The four day workout - Some last tips and tricks

We’ve covered a standard four day workout over the past few days. We looked at how each day’s worth of exercises is constructed and we looked at cardio options as well. So what’s left? Well, nothing except a few tips and tricks to keep you motivated and interested.

Tracking - Tracking progress is vital if you’re going to keep at this. It doesn’t have to mean a journal or anything complex like that, it can mean a simple spreadsheet where you list the exercises you do each day, the weight you use and the number of reps you plan on performing. If you want to track all this online, there are a number of sites that can help you do so, like FitDay. Personally, I think FitDay is a bit of overkill, but to each his own.

Improvement - When something becomes easy, raise the difficulty. Yes, you should constantly be challenging yourself and your body. Now that doesn’t mean you should push yourself at all times, but it does mean that you should look for gradual and steady improvement. My philosophy is to look at my workout plan each week and improve one thing. Perhaps I will raise the number of reps of pushups I do per set or maybe I’m going to increase the weight on a specific set of exercises. Whatever it is, I just choose one thing and improve it while keeping everything else constant. Next week I choose something different and so on. Slowly but surely, my entire workout gets harder, but the change is so gradual that I never notice it.

Change - When it comes to workouts, change is good. You’ll find yourself hitting plateaus or finding specific exercises that just don’t agree with you. Also, it’s nice to change things once in a while to keep yourself interested. For me, I try to change out one exercise every month and replace it with something else. Of course, you’re going to need to replace it with something that works out the same muscle group, but that’s easy to do. There are various online resources that can help you find exercises for specific areas of the body. I use EXRX and Cooper’s Guns (Cooper’s was brought to my attention by a reader here at 60 in 3 and I can’t recommend it enough, it’s a great site).  You can also ask other people at the gym for advice, you’ll find them very willing to share.

Schedule - I really recommend that you find a schedule and stick to it.  Too many people think that a four day workout means that can keep putting it off.  “I’ll just start my workout on Tuesday…” is the common line I hear.  Except they never start on Tuesday, they keep pushing it off and it never gets done.  Decide which days you will work out on and stick to that schedule.  Yes, if you happen to miss one it’s ok, you have three more days in the week to catch up, but that should be the exception, not the rule.

That’s it, all the tips I have about this specific workout.  If anyone else has anything to share about what keeps them motivated and interested, I’d love to hear about it.