5 Fitness Gym Hacks

Athletes and fitness enthusiasts are always looking for a leg up when it comes to maximizing their time spent in the gym. Sometimes it just takes experience to learn the ins and outs of the gym, but in this case allow me to impart some knowledge.

Here are the 5 Fitness Gym Hacks:

1. Bring a Water Source With You

Hydration is one of the most overlooked wellness measures in our culture. Our lives are so busy and full of distraction that stopping to take a sip of water can easily be forgotten. Training yourself to drink water consistently throughout the day is a tough enough habit to adopt. Forcing yourself to drink water periodically while at the gym is a good place to start.

When you go to the gym, bring a water bottle with you. Don't leave it with your coat or keys, take it around with you to each workout station you go to, this will help you to remember to drink. I recommend taking a sip or two between every workout. An even better way to force yourself to drink is to buy a nice water bottle from the store. If it is a nice bottle that you paid money for you will be much more likely to remember to take it with you wherever you go. For extra performance, fill your bottle with a BCAA powder mix for an intra-workout boost to your muscular performance.

2. Wear One Extra Layer

Whether you're going for a detox workout or just trying to burn more calories, wear an extra layer of gym clothes than you would normally. Wearing an extra layer, like a sweatshirt top, sweatpants, long sleeve shirt, or a hat, can increase your body temperature while you workout. This can help you sweat more in the gym and burn more calories. If you're working out after a weekend of drinking or eating and want to clean up your system, sweating it out with an extra layer can be the best way to get your body feeling good again. Psychologically sweating more at the gym can be good too, you will feel that you worked much harder while you were there.

3. Superset your Exercises

If you have two exercises on your list that you can do on the same machine or bench it can sometimes be best to superset these exercises so that you save time and increase the intensity of your workout. When you do a superset, you combine two different exercises that you do in succession. For example, if you were to superset bench press and pushups you would do your reps on the bench press, then right after get down on the floor and do 10 pushups. The benefits of supersets are great, you increase the intensity and effectiveness of your muscles, so your body learns to work harder and grow stronger, and it can actually save time and increase the efficiency of your work outs. If you did an entire workout of 6 different supersets, you could do 12 different exercises in about the same time it would take you to do 6. This is a great technique for those days when you have limited time in the gym, but you still want to get as good a workout as possible, just do a couple of supersets and in 30 minutes you'll feel like you just worked out for an hour.

4. Give Your Workouts a Title

Planning out your workout before you get to the gym has its obvious benefits. Instead of getting to the gym and staring at the equipment for five minutes before you decide what you want to do, having a plan means you can walk in and immediately start hitting the weights. Well, here's an even more simple hack to add to your workout plan, name your workout. "Get Big Day," "Weekend Detox," or "Hump Day" are just simple examples of the titles you can give. What a title does when you put it at the top of your workout plan is it gives you a purpose to your workout. When we go to the gym with a purpose or goal in mind we tend to work the hardest, get the best results, and enjoy our workout the most. It's simple psychology but something I'm sure most of us don't already apply, when workouts begin to become monotonous and ordinary is when we tend to lose interest. Next time you write a workout, throw a title at the top of your list and see how it changes your habits.

5. Break Your Routines

Routines are great. They get us into the gym, help us figure out what to do when we are there, and generally make our lives easier. However, over time routines can cause stagnation in personal improvement both inside of the gym and outside of the gym. In the gym, repeatedly doing the same exercise routines every week can result in reduced muscle adaptation and growth in as little time as five weeks of repetition. Having routines in your lifestyle that you carry on for months at a time can also result in similar effects for your psychological and physiological health. Overcome routines and muscle growth stagnation by simply recognizing when you've been doing the same types of workouts or exercises for a while, and change it. For life routines, changing the route you take to work or the time you go to bed can have a great impact on the path of your day.

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