4 Tips To Make An Exercise Harder

If you’ve been going to the same gym long enough, you’ll start to notice an interesting trend. Some of the people perform the same exercises every single time.

I remember one guy specifically from a gym I worked at. Each morning he came in, he did incline bench press, lat pulldowns, cable curls, and finished with a walk on the treadmill. That was his routine, and he did it every single time.

The average gym goer doesn’t have a plan when they go to the gym. They perform exercises they know and are comfortable with. A plan like this doesn’t provide results and quickly produces boredom.

When you’re bored and aren’t seeing results, the odds of you continuing on your fitness program are slim. This doesn’t mean you need to change up your program every single week. But simply changing the difficulty of your exercises can provide you with enough variety to make training fun and a sufficient stimulus for better results.

With that in mind, I wanted to share 4 quick tips you can use to make an exercise harder, other than adding weight or sets/reps.

1. Change your body angle

Any exercise involving your entire body, such as a push up, will always be a fight against gravity. That’s the challenge with these types of exercises, overcoming gravity.

Once you can perform a push up correctly from the floor, all you need to do to make it harder is elevate your feet. This increases gravity’s effect making the exercise more challenging.

The same can be done for inverted rows.

2. Decrease your points of contact

Your point of contact refers to how much of your body is in contact with the ground. For example, if you are doing a plank, you will have a total of 4 points of contact (2 feet + 2 forearms = 4).

The more contact you have with the ground that easier the exercise will be because you’re more stable. As you lose stability, the difficulty is increased. Removing 1 point of contact in a plank can make the exercise feel entirely different.

Single leg plank

Single arm plank

You could do the same with the push up.

Single leg push up

3. Alter your foot position

In most standing exercises, such as the squat, your feet are positioned directly below your hips. Going along with my point from above, this is the most stable position to be in.

Simply altering your foot position to a staggered stance is an easy way to make this staple exercise harder. The reason it becomes harder is because the emphasis is now placed on one leg more than the other. The back leg becomes a kick stand, while the front leg does most of the work.

The same can be done with a Romanian deadlift.

4. Add a pause

This is one of the easiest things you can do to add difficulty because you aren’t changing the exercise itself. You’re just pausing during the middle of the lift. The reason this makes the exercise harder is because you increase the time your muscles are under tension.

Take the squat for example. At the bottom, pause and hold for 2-3 seconds, then return back to the top. You could also do this during a pull up. You would pause once you pulled yourself to the bar.

Pause here

Pause here

*****

These are just a few of the strategies you can use to make any exercise harder. Ultimately, this is necessary to continuing seeing progress. Not only that, it’s a great way to prevent boredom and enjoy your time in the gym. Be sure to incorporate these tips into your training for more challenging workouts.