Stepping up your workouts is essential to getting yourself to the next level. Breaking
through the plateau that so many of us stumble upon in our fitness journey and cannot get past.
Stepping up your workouts doesn’t always mean putting more weight on the bar of try harder
during your workout. Often it is good to switch up your workouts and the exercises you are used
to doing in order to push out of your comfort zone. Pushing yourself to do what you are
uncomfortable doing.

Something New

I always try to step up my workouts with something new. Something new will shock the
body and allow the body to adapt to it. When you get those new adaptations it might also affect
what you were doing before for the better. For example, I enjoy doing calisthenics and HIIT type
of training and a goal of mine was to be able to do more body weight dips and pull-ups. I have
never done powerlifting before but some of the other trainers at NoCo do. A few months ago I
started powerlifting. Mostly because I wanted to expand my overall fitness knowledge, but
something else came from it too. My max dips and pull-ups have doubled, maybe even tripled,
because of powerlifting, and achieving all around better fitness.

Stepping Out of Your Comfort Zone

This brings me to my next point with stepping up your workout, stepping out of your
comfort zone. Sometimes stepping up your workouts can be scary. When I was doing
powerlifting, I knew I wasn’t very strong. It was intimidating lifting with these other guys that
could lift more than twice I could but now that I have been doing it for awhile, I can actually
almost keep up, and I have confidence when doing those lifts. The main thing is doing different
things you wouldn’t normally do. Take on challenges and taking on new challenges often!
Become comfortable with being uncomfortable.

No matter what level you are at you could always escalate your workouts. Finding
something different and stepping out of your comfort zone is how to break through a plateau
and get to the next level of fitness. If you go to the gym regularly. switch it up, one day a week
join a HIIT bootcamp outside. If you run often but never go to a gym, take a risk, step out of your
comfort zone, and go to a gym and lift some weights. And always if you do not know how to take
your workouts to the next level, there are six personal trainers at NoCo Fitness that would be
ecstatic to help get you there.

By: Matthew Miller