Athletes and fitness enthusiasts are always looking for a leg up when it comes to maximizing their time spent in the gym. Sometimes it just takes experience to learn the ins and outs of the gym, but in this case allow me to impart some knowledge.
Here are the Fitness Gym Hacks:
Bring a Water Source With you
Hydration is one of the most overlooked wellness measures in our culture. Our lives are so busy and full of distraction that stopping to take a sip of water can easily be forgotten mentally fit hacks. Training yourself to drink water consistently throughout the day is a tough enough habit to adopt. Forcing yourself to drink water periodically while at the gym is a good place to start.
When you go to the gym, bring a water bottle with you. Don't leave it with your coat or keys, take it around with you to each workout station you go to, this will help you to remember to drink. I recommend taking a sip or two between every workout. An even better way to force yourself to drink is to buy a nice water bottle from the store. If it is a nice bottle that you paid money for you will be much more likely to remember to take it with you wherever you go. For extra performance, fill your bottle with a BCAA powder mix for an intra-workout boost to your muscular performance.
Whether you're going for a detox workout or just trying to burn more calories, wear an extra layer of gym clothes than you would normally. Wearing an extra layer, like a sweatshirt top, sweatpants, long sleeve shirt, or a hat, can increase your body temperature while you workout. This can help you sweat more in the gym and burn more calories. If you're working out after a weekend of drinking or eating and want to clean up your system, sweating it out with an extra layer can be the best way to get your body feeling good again. Psychologically sweating more at the gym can be good too, you will feel that you worked much harder while you were there.
If you have two exercises on your list that you can do on the same machine or bench it can sometimes be best to superset these exercises so that you save time and increase the intensity of your workout. When you do a superset, you combine two different exercises that you do in succession. For example, if you were to superset bench press and pushups you would do your reps on the bench press, then right after get down on the floor and do 10 pushups. The benefits of supersets are great, you increase the intensity and effectiveness of your muscles, so your body learns to work harder and grow stronger, and it can actually save time and increase the efficiency of your work outs. If you did an entire workout of 6 different supersets, you could do 12 different exercises in about the same time it would take you to do 6. This is a great technique for those days when you have limited time in the gym, but you still want to get as good a workout as possible, just do a couple of supersets and in 30 minutes you'll feel like you just worked out for an hour.