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

@dawn16 Along the same lines I’m huge on prehabilitation work. For example the myrtle routine to strengthen glutes/hips to prevent injuries. Game changer
 
@dawn16 This is it for me too. My gains are held back when I don't pay enough attention to the quality of my movements. My form suffers so I suffer. Mobility training is helping so much.
 
@colwyn I underestimated how important is was to eat healthy and eat more.

I wasted a good year getting tiny gains because I didn't know enough about proper nutrition and bulking.
 
@cerufrost This me right now. I'm still feel like I'm force feeding myself 2000 calories when I'm used to only 1 meal per day. (not a diet thing, I just don't eat a lot)
 
@cerufrost this is me right now. I know nothing about nutrition even after doing tons of research on it. Whenever i increase my calories i just seem to be getting fat on my stomach
 
@dawn16 It sounds like you may want to take a look at what your eating in terms of macros and calories and how you exercise to see if they align with your goal.

Excess calories, insufficient strength training = optimal fat gain, some muscle gain

Excess calories, sufficient protein and fats sufficient strength training = optimal gain of muscle , some fat gain

Deficit calories, insufficient strength training = loss of fat and muscle, ie “skinny fat”

Deficit calories, sufficient protein and fats, strength training = loss of fat, optimal retaining of muscle (which is usually what people are looking for when they say they want to look “toned” and need to lose weight)

Add cardio to any of these in order to eat more calories at the same loss/gain rate, or to speed up the rate itself without eating more.
 
@ejmom3811 For me, just upping my protein to the right levels really allowed me to add weight to my lifts. It was crazy how quickly I made progress after having stagnated for a bit. I aim for about 1.6 g per kg of body weight and track calories. I don’t really bother much tracking the other macros, but I’m not doing anything like low carb or low fat.
 
@colwyn Planning each workout and recording my performance. At first, I did the thing where I just kind of wasted time and flailed around, doing whatever exercise I could remember. Now that I have things more organized (I use the Strong app now, but I was using a notebook before and that worked well too), I can be so much more efficient and effective with my workouts.
 
@swesthoelter Lol yes the first time I brought a post-it with a well thought out back workout written down with me to the gym was a game changer! Now I always plan ahead and record my workouts so I can make sure I’m not hitting the exact same moves each time. It helped a ton!
 
@swesthoelter Completely agree! At first, I was doing an upper body-lower body split, but kind of winging it each day, and doing whatever I could remember, no plan whatsoever. I follow a PPL plan now, but thinking about changing it. Do you recommend Strong app?
 
@colwyn If you’re doing mostly “traditional” exercises, yes! If you’re doing a lot more functional/complex/flow/creative stuff, it’s not quite flexible enough for tracking that well.
 
@colwyn Definitely eating protein! I jumped head first into crossfit after years of only yoga and definitely suffered my first few months because I was vegetarian and not making any kind of effort to eat enough protein
 
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