mind that you can pull it off. If you aren’t confident, you shouldn’t even be trying it.
I’m a big believer in positive self-talk. Whenever I step up to take the weight, I’m absolutely convinced that I’m going to dominate it. That’s not to say I always do, but getting in the right mindset at least gives me a fighting chance.
Learn Correct Form
The best thing I ever did for my lifting was to get a video camera. This is a great idea for people who train alone without a coach or a trainer. Watching yourself training is going to help see the moves you are doing wrong. Learn from your mistakes and nail down good form from the beginning. If you’ve let it side, suck it up, lighten the weigh, and take the time to get it right. Until you do, nothing else matters. Fancy programming is useless if you can’t execute the exercise correctly.
Hammer Your Weak Points
It’s human nature to like the things we do best and avoid the things we suck at. In the gym, this often manifests with us prioritizing our strengths and neglecting our weaknesses. While it may be normal human behaviour, it doesn’t make it right. This is a recipe for creating imbalances, which sets us up for stagnation and injury. I’m suggesting that you look for the glaring weaknesses and attack them head-on, even if you don’t see the immediate benefit. I’ll bet that you know exactly what your biggest weak point is. Maybe it’s your core strength, upper back, glutes, hamstrings, mobility, whatever. Now it’s just a matter of taking action and making a conscious effort to improve it. That may mean putting it first in the workout to ensure that you give it full attention, or it may mean devoting an entire extra day each week specifically to that weak point. Just get it done.
Mobility Work
It’s certainly not as sexy and fun as weight training, but it’s still vitally important. It likely won’t contribute directly to gaining muscle, but it can augment the muscle-building process by helping us feel better, move better, and recover better. Flexibility and mobility are essential to training hard and avoiding injury.
As much as it might suck, make it a priority. I recommend doing a bit and during your workouts, and then spend a good 10 minutes of devoted stretching at night at home before you go to bed. I find doing it at night helps me to relax and alleviate some of the soreness caused by lifting.
Unilateral Exercises
One of the many benefits of unilateral training is that it helps even out imbalances between limbs. Conventional wisdom says to do the weaker limb first to avoid exacerbating the imbalance and then match that number of reps with the strong limb. I’ve never been a fan of this method. While it may help create balance, it’s selling the strong limb short since you aren’t working it to its capacity. Instead, try doing the strong limb first and then force yourself to match it on the weak side. You obviously won’t be able to do it all in one continuous set, so do as many as you can with good form, pause for 10 seconds and take a few deep breaths, then continue on until you match the reps you got on the strong side.
