Even the most seasoned gym rats aren’t immune to monotony when it comes to training and diet. If you’ve been doing the same thing for months (or years), it’s time to incorporate some new strategies into your routine.
Here’s some of the latest research you can use to your advantage while you eat, train, and recover.
Strap on a nerd helmet for pain-free results. Cheap and powerful virtual reality (VR) headsets can now be used to help make exercising a less painful and more productive endeavor, according to recent research from the University of Kent in the U.K. The study showed those doing a curl and hold while wearing VR headsets displaying an image of an arm and weight had a 10% lower amount of pain compared with those without the VR experience.
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Pavel Ythjall
PLAN TO FAIL
You may be able to maximize your strength by doing as little as one set to failure of a lift once a week, says a study published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sport & Exercise. Researchers put 46 subjects on multiple training regimens, including the standard three sets of 10, three times a week, for leg curls and extensions for six weeks and found that those on the one-time-a-week-to-failure protocol gained significantly more strength compared with those on the other programs.
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Getty
EXHAUST YOUR LOAD
Utilizing a pre-exhaustion routine on a single-joint exercise (like bicep curls) before doing a multi-joint movement (like barbell rows) to maximize load and eventually hypertrophy won’t affect the muscle-activation levels, says a new meta-analysis in the Strength & Conditioning Journal. But researchers found that it is a great way to maximize your training volume.
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DIET MATTERS
This isn’t (or shouldn’t be) new news, but to back it up, a recent study in the journal Sports Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism pitted a lifting-only program versus one that combined resistance training and diet and found that, though fat mass was reduced for both, only those doing the combined effort also showed an increase in lean mass.
