If you have taken a hiatus from your work out schedule it’s hard to get inspired to get into your workout routine again. What you need to do is make some realistic attainable “written”goals to help push you.
The main reason I say “written†is simply because if you do not write your resolutions down your resolutions are purely wishes. Studies have demonstrated over and over that writing your goals in a notebook is powerful beyond measure.
Let us look at a few examples. If you want to get back into jogging, start to walk to begin with. Depending on your level of usual fitness you can only start with fifteen or twenty minutes. If you already have a certain level of exercise begin with 30 minutes and in stages intensify it.
Once you have been walking briskly for a couple of weeks you can ease back into running by alternating walking and jogging. Walk for just ten minutes and run for five and so on. As you begin to running longer and your soreness goes away you should increase the running until you are running again for atleast 30 minutes once again.
If you have been involved in weight training in the past and have taken a hiatus of more than a couple of months it would be a good idea to slowly ease back into it.
When training with weights, if you push to do too much initially you can end up damaging supporting tendons and ligaments. The solution is definitely not to hurry in trying to try to do the same routine that you were doing but doing less sets.
What I do once I’ve had an extended time-out is to go to the fitness center and exercise on the stationary bike for 15-2o minutes to start with for a warm-up. Then, I will decide on only one paticular body part each day day to train. If you are an elderly person or have a larger frame you may want to continue this type of exercise program even after your initial break-in period.
Let’s look at training the chest for example. If I was able to bench press 300 pounds before I took a break I will begin my first work out with 135 pounds and do 3 or 4 sets of high reps in the 15-20 range. Fine-tune your weights to match your preferences. After that I will do 3 sets of flat dumbbell flyes once more with higher reps so as not to put too much stress on my tendons and ligaments.
Follow these same rules for all body parts and don’t forget to increase the weights and repetitions gradually and inside a month you’ll be right back to hard training again and moving towards your goals.