5 Reasons Why Your Fitness Program Isn’t Working

In fact, when you study exercise science you learn about (or you should learn about) 5 principles of exercise science. These principles are: specificity (you must train in the specific way that brings about the desired results), overload (the system must be overloaded in order to supercompensate), progression (increase the stimulus as the exerciser progresses), individuality (everyone has different needs, strengths, and weaknesses), and reversibility, or use/disuse. Most people will eventually do something that violates at least one of these principles in way, or another. In fact, one of the first things that I try to do when writing workouts for someone

5. You Aren’t Working Hard Enough.

In order to get results from your workouts, you have to push your body outside of its comfort zone. That principle of overload that I mentioned earlier, that’s a way of saying that you don’t stress your body at least slightly more than what it’s used to, it will have no reason to change. I see a lot of people that will stop way short of failure all the time. They’ll perform 12 reps with a weight they can lift 20 times; because they get scared of feeling those muscles burn, or the panic as they struggle to lift the weight.

4. You’ve Been Doing the Same Workout for Too Long

Even though you do want some adaptation to your workout program, you don’t want to perform the same workout the same way, until it doesn’t work anymore. You’ll want to change your workout before it that happens, and keep that progress rolling. Most people will adapt to a workout (which by the way has nothing to do with boredom) by the time they’ve performed a workout 6-8 times, those will more experienced exercise will adapt to a program faster. Some people even workout with the same template for too long, and only change exercises, with all other variables (such as sets and reps) being the same.

3. Your Workout Doesn’t Match Your Goals.

The rep ranges to best improve strength are between 1-5 reps, build muscle are between 6-12 reps, muscular endurance, which also can help with basic fat loss for a beginner are above 12 reps. When training for fat loss or muscular endurance you want considerably shorter rest periods, than you do for strength. Are you trying to have great fat loss workouts with long rest periods? Are you trying to gain muscle by only performing high reps? Trying to get strong but never perform less than 10 reps?

2. You Don’t Pay Attention to Rest Periods.

You’ve probably heard me say this before, but rest periods matter. If you rest too long, it becomes harder to burn fat. If you don’t rest long enough, your strength levels will drop as your workout progresses. Getting the rest periods right with your muscular endurance, fat loss, and muscle building workouts can give you additional progress, even though you may have to work harder during your workouts. Getting the rest periods correct for strength workouts may allow you to have more repeated efforts with the most weight possible, before reaching failure

1. Progressive Overload.

What this means is you’re finding new ways to shake up the system with your workouts. With most people the only way to overload the system is to use more weight. But there are numerous other ways to do that.

You can also:

1. Lift slower. Most people don’t pay attention to Time under Tension or TUT. They will usually lift and lower the weight pretty fast. But actually are studies that show that this can have you burn more calories, and produce more fat burning hormones during a workout. Which is great as long as your goal isn’t maximum strength. Try this, if you normally don’t pay attention to rep speed, and your goal isn’t maximal strength (lifting as much weight as possible) try to perform your normal workout and lower the weight for at least 4 seconds during every rep, of every set.

2. Shorten your rest periods.

3. Perform more volume. Volume is basically the amount of repetitions performed. If you normally do 3 sets of 8 reps. Performing either 3 sets of 10 reps, or 4 sets of 8 reps is increasing workout volume.

4. Increase workout density. I made a video where I give great details about how increasing the density can help you make progress. Just type it in the search on this page, or I’ll send you the link. When you make your workout more dense you can either get the same amount of work done in less time, more work done in the same amount of time, or you can perform more work done in less time than normal.

5. Changing the nature of the exercise you’re performing. If you normally perform back squats, you can perform back squats with the heels elevated, perform front squats, or perform front squats with the heels elevated, or even 1-legged squats.

6. Perform the same workouts more frequently. If I work each body part every 7 days, what if now hit each body part every 5 days? Wouldn’t that also be increasing volume if you look at how many times I hit that particular body part every 30 days? This might also allow you to get stronger.