How to Improve your Fitness Results in Half the Time

Busy professionals and entrepreneurs are always looking for the best way to capitalise on leads and stream line systems to improve efficiency, resulting in a better bottom line. So why don't the same people approach their health and fitness the same way? Here are five tips on how to maximise your workouts to get you result in half the time.

1. Change it Up - You need to keep the body guessing! You should aim to constantly vary your workouts. Our bodies can adapt relatively quickly to the stresses placed on it during exercise. Once your body understands how to handle a particular exercise it goes into auto pilot and can be quite hard to improve. For example if you're an 800m runner you wouldn't just run 800m as fast as you could all day. You aren't going to improve. Instead you vary your training. Working on starting position, speed drills as well as strength and conditioning in the gym. Your training should be the same, varied exercise types compliment each other resulting in faster improvement.
2. Move Everything - The fastest route to improved health and fitness is simple, move more. A lot of 1970's bodybuilding techniques have been practiced over the years, we all know them. These are the "fancy" machines you see in the gym allowing you to isolate muscle groups to help sculpt the perfect body! That's bullshit. Unless you want to be Arnie then by all means go for it! The best way to get fit quick is it use exercises that use as many body parts and joints as possible. Instead of using the chest press machine that only taxes your chest, do push ups/ knee push ups. Push ups engage your shoulders, chest, arms core and hip resulting in more calories being burnt. Exercises like squats, deadlifts and burpees are great. This is the quickest way to drop weight, compound movements recruit as many joints and muscles as possible.
3. Intensity - Would you rather spend an hour jogging on the treadmill or 30mins of box jumps, kettlebell swings, rowing and bear crawls. You can get way more bang for your buck with higher intensity workouts. Here's how, it is super simple! Pick a few exercises and set your self a time frame (ie 10mins, the duration determines your intensity level). You need to pick an intensity level that you can sustain for the duration of the workout, i.e. longer workout, lower intensity and vice versa. For example a quick workout could be combining Box jumps, kettlebell swings, bear crawls and sled drags. 10 reps of the box jumps and kettlebell swings, 15m bear crawl and sled drag. It's that simple! You can get creative to help you stay engaged with your workouts, alleviating boredom and burnout.