Do Your Workouts Work?
If they don’t, change them. If they do keep them. But first ask yourself:
Am I getting a pump in my workouts? YES
Do I feel tired a lot? NO
Am I getting stronger? YES
Do I feel like I’m growing? YES
Do I enjoy my workouts? YES
Do I feel good from training? YES
Do I feel tired after training? NO
Do I get enough sleep? YES
Do I yawn a lot during the day? NO
Am I calm most of the time? YES
Do I fall asleep easily? YES
Can I relax at will? YES
Get answers like these and your workouts are working, and you are doing things correctly. Let’s look at each one:
It’s important to get a pump on every exercise. Do reps slowly (slower on the negative) with rhythm and stretch the body part you’re working between sets. You should have a good pump after two or three sets of each exercise.
You can feel tired from training and when you do it’s important to rest. Sleep or meditate. The fact is meditation is two times more restorative than sleep. I find myself sleeping less (5 hours a night) and meditating more (1 to 2 hours a day) as I ripen with age. But over time as you train and get in better shape, doing endurance work as well as weight training, you will feel more energetic. I notice this as I’ve worked up to 30 minutes of stationary bike 3 or 4 week.
A big issue in bodybuilding is overtraining, many people do it. The only time you should overtrain is in preparing for a contest. As your workouts intensify the last month prior you work yourself into a state of overtraining 6 days before. And then you rest and rebound from it in fantastic shape.
The key to making workouts work is balance. You have to train hard enough to elicit a little soreness the next day in the body parts worked. If you do too much you may get sore two days after your workout because it takes longer to heal. I stretch a lot when I’m sore.
When my training is going well, I feel growth and I’m getting stronger. And this makes me happy, and I enjoy my workouts even more because they are working.
I feel exhilarated after a workout and later that evening start getting sleep so that by 11 pm I’m ready for sleep. Some aminos (especially tryptophan and arginine) with a piece of fruit and in a half hour I’m drifting off into deep dreamlike sleep. No need to yawn the next day after deep restful sleep because I’m totally relaxed and calm as I carry on.
But how do you know if you are making gains? What is the best method of determining your progress? Aside from evaluation from an expert, the best way is to study your image in photos. Looking in a mirror is too subjective, although you can develop a more objective attitude with mirror gazing. The best way to do this is to regard your image in the mirror as ‘the body’, don’t consider it as all there is to you, look objectively and as if separate from it. Work on it as if sculpting a living stature because that’s what you are really doing.
If you give the answers to the questions above, you should see a difference in your image as captured in photographs. This happens gradually over time and it’s important to keep a record of it if you really want to make continued progress in your development.
