4 Tips for Improving Your Pre Workout Routine

Lifting weights is not only good for your health, but it’s an activity that many people love to do. Unfortunately, not many people know how to prepare themselves for an effective workout properly. Regardless of whether you are training for athletic function, aesthetics, general health or any other reason, improving your pre-workout routine will help you accomplish your goals easier. Check out these 4 tips for improving your pre-workout routine and improve your body more efficiently!

Get a Quality Night of Sleep

Your pre-workout routine truly starts when you head to sleep the night before training, don’t forget it!

The consensus is that you need seven or eight hours of sleep per night to recover your body and prepare for a new day adequately. If you are weight training or doing another physical exercise often, you should follow this rule as well as you can.

Not sleeping long enough will ultimately result in less muscle mass gained, less body fat lost, and worse overall health. Training hard and eating right won’t do much for your body if you aren’t sleeping long enough each night, and the effects of poor sleeping habits will eventually catch up with everyone.

Do yourself a favor and aim for sleeping 8-hours per night and your workout quality will improve each day!

Eat a Good Pre-Workout Meal

Before you even consider going to the gym, you need to fuel your body properly. Depending on your goals, your nutritional requirements will be much different than other people.

A general rule is that consuming a meal approximately 45-minutes before training is optimal to provide adequate nutrition and enough time to digest.

For those people looking to build muscle mass, your meal should contain more carbohydrates and overall calories. If you are training early in the morning, a convenient option is to make a smoothie or shake containing enough calories and nutrients for your body.

For those people looking to increase their lean muscle mass and add bulk to their body, carbohydrates are as necessary as grams of protein. Protein is a basic nutrient for everyone before training, but those looking to gain weight need more carbohydrates than others.

If you are looking to lose weight, a meal containing higher amounts of healthy dietary fats and lean protein will work better.

If you don’t eat properly before training, there is a great chance that your body will fatigue earlier than normal. Overall, your workout quality will sacrifice.

Drink Pre-Workout Product

About 15-minutes before you begin your workout is the best time to drink a pre-workout product and give yourself an extra jolt of energy. Fortunately, you can choose to drink a natural pre workout alternative instead of a synthetically produced product.

There are tons of sport nutrition companies which produce pre-workout products with synthetic stimulants and loads of other ingredients, but there are natural options which work well too.

For example, coffee and green tea can adequately provide caffeine as well as any pre-workout product, and they come without the side-effects and crash.

Beetroot juice increases nitric oxide production and improves circulation, providing the “pump” that other sport nutrition companies promise from their products.

The main goal of any pre-workout product should be to provide a jolt of energy, stimulate your circulation and blood flow, and provide additional hydration and nutrition to your body.

Choosing the best natural pre-workout alternative is one of the quickest ways to improve the quality of your daily workout!

Start Your Workout with a Proper Warm-Up

One final step to take before you workout to improve the quality of your training session is to warm-up adequately, unlike what the majority of trainees do.

Most people warm-up for their training session with a small amount of static stretching at best.

An easy rule to remember is that the main goal of any warm-up is to pump oxygen into your blood and throughout your body. For many people, walking on the treadmill for 10-minutes is more-than-enough of a workout.

For those who are looking for a more intense warmup, dynamic stretching is superior to static stretching.

Dynamic stretching typically involves moving through multiple different ranges of motion in a “dynamic” fashion, improving your movement quality and flexibility. A proper dynamic warmup doesn’t take more than 10-minutes either, and it can drastically improve your longevity.

Conclusion

A proper pre-workout routine will prepare your mind and your body, and it will drastically improve how much you get out of your training sessions. Especially for people who often feel lethargic in the weight room and routinely cut their planned training program short due to a lack of energy, reavaluating your pre-workout routine is a simple way to improve your training results.

Use the tips above, and I am confident you will quickly love your new results from training!