How to level up your workouts with pre-session preparation
Scott Thompson, Global Athletics Director | September 2022
An F45 workout is 45 minutes, taking up only 3% of your day. Therefore, we want to ensure our time spent in the studio is as efficient as possible. So, how do we maximize our workouts? Here are 3 things that you can do prior to your session that will result in a more effective and beneficial workout.
- Mindset: Like anything, exercise starts with your mentality. We all have days where we just do not feel like it. We might show up with a negative mindset and complete the bare minimum at the gym. Switching to a results-focused mindset during workouts can help preserve performance, especially on days that you do not feel like working out. It is important, in order to achieve sustainable success, to develop a positive mental fitness routine.
Begin with finding your key drivers, why is exercise is important to you? Maybe it is to reduce stress, feel better in front of the mirror, or to keep up with the kids. Reminding yourself of these reasons can be a key motivator in getting you to the studio on those hard days.
- Mobility & Activation: F45 provides a dynamic warm up before each session that incorporates some mobility and activation exercises to increase range of movement and promote blood flow to muscles. Increasing range of movement will allow you to dial up the level of intensity you are working at. For example, being able to do a deeper squat will recruit more muscles, meaning more calories burnt. Performing mobility and activation exercises before a workout will also significantly reduce the chance of injury as opposed to jumping into a workout from a resting state.
- Recovery: Recovery is the most important part of any fitness routine. Not only does it prevent injuries, but this is when muscle growth happens. If you are hitting the same muscle in the same way every day, there is less time for the cells to repair the muscles, resulting in less time for results of muscle growth and strength.
It is also important for injury prevention that you take plenty of time between workouts for muscles to recover. This is particularly important if you are doing the same workout in the morning and again in the afternoon. In order to see results, you should be approaching each workout with the same level of intensity. More often than not, the second session is not met with the same level of intensity due to fatigue, thus increasing your chance of injury and overtraining. We suggest you prepare a workout schedule that will ensure your body has plenty of time to recover between sessions.
Our training program at F45 intentionally alternates between cardio and resistance training workouts so that members can train every day without experiencing training fatigue. Our bodies will move and perform in different ways on different days, allowing us to be able to recover between workouts, and maintain our level of intensity from one workout to the next.