How to Make Your Workouts Addictive

When I was in the military we used to do a lot of circuit training. I’m sure you’ve seen it before – there are about 12 stations and you go through each station 2-3 times. A common scheme was to do each station for 60s, rest a little, go again for 45s and finish with a 30s hard effort.

You can get insanely fit doing these kinds of circuits and a lot of franchise gym models use this method – but man, it is seriously boring!!!

The first couple of times are kind of cool, you get a good sweat on and you leave feeling like you’ve done a workout. If you’re like me, after a couple of weeks you start to question if you’re getting any better at this stuff. How do I know if I’m stronger? Am I fitter? 

This way of training has a pretty short shelf life. You will likely plateau pretty quickly and it’s not possible to get very strong like this. This is aerobic training. Anything that you can repeat for a considerable amount of time is working your aerobic system far more than anything else.

These circuits are very popular and people usually see good body composition results within the first 6 weeks. After that, the majority drop off and end up back where they started.

The key to making your workouts addictive is to prioritize movement and progress within those movements. Hear me out a minute.

When you start to start to track your progress it becomes addictive. Everyone loves to make progress and we can all make improvements in our movement. It is very common to focus on getting out of breath and getting sweaty in most circuit style classes, it is pretty uncommon to focus on perfect squats and perfect push-ups.

CrossFit has been my method of training now for about 8 years. There is so much variety within the method that you always have something to improve. The idea is to be good at all areas of fitness; Cardiovascular and Respiratory endurance, Stamina, Strength, Flexibility, Power, Speed, Coordination, Agility, Balance, and Accuracy. 

To make improvements in all these areas you need to focus on the quality of your movements. If you have a better squat position you can load the bar heavier. When you load the bar heavier you get stronger and build muscle. Building muscle reduces your body fat percentage thus making you healthier (plus improving joints etc.)

Some days we train heavy, some days we train long and some days we train short and fast. Every day we track what we did in order to try to make improvements next time.

Doing anything blindly often loses its appeal pretty quickly. If your goal is to get into better shape then having a few metrics to track (deadlift weight, 1 mile run time, max pull-ups) and focussing on these will make the process much more additive and likely you will stick at it.

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