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Gym Tips

Stress

Stress is bad for your workout. Emotional upset releases a hormone called cortisol, “and cortisol is not a friend of the lifter,” says Dave Pearson, an exercise scientist at Ball State University. Cortisol helps your body relieve stress, but it also suppresses testosterone. Lower testosterone means less results from your workout.

Moreover, stress causes most men to tense the muscles in their upper backs, says James Annesi, an exercise psychologist in Atlanta and author of Enhancing Exercise Motivation. A tense muscle is easily injured. One way to help avoid injury is to relax before you work out. When you arrive at the gym, take a few deep breaths, allowing maximum air into your lungs.

Then shrug your shoulders as high as you can, hold for a few seconds, and very slowly lower them as you continue to breathe deeply. Continue tensing and relaxing other muscles — chest, shoulders, back — until you feel less stressed. Then you’re ready.

Unable To Focus

Often the success or failure of a workout depends on how well you do on one or two sets when you’re trying to lift more than you have before. This requires not only strength, but also single-minded focus. Unfortunately, with all the distractions usually found at a gym — loud music, crowds — it can be hard to concentrate at times.

To help in improve your level of concentration, Tom Seabourne, a sports psychologist in Mount Pleasant, Texas, recommends having a ritual before you begin a set. Go through the same sequence every time: how you set your hands, how you place your feet, how you square your shoulders and align your head. Follow this ritual with two deep breaths. Now you’re ready to work out.

Sickness

But you don’t know it yet. Often, a terrible workout is the first sign you’re coming down with something, says physician Scott Reale, a sports-medicine specialist in Manhattan, New York. One indication that you may be sick: You do one good set of an exercise and then can’t come close to repeating it.

This could mean your energy reserves are being redeployed by your immune system to battle the illness. You can’t do much about an illness once you’re sick, except leave the gym and give your body time to recover. But your body may have sent you some signals that you ignored. Fatigue, malaise, and joint or muscle pain that seem to come from nowhere — you haven’t done anything that would leave you tired or injured — are often the first signs of illness, Dr. Reale says.

Increase Your Workout

So let’s say you’re not sick, stressed, overexercised, underfed, or dehydrated. And yet you still have a bad workout. Could be that you’re under training — not exercising enough for the benefits you expect. If you work out hard, the immediate effect is that your body is broken down and weak. But within a few days, your body has recovered and is actually stronger than it was before your hard workout. It may hold these new powers for a day or two, but then your strength starts to slip.

Wait long enough between workouts and you could easily get weaker instead of stronger. You won’t notice this problem as a huge dropoff from one workout to the next. Most likely, you’ll just feel as if you’re not making any progress. You have two options. Either work out harder, or work out more frequently.

A few guidelines:

1. Train two or three times a week if you’re doing total-body workouts, three or four times a week if you’re doing split routines (lifting with your upper body one workout, lower body the next, for example).

2. Increase weights five to 10 percent per week. When you can’t do this anymore, you’ve peaked on the exercises you’re doing and need to change to new ones.

3. After six to eight workouts using one system of sets and repetitions, switch to another. Doing the same exercises the same way for more than a few weeks guarantees that you’ll be referring to this article often.