100 Days of Fitness
- 100 Days of Fitness: An Introduction
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 2 - Nutrition
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 3 - Exercise
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 4 - Building a Home Gym
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 5 - Supplements
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 6 - Expectations
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 7 - Footwear
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 8 - Food Lies
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 9 - Meet the Kettlebell
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 10 - Sample Circuits
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 11 - Days vs Weeks
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 12 – The Geography of Weight Loss
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 13 - Travel Training
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 14 – Meals, Snacks, & The Pocket Workout
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 15 - What It's All About
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 16 - Endless Push-Ups & Learning the Pull-Up
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 17 – Adjustable Kettlebells + A Circuit
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 18 – Intermittent Fasting & Strength Test
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 19 – 15 Minute Workouts & A Cool Workout iPhone App + Contest
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 20 - Switching It Up
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 21 – Reflections
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 22 – A Week Without a Workout
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 23 – Why We Work Out & The 30 lbs Lost Marker
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 24 - 5 Common Home Gym Mistakes
- 100 Days of Fitness: Week 25 – Work Ethic
- 100 Days of Fitness Special: Men's Health in Movember
- 100 Days of Fitness: The Muscle Aesthetic
- 100 Days of Fitness: The Cure for Holiday Pounds
If you stick with anything long enough, it becomes routine, a word most often synonymous with boring. Tired. Sure, creating a routine can help you in many ways. Getting up on time, eating better, showing up to work without being late, taking the dog to the park. But sometimes, it does get a little too monotonous. They say variety is the spice of life and, as it turns out, it should be the spice of your workouts.
I find that when working out at home, I fall into ruts of just doing the same exercises over and over again. Never switching it up. Just plowing through the same kettlebell workout day after day. The boredom gets to me. I'm just going through the motions. While that works for eating consistently or getting to work on time, it doesn't help you build muscle or burn fat. Effective exercise requires real effort. Real intensity. When you're bored and just moving through the motions, you lack the intensity and fire to get a real workout going.
So you have to switch it up. There are quite a few ways to do this. Many of you might have gym memberships, so that's an easy one. If you go to the gym, do a home workout. If you workout at home, head to the gym. Or head to a park. Do your entire workout outside. Just switch it up to reignite the fire.
I own a variety of home workout equipment, so one easy way for me to add variety is to create workouts that focus on one group of equipment at a time. For example, for a week or so I might workout only with the kettlebell. The next week I switch to a body weight only workout. After that, sandbags, or the gym, so and so forth. You could switch it up sooner than a week, or maybe at two weeks. Whatever works for you at the time.
Similarly, if you're focused only on cardio, definitely switch over and do some resistance training. If you mostly go relatively light weight and decent reps, kick into heavy gear and do six reps of a heavy ass weight. If, like me, you never want to go running, strap on some good shoes and go tearing around the neighborhood. If you run on streets, run on the grass. You're getting the picture.
Keeping a variety of workouts at your fingertips will help you to stay motivated to keep working out and will also help keep your interest and intensity up. If doing the same thing every day works for you, hey, great. However, if you're like most of us out there and find your interest waning at times, throw a wrench into the situation and do something completely different.
My Results
Another busy week at the office and a few nights out leave me consistent at 228lbs. Obviously things have slowed and I'm not happy with it, though my work schedule has lightened considerably, which should allow me to rededicate myself to my workouts and low-carb eating to find the results I'm looking for.
