Preparation: What You Should Be Doing Before Lifting

3 Tips to Help You Prepare for the Gym

For many of us, our training sessions are a place where we can zone out from everyday life. A place that involves commitment, discipline, and a willingness to push beyond boundaries. Before even entering the gym, we have a routine that we like to follow that ensures we'll hit the ground running as soon as we take a step inside our sanctuary. Today, I'll discuss 3 tips to help you get the most out of your workouts.

Every individual has their own particular way of preparing for the gym. Some crank up the tunes in their car to get hyped up, while others prefer peace and quiet. No matter your style, I've gathered general rules-of-thumb that I've found most people find themselves following.

Before touching a weight, try these pre-workout preparations:

1. Pre-Workout Nutrition  

2. Mental Visualization

3. Establish a Workout Plan

1. Pre-Workout Nutrition

Nutritious meals are essential to getting the most out of your time spent at the gym. Having a solid pre-workout meal consisting of an adequate amount of carbohydrates (for energy), a moderate amount of protein, and low amount of fats will help maximize your performance. Now this doesn't mean polishing off a whole bag of chips, it means giving your body rich, wholesome foods full of nutrients that will assist you in pushing weight around in the gym. Another thing to keep in mind is the timing of your meal. A pre-workout meal should ideally be consumed somewhere between 60-90 minutes beforehand, with the very least being at the 45-minute mark. Having a sufficient amount of time to digest will prevent you from experiencing any discomfort, such as gas and bloating, so you can solely concentrate on lifting weights.

2. Mental Visualization

Yes, mind over matter is indeed a thing! Before making your way into the gym, mentally picture yourself banging out repetitions on the exercises you plan on performing for that workout. Getting your mind in the game will help you wipe away any distractions you may have, and help you focus on what you came to accomplish. Just as much as lifting weights and running is physical, it also has a significant mental component as well. Convincing yourself and believing that you can lift some serious weight will give you the boost to actually make it happen. 

3. Establish a Workout Plan

Anyone who regularly goes to the gym has seen it, teenagers strolling in and hitting every machine in sight. With no plan of attack, how do you expect to get anything out of it? It's important to carefully plan and log your gym sessions because having a benchmark helps you see how for you've come, or undesirably how far you fell off. Knowing exactly what you're there to do also prevents you from wasting time thinking of what exercise to do next. Recording what exercises you do, how much weight you're using, and the number of repetitions you're performing will assist you in gauging what needs to be altered in order to improve and reach your lifting goals. Each workout, you should aim to increase either the repetitions or weight for a couple of exercises. This simple tweak overloads the muscle and forces it to grow, which is something that most of us are aiming to achieve.

There are a number of apps, online logs, and templates you can use to journal your workouts. I personally prefer to log my exercises the old-fashioned way, with a pen and paper. Below is an example of a workout plan template that you can fill out before your next training session.