6 Reasons why your fitness routine sucks

6 Reasons why your fitness routine sucks, and how to fix it - Part 2

This is the second of six articles listing some common reasons why your fitness routine is not producing the results you want, and how to fix it.

Reason #2: You always do the same thing.

If you are lucky enough to be disciplined to workout regularly, there's a good chance you do the same thing(s) over and over. It's good that you are working out, but you may be cheating yourself out on the gains you are working for. When you do the same exercises over and over, your body adapts to the challenge and you reach a plateau. The gains you saw when you first started working out slowly but surely start to disappear. You also may get bored to death and possibly quit working out all together.

We think it's good to constantly vary your fitness routine to maximize your results. We use dozens of functional, compound movements in constantly varied combinations. Our workouts change every day so your body doesn't adapt and you definitely don't get bored doing the same thing over and over.

We do not perform isolated muscle exercises in CrossFit workouts. You won't see a bicep curl or a tricep kickback, ever. We do pullups, pushups, ring dips, squats, box jumps, olympics lifts, deadlifts, overhead lifts, situps, kettlebell swings, handstands, somersaults, sprints and a slew of other exercises to work your whole body or at least multiple parts at the same time. You might say that you don't know how to do all of those exercises - I'll adress that next week in Part 3 of this series.

So, if you always seem to do the same thing every time you workout, or you've fallen into the trap of working your upper body one day, lower body another and running or doing cardio routines in between, start getting creative and mix it up a little. Take a quick peak at our What is CrossFit? Promo video to get a better idea of what I mean.

Here are a few examples of how you can mix up some common routines. Let's say you like to run 3 miles every day. Next time you run, stop every 1/2 mile and do 30 pushups and 30 squats. It's a simple change that will make your run quite a bit different. Maybe different enough that you might not finish.Instead, or in addition to adding the pushups and squats, you could mix in a 20 second all-out sprint after every 3 minutes of running.

If you spend a lot of time on a treadmill, bike or eliptical machine, you can do similar modifications to your routine by adding exercises throughout your workout. Break up those long, slow, boring cardio routines by mixing in pushups, squats, situps, sprints or whatever else you can think of to increase the intensity of your workout a little bit. You'll notice two good things happen, you won't need to spend as much time in the gym and you'll begin to see improvement in your overall fitness level.

Next week - Reason #3: You don't know what you are doing!

Find Part one of this series here 'Six reasons why your fitness routine sucks" - part 1

Bill Russell
CrossFit Cleveland - RAW Fitness, LLC
17140 Madison Avenue
Lakewood, OH 44107
216-812-7841

To get more information and watch a video to hear what our people think of our training , visit our CrossFit Cleveland website.

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