What's something you wish you started doing sooner/knew earlier in your fitness journey?

[mrcarrol2013]

@lostandseeking2015 So do you mean you're keeping your head and neck stable and only looking up with your eyes? Or you actually tilt your head back to look up? This is the first time I've heard this, I always look straight forward

 

[thebadcatholic]

@colwyn I wish I had started following a program written by a professional sooner rather than putting together my own plans. I didn't injure myself or anything but I also didn't progress as much I would have liked doing my own thing.

 

[mac54]

@colwyn -Getting enough protein. And this doesn’t mean just winging it. It’s best to track intake to see how much you actually have to eat to hit your protein target. This also leads to being consistent with your eating. I like to follow the rule of out of every 20 meals 17 have to be on point nutritionally.

• track EVERYTHING you do in the gym. Its important to train harder than last time and how can you do that if you can’t see back to last week/month
• mobility exercises are crucial! Not only do they help prevent tightness and pain, they can reduce injury and increase the longevity of training as you get older. I wish I did more mobility/foam roller drills in my 20’s

-choose a program and stick to it. It’s so easy to be overwhelmed by all the different routines out there. Fact is, they all work as long as you put in the effort and stick to it for long enough ( at least 3-6 months in my experience).

 

[brianhex]

@colwyn I was lifting with way too little intensity (just counting the prescriped reps, not exhausting the muscle) and without focusing on mind-muscle connection. SO much wasted time, it's embarrassing

 

[bgerkes]

@colwyn Training upper body!! Neglected it so much for the first 2 years of my journey, I was so weak, but for the past year have been hitting it consistently, with a proper split. I love training upper body so much now and can’t believe I spent so long without it

 

[mmbee0112]

@colwyn That working more intensely/frequently/longer not only will not help you, it could very well hurt you. I used to get in double workouts a few days a week, intense exercise 5 days a week, way too much endurance work, etc. Calm it down.

I've taken the intensity down a notch and aim for 4 solid workouts each week (depending what I am training for), and just try to move on the other days (walking, hiking, yoga, etc).

I am in better shape than I've ever been, feel amazing, no more consistent pain AND I've gotten the best results of my life in the last year!

I used to just kill myself every day with intense work and I was making very slow progress. No wonder, I was tired and hurting all the time. My results were slow too, largely because I was training so often that I was hungry alll the time and frequently blowing my diet. Don't do it! You don't get any extra points for working stupid hard.

 

[epiclasersauce]

@mmbee0112 Yes!!! I was exhausted, tired and running to thr gym. Now I aim for activity 4-5 days a week, eat and sleep well and am in better shape than any other time in my life

 

[annababe121]

@colwyn Listening to my body and warming up properly! If a movement doesn’t feel right, stop. If you’re really tight somewhere, don’t push it. I injured my rotator cuff early in the game by not listening to my body and overstepping my limits.

 

[speirsaaron]

@colwyn That my body was made to do this.

My body was made to run. My body was made to exert strength. My body was made to stretch and bend. My body is the product of six million years of evolution. Evolving perfectly to do all of this.

 

[dawn16]

@speirsaaron Oooh, this is my new mantra!

 

[speirsaaron]

@dawn16 Hell yeah!

 

[jimmyh214]

@speirsaaron That's what I try to use as motivation. I want to find out what my body can do.

 

[colwyn]

@speirsaaron Love this!

 

[dbooth]

@colwyn I wish I’d kept track of my workouts earlier and written things down. I would often forget how many reps or what weight I had lifted in my previous session so I kind of stagnated. Now I write down EVERYTHING and I have improved every single session as a result. Even just throwing in one extra rep makes me feel 1000x more accomplished than just guessing and feeling kind of stuck.

 

[bethanp]

@colwyn Progress isn’t linear. Consistency matters most and even if you are consistent, sometimes you plateau and stall out, sometimes you have set backs, and sometimes you just don’t feel like it. All of this is okay and give yourself grace sometimes. Some days, just making it to the gym is progress enough and sometimes it’s fitting into some goal jeans.

A huge one I always promote: the scale is ONE unit of measurement and not the end all, be all. Avoid having a goal weight and focusing on a number if you can. Use measurements and progress pics.

 

[dawn16]

@colwyn Not throwing up

 

[ronit]

@colwyn These threads come up every so often and I never get tired of them. Some things can't be repeated often enough.

Speaking of tired, rest. Rest is part of (as in, included in, mandatory, non-negotiable) any good program. If a program skips over rest or treats it as a necessary evil which is to be minimized and only resorted to shamefully as to not, well, disintegrate, no matter now optimal the program is designed or how much love for detail is put into the exercise selection and frequency, the program is mediocre at best. Even if you pay lots of money.

That is because your muscles grow at rest, not during training them, that's only the stimulus.

On a tangent, please especially if you start a new sport as an already fit person, remember that your active movement apparatus (i.e. your muscles) adapt a lot faster to new stimuli than your passive movement apparatus (tenons and ligaments). So even if you have strength and endurance to do much more than the regular beginner at that sport, your limiting parable isn't necessarily how much of the noob phase you can skip. Don't skip the newbie phase, enjoy it and play safe for a while. You're in this for the long run.

 

[humbleheart]

@ronit So much yes. As a woman I struggle with deload weeks, because it took me so much effort to be able to lift whatever I can now and my sense of pride and confidence in the gym are attached to the numbers (which they really shouldn't!)

My new, current goal is not a PR. It's actually just to successfully do a full deload week at 50% load or whatever my program says, and be healed and ready for the next cycle.

 

[pastormoazzam]

@ronit This is a great response! I think sleep (and diet) are the hardest part for many of us. You know, basically everything but the exercise, which is tough enough on its own. Chronic sleep deprivation is socially programmed at this point — I'm currently an online student who wakes up around 6:40-7:00 to workout out of my own volition, but I pity my younger siblings (a 6 year old!) waking up at 6:20 to get on a bus at 6:40 AM. It's ridiculous.

 

[ronit]

@pastormoazzam Yep. I'm 25 and I developed insomnia a few years ago. It gets better and worse it times, but it made me lose all respect for fatigue culture. It's not even hustle culture anymore, it's fatigue culture. I work in a research lab and am in a master's program and swear I get the same amount of quality work done in a 30h work week as in a 40h work week and it's not because I'm lazy either.