In your fitness journey, you may eventually hit a wall at some point and feel like you’ve plateaued. Perhaps your routine has become boring to you, or you’ve started to notice that you aren’t breaking as much of a sweat as you used to.
If your routine has become easy for you, that’s a definite sign you’ve made some progress since you started. Your body has gotten stronger and more capable. Now it’s time to move on and incorporate new activities or more challenging exercises into your routine. You can focus on other muscle groups, for instance, or find ways to level up the difficulty of your current routine. In this way, you can break the monotony and continue to challenge yourself.
Here are some ideas you may want to consider trying.
- Add Abdominal Workouts To Your Routine
Some people may not pay much attention to their abdominal muscles when exercising, since their main goal may be to lose weight. Because they skip out on abdominal exercises, they might not be as toned in that area as they could be. If you fall under that category and ab workouts aren’t part of your fitness routine, perhaps consider doing some stomach toning workouts at home. In addition to having something new in your routine, you could also enjoy the benefits that come with these workouts. These include the following:
- Toned Abs
Many people consider toned abs to be an attractive feature. With that said, toning your abs may help you feel more confident in your body. You don’t need a six-pack to be able to attain this confidence; just trimming the excess fat around your stomach area will be improvement enough.
- Improved Sports Performance
If you play sports, ab workouts will definitely give you an advantage. Working on your abs will allow you to have a stronger and more stable core, and with a stabilized core, you will be able to control your body movement more skillfully and move with more force.
- Improved Posture And Stability
Ab workouts help improve balance, stability, and posture. As people age, their posture could change, and ab workouts can aid in maintaining the proper one. A good ab workout will strengthen the muscles around the spine, which in turn will distribute weight correctly within the body.
- Work Out With A Partner
With a partner, you can push yourself a bit harder than you typically would if you were working out alone. While working out on your own may have given you excellent results so far, working out with a partner could help you improve and attain higher goals. You can benefit from their feedback and coaching, and help them reach their goal as well.
If you can’t meet with your workout partner due to COVID-19 restrictions or if you live too far away from each other, you could still do home workouts together through online teleconferencing platforms and video calls. If you’d like to try something new, you could even sign up for online workout classes together.
- Try High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)
HIIT is considered by some to be a convenient way of improving fitness. It promises the best workout in the least amount of time, as it requires you to perform intense exercises in short bursts. You get to rest between sets, of course, but only for several seconds.
With HIIT, you’ll continue to burn calories even after the workout. It increases your metabolic rate, so even after you’ve already stretched and showered, your calories will slowly continue to burn.
Adding HIIT workouts to your routine will surely elevate it. Not only will it make you more competitive, but it will also help you have better endurance as well.
- Do Plyometric Exercises
Plyometric training essentially involves adding jumping elements to movements. For example, instead of doing regular exercises, consider going with jumping squats or clapping push-ups. With the explosive movements involved in plyometrics, your heart rate will go up, and you will burn calories faster. This will modify your workout’s speed, power, and performance, and thus give you more of a challenge than conventional exercises.
Conclusion
While exercising may be fun and often challenging, doing the same things repeatedly may cause overfamiliarity and loss of motivation. To avoid this, it’s essential to make changes in your fitness routine every now and then to keep it exciting. You may find that the tips mentioned above are a great place to begin. Although it may require more effort and energy to perform, they’re definitely well worth trying.
