5 Ways To Make Exercise Harder

To build muscles you need to train hard. This isn’t anything new. We all know that. What you may not know is how easy it is to make every minute of your time in the gym that much harder and more effective.

In this post I want to talk about ways to make exercise harder and smarter. This isn’t about spending more time in the gym. It’s about making the most of each workout and ensuring that you get better muscle stimulation and growth from it.

Here are 5 tips to make your workouts harder

1. Use free weights instead of machines

The reason why free weights top machines is that when you’re using a fitness machine, you don’t have to keep the weights stable. The machine does some of the work for you. Usually, the weights move along a groove, up and down or forward and backward. This makes the exercise much easier.

When you use free weights, you’re training in a free environment in which you need to stabilize the dumbbells or barbell, or whatever you’re lifting, yourself. This requires you to use more muscles and to put in more effort.

2. Do Supersets

Supersets can transform your workouts. I’m talking about a massive increase in intensity. Supersets are one of the easiest ways you can get more from each workout. Supersets are simply 2 or more exercises done one after the other during a single set with no rest in between. These 2 exercises can target the same muscle group in a different way, such as a chest press and chest flies, or, in the case of antagonistic supersets, target opposing muscles, such as tricep extensions and bicep hammer curls.

You can play around with supersets, sometimes even doing 3 exercises back-to-back. The main thing is that you’re squeezing in more work into your workout and pushing your muscles beyond their usual endurance. I will write a complete post about supersets soon.

3. Do More Big Movements

 Not all exercises are made equal. You can’t expect a bicep curl to be as hard as a split squat. One is a small movement and the other a big one. If you want to engage more muscles and make your workouts harder, I recommend focusing on exercises with big movements. These include exercises such as squats, lunges, jumping exercises, pull ups, etc. Small movement exercises include bicep curls, tricep extensions, forearm reverse curls, etc. Both type of exercises have merit, but do more big movements and you will get faster results.

4. Work the Negatives

One simple way to make any set harder is to do the releasing part of each repetition more slowly. Each rep is made up of lifting and release parts. The lifting part is the one in which you exert the most effort, but it doesn’t have to be the only one. When you release the weight, by which I mean go back to the starting point of the exercise, you also work your muscles. Most people do so too fast so their muscles hardly get any work done. If you do it slowly it’s an entirely different story.

Working the “release” is also known as Negative training. You’re using the negative movement to train your muscles. A classic example of this is to hang from a pull up bar and to go down to the outstretched position very slowly. You will not believe how hard this can be and how this can help you build big biceps (in the pull up example) and bigger muscles all over your body, in general.

5. Notch It Up

Some people work with a certain weight until they feel very comfortable with it. Only then do they try to use a heavier weight. I like to use a different approach. I call it: Notch It Up.

What I mean by notching it up is to use increasingly heavier weight, even if it’s just by a half a pound weight or less. I want you to train a little beyond your comfort zone on each workout. This will keep your muscles under the right kind of tension and will make each workout count. Try it the next time you visit the gym, keep it firmly in mind, and you will see results.

Finally, remember that working out isn’t enough to build muscles. You also need to eat correctly. If you’re having trouble with your nutrition, use some of the recipes from the Anabolic Cooking plan. I’m sure you’ll find a lot of tasty options there and they’re all designed for building muscles faster.