4 ways to intensify your workouts (without buying new weights) 4 ways to intensify your workouts (without buying new weights)
Centr Team
27 Nov 2019
It’s a fact of life: if you’re training hard and making progress, all the things that used to be a challenge become much easier. Obviously, it’s a huge confidence boost to be smashing goals and doing moves that used to be impossible – especially if you’re a sit thru master now.
The problem is, without a challenge, your body isn’t working hard enough to keep getting fitness results. You can start to lose momentum.
If you’re lifting weights, progressing an exercise is much easier: you just increase weight. But you can also ‘progress’ other exercises that are performed without free weights or cable machines.
If you’re not feeling the burn anymore or cardio has become a breeze, here are four ways to pump up your workouts so you start seeing results again.
1. Change up the tempo
If you’ve ever tried to push out as many rounds as you can of an exercise in a given amount of time, you’ll know that it can blast the intensity of a session.
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Try pumping more energy and speed into Ashley's HIIT sessions.
Playing around with the tempo of timed exercises, such as in Ashley’s interval workouts, forces the muscles and cardiovascular system to adapt to a new speed of movement to give you an extra challenge. Speeding up a movement will force your body to pump faster and complete more reps than usual. Slowing down an exercise (especially a resistance exercise) will require your muscles to be under force for longer and call upon all fibers to complete a movement.
2. Increase the range of motion
How low is your squat? Does your chest come all the way to the ground in a push-up? How high are your kicks?
Challenging your current exercises by increasing their range of motion will force your body to switch on the full length of each muscle involved in a movement. Trust us, you will probably feel it the next day – in a good way, of course. If you’re worried about injury, practice the form of the increased range of motion slowly at first, then speed it up.
3. Add an unstable surface
So you’ve mastered all the movements in your Centr workouts? Good, now you’re going to challenge those movements by adding an unstable surface, switching on supporting muscles and increasing the intensity of the workout.
Try holding a plank with one leg raised or complete your push-ups with one hand on a medicine ball. You could also try squatting on one leg or completing a bench press on an exercise ball rather than a bench.
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Get a little bit airborne with some explosive Da Rulk moves.
4. Blow it up
Plyometric exercises are explosive in nature, increasing the speed and power of a movement, usually by adding a jump. It uses maximal effort and force from the muscles in short bursts and will blow up your training session. It’s not for the faint-hearted.
If your regular squats just aren’t cutting it anymore and are starting to feel easy, take the challenge and turn them into squat jumps or make them more like Da Rulk’s switches (which will also increase mobility).
