It’s the second week of the Olympics, which means you’ll still be able to turn on the television or boot up a streaming device to check out persons competing at the apex of mankind’s physical abilities. They offer quite an ideal to strive for, but whether or not you want to reach professional levels in sports or simply maintain a healthy lifestyle, you can’t succeed if you’re not training in the smartest ways possible.
A new article relates some workout tips from Olympic athletes, and what you’ll find is that you don’t have to be a paragon of the human form to benefit from these. You have to learn to walk before you can run, and getting these basics down will serve you no matter the level of fitness you’re at.
How much you do in a given workout isn’t necessarily as important as how you’re doing it. If you’re lifting massive weights, you could feel good about yourself, but your muscles don’t benefit unless you’re lifting in a precise manner. You could lift those weights 100 times, but if your form becomes skewed after your tenth lift, you’re plateauing too early.
Instead, get in the habit of lifting and running and exercising in general with the proper technique always in mind. Get that down before you start increasing the weight or the reps. That way, you can be sure that your muscles are always being improved through exercise.
You also have to know when to throw in the towel or alter a workout to take into account how your body is reacting to what you’ve asked of it. One skier notes how she had to force herself to take just ten minutes of rest, tuning out everything but what she felt throughout her body. In this way, she could pinpoint injuries that may have been overlooked.
Think about how you could enact this piece of advice. There are some for whom pain becomes such a regular part of their lives that they just grow accustomed to it. But you don’t have to simply live with that pain. If you really take the time to heed your body when it’s telling you that, for instance, your right calf is sore, you’ll be able to make adjustments, rest up that injured body part, and be ready to fight the next day.
This will also allow you to accommodate unique circumstances into what could otherwise be a regimented workout. Exhaustion from days prior can serve to undermine your ability to reach a certain benchmark you usually hit easily, but that’s alright. It’s more important to rest and stick within your potential for the day than to push too hard and set yourself back even further.
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