Are you working out for your goals?

There are so many reasons to exercise! Those reasons can be appearance related (I want huge muscles), performance related (I want to lift heavy weights), health related (I want to feel holistically well), or a combination of the three (I’m so balanced). Whatever your goals and aspirations are, you should know if your fitness routine embodies them. There are certain training regimens that will help make your fitness dreams come true more efficiently than others.

Before going into training structures one of the most important aspects of training to note is recovery. Allowing the body to rest and recover is essential to making progress. A good rule of thumb is 24-48 hours of rest for muscle groups depending on how intensely you’ve hit them.

This is because your muscles break down and tear during most exercises and they need time to rebuild. If you hit muscle groups too often your muscles can’t repair themselves, which could result in injuries, overtraining, or worst of all - limited gains.

Implementing fitness supplements can also aid in recovery and allow you to train more frequently - building muscle faster. Hilo has several gummies that help you perform during your workouts,Nitro Pump Gummies, recover after your workouts,Muscle Builder Gummies, and get you ready for your next training session,Sleep Recovery Gummies. Supplements can be an important asset in your fitness routine to get the most out of your workouts and take care of your body. 

Now… onto those workout structures. 

Increasing Muscle Size (hypertrophy)

The most common way to increase hypertrophy is lifting weights. There are different types of hypertrophy which yield different results, but we won’t go into that now. Specifically, to increase size you need to achieve both metabolic fatigue and muscle damage. 

The best way to design your workouts are to keep sets in the 3-4 range while having 8-12 repetitions. 

Pushing yourself in these sets is important, but not to the point of failure. Studies show working till failure is not the most efficient way to build muscle so calm down Hulk Hogan, work smarter not harder. 

As you progress through your fitness journey you need to also achieve steady progressive overload meaning one needs to do more work overtime - either increasing volume, intensity, or density.

Endurance 

Muscle endurance is your ability to do a movement or exercise repetitively for an extended period of time. This is all about volume. 

It could be doing bodyweight exercises for repetitions of 50 or doing lighter weights for repetitions of 15-20 with a maximum set of 3. 

Bottom line you need to do higher repetitions to build your endurance, who woulda thought?

Strength

People usually associate being big with being strong. They are similar, but necessarily the same and they take different training patterns. 

To build strength you will want even lower rep ranges than when building size and higher intensity (weight). 

A classic structure is the 5x5. Max exertion is key so giving it your all and hitting failure is what you should be aiming for. If you aren’t failing you're not getting stronger.

Working towards one rep maxes are also a great way to get stronger, but doing anymore than 6 reps in a set you will be working more towards building size than strength. It’s all about lifting as much as you can for a short period.

Losing body fat

Unfortunately drinking juice is not how you’ll lose body fat. The only way to lose weight and in turn lose body fat is to be in a caloric deficit. 

The best way to do that is to burn more calories which is easiest to do through cardio and HIIT workouts. Getting your heartrate up above 70% of your maximum heart rate (subtract your age from 220) is the sweet spot for burning fat so getting into that range and staying there is optimal.

You should incorporate your resistance training with cardio circuits if you want to maintain and condition muscle appearance and size as you cut fat levels. Rep ranges for this goal isn’t as set in stone, what’s important is burning calories so however you want to do that - do ii!