The Biggest Reasons You’re Not Getting Results From Your Workouts

The Basics

When it comes to working out there are a lot of nuances around getting the best results. If you don’t have all the aspects lined up, then you could just be wasting your time at the gym. So, if you want to get the best out of your workouts then you’re going to need to master these fundamentals:

• Training to Failure
• Form
• Progressive Overload
• Too Much Junk
• Periodization

You’re Not Training Hard Enough

Science has shown that in order to get the best results from your workouts, then you must be training within proximity to failure. We’re talking usually 1-4 reps from failing. However, most people do not train close to true failure.

Training even close to failure is exhausting, and sometimes scary, but necessary for progress. You’ll really have to push yourself to the max to reap the rewards of your workouts. You have to go to a place that most others won’t. Here’s it put beautifully

To get what others don’t, you must do what others won’t.

So, be honest with yourself, are you really giving your all in your workouts? Are you giving them your full attention, or do you play on your phone and work out half-assedly? Success or failure, you can only choose one.

Form

As a personal trainer, this is the #1 mistake I see people make. If I had to guess, roughly 90% of people who work out have poor form. BUT, when you’re form isn’t right you won’t get results from your workout, AND you increase your chance of injury drastically.

The point of having good form, and why it’s important, is that when you’re doing an exercise right you will stimulate your muscles to grow, burn more calories, and boost your metabolism. Also, you’ll develop that athletic look. When you’re form is bad, however, your joints will take the damage rather than your muscles. The downside to this is it stresses your body, causes injury, and will cause you to store more fat.

Every exercise has to be performed with intention. Your goal shouldn’t be to just move weight from point A to point B. You’re supposed to feel the muscles that exercise is working. For example, if you’re doing a bench press, you need to be feeling that exercise in your chest otherwise, your form isn’t right.

So if you are determined to get results, you can either:

1. Hire a personal trainer who’s educated on all the exercises
2. Spend a lot of your free time doing research.

It takes a lot of work to know whether or not you’re doing the right thing. I always recommend hiring a personal trainer because they’ve most likely spent years figuring out how to do things the right way. Even now as experienced as I am, I still have a personal trainer to keep me on the straight and narrow.

So if you’re not getting results from your workouts: I would bet my left leg your form isn’t as good as it should be.

Progressive Overload

Another thing I always see when people are working out, is they do the same exact exercises with the same exact weight, every single week. Einstein said it himself:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Progressive overload is the exact opposite principle, and to explain it we will have some story time:

In ancient Italy, there was a famous greek wrestler, named Milo. Milo was by far the strongest and most successful wrestler of his time. He had an interesting method behind how he became so strong. There was a calf born near his home, and every day Milo would carry it up the hill into town. He did this for four years, and that’s how he became so strong.

Now, as you might have figured a calf grows at a quick rate, and by the end of the four years, it was a cow. So every time Milo had to carry the calf up the hill, it would weigh more, thus causing him to become stronger.

This is the core principle of progressive overload. Progressive overload means that there is some form of progression in your workouts. Whenever you overload your muscles and push them to their limits, that’s what causes them to grow in response. There are 4 different ways you can achieve progressive overload:

• Improve Your Form
• Move More Weights (with the same quality of form as previous)
• Perform More Reps
• Progress Your Exercises (i.e. a split squat to a pistol squat)

The obvious thing that everyone should be doing is tracking their workouts, so you can see whether or not they are achieving progressive overload. Remember what Einstein said, if you’re doing the same thing in your workouts over and over, then you can’t expect to get different results.

You’re Doing Too Much Junk

Piggybacking off of periodization we’re going to talk about junk. Now, there’s two types of junk, we have:

• Junk Volume
• Junk Exercises

Junk Volume

Junk volume, put simply, means you’re doing too much for the sake of doing more. In the gym this would be you finding someone doing 10 sets of 10 on bench press, then moving on to more chest exercises.

The goal of your workouts should be to get the most out of the least. I cannot stress this concept enough, but take that person for example. There is no way that you will be able to recover from 15+ sets of any muscle group. Doing more does not mean you will get more. Instead, it’s quite the contrary, by doing tons and tons of sets you won’t recover and your muscles won’t grow as a result. You cannot just keep doing more and more, hoping for more results.

If you are one of those people doing tons and tons of sets, then I suggest you revise your workouts. The science shows that the best range of sets for one muscle group is 3-12 sets. If you’re doing more you’re probably not only wasting time, but wasting those sweet gains.

Junk Exercises

On the other hand, we have what are called junk exercises. Recently, these have become more and more common. A junk exercise is an exercise that is simply a waste of time and gives little benefit. Usually they don’t even hit the target muscle, or just do so very inefficiently. They’re silly exercises made up to make people think there’s some secret exercise that will get them ripped. Well, I’m here to tell you there isn’t.

By doing these junk exercises you take away time from what could actually be getting you results. Here I’ll list some to give an example:

• Anything on a bosu ball
• Side Bends
• Waiter’s Curl
• Plate Press
• Standing Dumbbell External Rotations
• Hack Squat Shoulder Press
• Ego Shrugs

…and the list goes on and on.

Instead, what you should be doing are the basic exercises. The most basic exercises are almost always the most effective ones as well. You should be doing exercises like:

• Rows
• Pullups
• Presses
• Deadlifts/Romanian Deadlifts
• Squats

Cut the Junk, Get the Results

So, if your workouts are full of either types of this junk, then I highly suggest you take my advice and cut it out. You’ll save yourself so much time and agony.

Periodization

Periodization is a concept that goes hand in hand with progressive overload. You see, the thing with progressive overload is that you shouldn’t always be training to absolute failure every single workout.

You have to remember, that your body is a system that adapts to what you do, and if you’re always training to failure you will reach a plateau. Your body will eventually adapt, which will make it hard to get more reps or move more weight.

Periodization is where you vary the intensity, in a way that makes sense, so that your body is always adapting. Remember if your body is adapted to what you’re doing, then you won’t get any results. You have to keep the body guessing.

You have two types of periodization you’ve got:

Linear Periodization – With linear periodization, you start with a lower level amount of intensity, and work your way up as the program progresses. This could mean you start a program and as the weeks go on you increase the number of sets, reps, or weight.

Undulating Periodization – Undulating periodization means that you vary the volume or intensity daily or weekly. So one week you may do a workout with heavy weight, and many sets, but the next week you’d choose fewer sets with many reps.

It Ain’t Easy

After going over all these reasons it can be confusing knowing where to start. So, my suggestion for you is to focus on one of these sections and take them chunk by chunk. So if you’re making a lot of these mistakes I would say just focus on one, and make that the best it can be, then move on to the next.

Getting results isn’t about being perfect, rather it’s about being better. You don’t have to eat the whole cow, instead just take a bite. Evenutally you’ll get there, and as always I know you guys can do it.

If you want to learn more on all things health and fitness check out more on our Fenix Fitness Blog.