Ever Thought Of Not Counting The Reps?
You might get better even if you don’t count.
With what feeling do you enter the gym? Around me, I see most of the people entering the gym with the motivation of beating the rep-records of the last session.
I too didn’t find it questionable as it was the only way I knew to track my progress until one fine day, when one of my friends suggested that I should go to work out with just the feeling of getting better at what I am doing, not breaking the records. Believe me, it just changed the way I look at the workout.
Form improvement
One of the biggest improvements I saw in my workouts was that I was performing my reps with much cleaner form and a much better tempo. The mind-muscle connection, as well as the breathing pattern, just improved dramatically.
All your mental capacity gets focused on muscle contraction and hence, the quality of each rep improves.
When you count your reps and have a predetermined goal in your head, it’s much easier to cheat your form and perform the reps at a much higher rate. Which, in my opinion, is definitely going to help you beat your last record, but you may not see the result you wanted.
When you stop focusing on your rep count and give your 100 percent attention to the movement of the reps, one thing you’ll instantly notice is that you are not as strong as you thought.
Your rep count may decrease, but the quality of the reps would be much better, and hence, the tension in your muscle is still there, and if done sincerely, it may fetch you better gains than just beating your previous record.
Muscles know only tension
Your muscles don’t bother about how many reps you are hitting, it only cares about tension. If you’re hitting your muscles groups with the right amount of tension, they are bound to grow.
Time under tension is all that matters.
Counting your reps is just a way of making sure that you provide enough tension to your muscles. Things get worse when we forget about the tension and solely focus on the rep count. We cut short the range of motion, increase the tempo and forget about breathing.
Only you know how much effort you have put into your workout, no number can justify that. If you can put your muscles under tension for a longer time than you can achieve by reaching a target, great, you have put more effort than the numbers could have justified.
In fitness, a target isn’t chosen to be reached, a target is a range where you need to fail.
You can always get back to counting your reps when you’ve perfected the right form and technique to perform a particular exercise. But while counting your reps you won’t be able to master the technique. It will be very difficult to maintain the right tempo, the right form, and breathing pattern while counting.
Takeaway
To reap the real benefits of fitness, treat it as a practice and not a goal.
Exercise only for the pleasure of doing it, fitness will follow. Concentrate on the journey, appreciate the journey, no matter if you didn’t hit the mark you have set before entering the gym, you have hit your muscles hard; you know you can’t do better than that today, that’s enough for the buildup.
Despite achieving a much lesser total volume in your workout you may feel that you have got a much better workout and pump because of the improvement in the quality of your workout.
I hope you found it useful and enjoyed reading it. Thanks for reading!!
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