After a summer of travel and holidays, now it’s time to get back into the routine of work, school and all that goes with it. Rather than worry or stress about it, we have you covered to make sure returning to the gym is a seamless transition: 

1. Training Plan – put your training plan in place. If you have missed a few weeks of training, then don’t try jump back to exactly what you were doing previously. You should aim to build up over the course of  2-3 weeks. For example, if you your goal is to train 3 times a week, then you could look at something like this: 

• Week 1 – 1 gym session and 2 x 30-minute walks 
• Week 2 – 2 gym sessions and 2 x 30-minute walks 
• Week 3 – 2 gym sessions and 3 x 30-minute walks 
• Week 4 – 3 gym sessions and 3 x 30-minute walks 

 2. Don’t go to Hard too Soon – managing your intensity levels when you start back training is important, go too hard too soon and you run the risk of injury. Reduce the weights, increase the rest, reduce the sets to manage the intensity that you are training at. Your fitness and strength will return slowly but surely, but you need to be patient. The rule of thumb for the first few sessions is to leave the gym feeling like you could have done a bit more. 

3. Warm Up – spend time and focus on effective warm up before your sessions. Making sure the body is efficiently warmed up is especially important for those first few sessions back where little muscle niggles are more likely to occur. For extra bonus points, evening stretching, hot baths and good sleep can help ensure you don’t suffer from too much muscle soreness.  

 4. Nutrition – nutrition and training go hand in hand, start to focus on your nutrition to ensure you are adequately fuelled for your session and also post workout to ensure you are recovering from the workouts. A common mistake is to try to reduce calories too much too quickly after holidays and then not be able to perform the way you want or not be able to recover from the session. Think of your nutrition like your training, improving it gradually over time. Being too restrictive too soon will result in a nutrition melt down and you run the risk of giving into nasty cravings on a calorie deficit. 

5. Hydration – Even if the sun doesn’t stick around for too much longer, it is essential that we are hydrating on a daily basis, with the benefits impacting your muscles, joints, energy, skin and even food choices. As a goal, if your fluid intake is around the 2-3lt intake you are on the right track. For extra bonus points, if you are a heavy sweater, we can add some salt to our water to replace some of what we are losing when we are sweating. 

 6. Environment – your training environment is so important to your consistency, and the more you enjoy it the more likely you are to keep it up. Where you train and who you train with can be the difference. Maybe Personal Training suits your needs, or training with a buddy or two, or maybe the group classes are more your style…Find a blend and create what works for you. 

If you would like to talk to one of our trainers today, why not drop us a line to info@theedgegym.ie or call us on 018534091.