“If you are your own coach, you have an idiot both for a coach and athlete.”
Coaching yourself can be fun and liberating, but it comes with its own set of challenges.
Two of the greatest ones are:
- Laziness. Are you lifting the same weights for the same number of sets and reps as you did last month? And the month before?
- Impatience. So you saw someone lifting a lot of weight on Instagram, and you’ve decided that to get strong now, you should suddenly triple your training volume?
Mistakes such as the above are common in the self-coached lifter, and they put you at risk of not only making dismal gains but also constantly sustaining overuse injuries.
Thankfully, the solution is simple.
Plan Your Workouts Ahead
Planning your workouts ahead, even if only a few minutes before you actually start training, is the opposite of going to the gym and just winging it.
The latter can be fun and enough to give you results initially, but for most people, the fun stops when the results do.
Going to the gym without a plan or direction means you are taking a high risk of not seeing any progress. Either because you always change what you do or because you never change what you do.
When you plan your workout beforehand, you have the opportunity to consider:
- What do I need to do today to get closer to my goals?
- What is a sensible way to do that without doing too much or too little?
- How much time do I have to train, and what are my priorities today?
Planning like this greatly increases your chances of a productive workout that is in line with your goals. It helps you side-step your inner idiot and actually make some gains without getting injured.
In our workout tracker StrengthLog, planning your workouts is easy and free:
After you’ve completed and saved the workout, it disappears from your home screen.
Unless you choose to save it as a template.
Using a workout app to plan your workouts is a simple move that can have a dramatically positive return on investment.
Download StrengthLog for free with the buttons below, and start planning your workouts now!
“When you fail to plan, you plan to fail.“
Click here to read more about our workout log app.
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