How Often Do You Challenge Your Body?

How To Challenge Your Body

In order to improve we need to challenge ourselves. Having challenges involves setting new goals or changing our old goals so that we always have more to do. But how often do you challenge your body? How often should you challenge yourself? How do you determine challenge?

How often we challenge ourselves should depend on how great a challenge we set for ourselves. Pushing ourselves a little bit every day can be good, and so can pushing yourself to the max from time to time. But, if you push yourself to your limits every day, you might not be giving your body enough time to recover.

Challenging Your Muscles

This is especially true for weight lifting and resistance training. When we use our muscles, acids can build up in our blood, which leads to that burning feeling. Muscle fibers can also undergo wear and tear. Both of these things are healthy and normal parts of exercising. But if we don’t give our blood time to flush out that waste, or our muscles enough time to repair those fibers, we can harm our bodies.

The American College of Sports Medicine advises against working out the same muscle group more than 3 times per week for beginners, 4 times per week for intermediate athletes, and 6 times per week for advanced athletes.

While you shouldn’t challenge the same muscle group every day, you can still challenge your body every day by only working out one or two muscle groups each day and alternating days for each exercise.

Free Report: 6 of the Best Exercises for Fat Loss

The ‘1 Rep Maximum’

The ACSM also has recommendations for how to challenge yourself. With a partner, a coach, or a spotter, find a weight or resistance that only allows you to successfully complete an exercise once. This establishes your ‘1 Rep Maximum.’ As a beginner, you should be lifting no more than 75-80% of your 1 Rep Max, though advanced athletes may go for as much as 80-100%.

Challenging Your Heart

Your biceps aren’t everything anyway. To be completely healthy you also need to exercise muscles that people don’t see like your heart. The American Heart Association recommends half an hour of intermediate cardio 5 days per week, or half that much time if you’re doing rigorous exercise, which is discussed below.

Unlike with weight lifting and resistance training, there doesn’t seem to be a point of diminishing returns on aerobic exercise. The National Heart Lung and Blood Institute recommends that to really challenge your body you can do as much as 300 minutes (5 hours) of aerobic exercise per week.  But they also say that “the more active you are the more you will benefit” without placing an upper limit on that claim.

Is It Really A Challenge?

Just like with other muscle groups, there are actually ways to quantify whether or not you’re being challenged. Most of these recommendations involve percentages of your estimated maximum heart rate. Most of us shouldn’t be going above 80% of our maximum heart rate. This is estimated by subtracting your age from 220.

So, if you are 30 years old, your maximum heart rate is probably around 190, so you shouldn’t be doing anything that brings your heart rate above around 150.

In order to challenge yourself and get the benefit of exercise, however, you should probably be going above or around 60% of your estimated maximum heart rate. For that same 30-year-old person that would be around 114, or roughly twice the average resting heart rate.

There are easier metrics though. If you can sing a song while exercising, you’re probably doing intermediate difficulty or less. If you have trouble talking while exercising, you’re probably doing more rigorous exercise.

Free Report: 6 Best Exercises To Challenge Your Body

High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) and the Tabata Exercise System are excellent ways to lose fat and challenge your body. At first, your work sets will be shorter and your rest sets will be longer, but that will change as you improve your fitness level. Take your time, explore different exercises, and have fun with a new workout method.

To learn more about the best exercises to challenge your body, download my free report 6 of The Best Types of Exercise for Fat Loss.