50 Basics of Fitness Trainings

By Spartan Health and Fitness

Whether you've just started training for the first time in your life or you've been doing it for years, below are fifty simple fitness rules that will each play a very important part to drastically improve your state of health and fitness. If you can apply all 50 of these important tips you'll see how your body transforms into a lean and very strong machine.

1. Log Your Workouts. Tracking your workouts is essential if you want to truly judge if you're making any progress.

2. Mobility Drills are important. You need to take extra care to ensure that your muscles and your joints always work fluently through full range of movement. Doing daily mobility drills like stretches will help to keep your body working just as it was intended to.

3. Intermittent Fasting will help to keep your body's own natural growth hormone a lot more active for longer, it'll also offset the ageing process, helping to keep you lean.

4. Eat accordingly because our daily lives fluctuate from day to day. We rarely expend the same amount of energy every day. If you train on Monday and do nothing on Tuesday, you're going to require more fuel on Monday than you do on the Tuesday.

5. Ice Baths. Hitting the plunge pool or taking an ice bath after training can significantly speed up your recovery process. It's agony, but it works.

6. Progression. Building muscle is about progressive overload, don't get caught doing exactly the same workout over an over again. Always add an extra rep or an extra pound.

7. Learn to time your workouts correctly. Experiment what works best for you to get the best from your training sessions. Everyone is different, so you may find you simply don't have the same kind of output training in the evening compared to the morning, or vice versa. Experiment to see what works best.

8. Use BCAA to preserve muscle mass. BCAA's prevent catabolism.

9. Train Your Legs. Don't get caught into every day being your upper body day but never training lower body. It'll effect your balanced physique, aesthetically and functionally. Training your legs will also raise your testosterone and your growth hormone production making your whole body a lot more anabolic.

10. Train Your Glutes. Your glutes are your athletic performance. Use weighted lunges, hip extensions and deadlifts to help develop a perfect butt.

11. Train Your Calves.

12. Talk To Experts. Guessing what, how and when to train will only lead to poor results and a lot of wasted time.

13. Get Your Mind Right. A study once showed that 13% of gains got from doing a workout result from simply performing the movement mentally first. Get your mind into your training and teach yourself to focus.

14. Avoid Crash Diets. Crash diets only lead to muscle loss. Avoid crash diets at all costs, just focus on healthy eating.

15. Drop Your Ego. Nobody actually cares how much weight you can lift. If you can't bench, deadlift or squat with immaculate technique, you should drop down a weight and learn to develop authentic strength.

16. Get Outside. You don't have to only train in the gym. There are always plenty of opportunities to train in the fresh air. Sprints, TRX workouts and circuits all provide you with a good opportunity to go train at your local park to enjoy the fresh air.

17. Have A Mantra. Tough times need a good mantra to get yourself through. "You Never Know Your Limits Until You Push Through Them".

18. Dress to Impress. Everyone is different but dressing well when you train could increase your motivation and be used as an intrinsic motivator.

19. Don't Look for Shortcuts. Stop looking for the perfect physique in a pill box, these things don't happen. Effort and reward, if it was easy to get strong, fit and healthy, everyone would be that way.

20. Train In Phases. Your body is able to adapt to any type of training in four to six weeks, halting your progress. If you switch your stimulus by training in 6 week phases you could switch from a hypertrophy phase to a muscular endurance phase, then a fat-loss phase. Planning your training for 24 weeks in advance switching up to a new phase of training after six weeks is key.

21. Get Over Setbacks Quickly. Setbacks in life are common place. Your most common exercise setbacks will typically be an injury or an illness. When something happens you'll need to rest up and recover, when you feel like you're can then train again, you should return with vigor.

22. Oil The Machine. That means your muscles, your joints and your tendons need repair. From using a foam roller, getting a massage, using a cold shower with saunas for both hot and cold therapy and get enough sleep.

23. Basic Supplementation. Take a multivitamin plus a multi-mineral supplement for optimal health.

24. Cultivate Your Environment. Plan ahead and journalize.

25. It's You vs You. Everyone has their own specific genetic make-up, their own demons and goals. You just need to concentrate on being better today than you were yesterday.

26. Be A Mentor. If you remember when you were young and just starting out, you'll remember what it was like before you started in fitness. The experience you have accumulated over time may seem unimportant to you, but it represents precious small nuggets for someone that is starting out. You should make yourself available to those who need encouragement, help or guidance.

27. Don't Get Boring. Sure, it's good being the most muscular person in the gym or having a totally ripped to shreds physique. But never get obsessed by it all. There's a big difference being dedicated and being obsessed.

28. Never Hold Back. Your personal fitness goals are yours, if you make decisions that get you the kind of health and/or muscles you want then you'll know that those are tough decisions that need to be made.

29. Get Compound. Compound movements have proven themselves. Don't get caught into the latest craze. No point in substituting a tried and tested compound movements because of some new isolation technique or some new exercise craze.

30. Avoid Overtraining. Overtraining happens when you're training too hard or too frequently, don't get enough rest.

31. Get Tested. Statistics like your body composition and your hormone analysis or your food intolerances and your metabolic gas exchange test; all these stats are aids to your training efforts.

32. Get A Training Partner. A training partner is more than just a spotter, they keep you motivated and you help each other.

33. Don't let a permanent relationship ruin your fitness goals. There is a curious phenomenon in the fitness industry: when most men are in a long-term relationship, they eventually let their training, their physique and their diet go to ruin.

34. Avoid Ab Obsession. Training your abs for hours never helped anyone. If you're determined to carry a set of rippling six pack, then it's about having a body-fat of 10% or less. Spending time training your abs is a waste unless you're eating correctly. Work your abs as often as you would train any other body part; no more, no less.

35. High Intensity Cardio. Cardio comes in low intensity and high intensity, if your objective is fat-loss then doing high intensity cardio like sprints and/or tabata drills will help to spike your metabolism.

36. Low Intensity Cardio. Low intensity cardio is when you're training with a heart rate of between 105-120 BPM. You won't burn as many calories, but you will burn a much higher proportion from fat. Low intensity is just a great tool to lose fat because it won't affect your recovery from your other training.

37. Sport Specific Training. The science of fitness has come a long way in the last 30 years. If you compete in any sport at any level, you'll be able to vastly increase your ability to perform when you train specifically for it.

38. Acknowledge Age. As the years pass our ability to recover from workouts slows down.

39. Experiment. Nothing wrong in changing your training stimulus to try something new to see what works best for your body. For example, new methods like 5 X 5 strong-lifts, German Volume Training, HST, or the 5-day split, all respond best to jogging, walking or sprinting or walking to get lean.

40. Train On Empty Stomach. It sounds a bit counter intuitive, but the truth is that when you can train with no food in your gut to turn into energy, your body burns its own fat cells for energy.

41. Range Of Motion. Always aim to use full range of movement on every exercise you perform. It allows more of your muscle fiber to be stimulated, improving muscle growth.

42. Hydration. Vitally important when reaching for any fitness goal. How much water you drink will seriously affect your exercise performance, your mood and ability to solve a problem.

43. Stop The Weight Worry. Unless you're a competitive boxer, what the set of scales say shouldn't really matter.

44. Prepare For Running. Whether you really want to be a runner or not doesn't really matter. If you train your quads, your glutes, hamstrings and your core you'll be stronger for anything.

45. Visualize. Visualization is a powerful thing, it's an important technique to master to get more inspiration.

46. Keep Nutrition Simple. Good nutrition is not complicated. The closest you'll be able to get your food to the way it occurs naturally the better. Keep your protein high with low glycemic index carbs, with plenty of unsaturated fats plus as many leafy greens as you can.

47. Take one week off. Sometimes it's best for your body to simply do nothing at all. After a really tough six-week training phase, it's always good idea to take a week off training, allowing your body to fully repair.

48. Pre & Post Workout Nutrition. Your pre and post workout meals will be the most important meals in the day.

49. Have A Plan. You need a plan. You should know what exercises you're going to do, how many sets and reps you are aiming for. Without this you're wasting your time. The same should apply to your nutrition: you need to know how many calories you need.

50. Consistency Triumphs. The people who succeed in fitness are those who keep it simple and remain consistent.

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