Intensity is one of several acute variables that come into play when creating your workout program. It’s one of the most important variables and it’s also one of the most overlooked when it comes to program design. Let’s take a look at the top 4 reasons why you need to start increasing your intensity immediately if you want to change your life.

4. Avoid Boredom

Doing the same workout each week will get really old, really fast. Even if you enjoy the exercises you are doing, if you aren’t adding a new level of challenge, you’ll find yourself just going through the motions instead of being present for each repetition. The solution to boredom? Crank up the intensity.

Upping your intensity will help to put a spark back into old favorites. Some easy ways to boost intensity:

• Trade out a weight training day for a bodyweight training day
• Use explosive movements such as jumping or sprinting
• Go to failure
• Perform drop sets

3. Break Through a Plateau

Most people begin a new workout, see great results, and then… nothing.

Whether you’re trying to build bigger muscles or lose more weight, hitting a plateau is a motivation killer. One of the best ways to smash through a plateau is to tweak your intensity levels. The idea is to force your body to adapt to a new level of stimuli.

That’s the thing most don’t realize: Your body is constantly striving for the norm. It adapts to resistance and stress in order to achieve homeostasis. This is why you constantly need to change up your acute variables in weight lifting. One of those variables is intensity.

Here are a few tricks of the trade:

• Decrease your resting time
• Slow down your tempo (moving through an exercise)
• Incorporate more High Intensity Interval Training into your program

2. Add a Few Years to Your Life

You know that exercise is good for you. What you may not have known is that the intensity level of your workouts may also impact your longevity.

A recent study confirmed that those subjects who engaged in workouts with higher levels of intensity were said to have a lower risk of death. How much lower?

Moderate intensity fitness enthusiasts saw a 9% reduction in mortality risk while vigorous intensity workout subjects saw a 13% decrease. It may not seem like much but considering these are months or even years of your life we’re talking about, a little is a lot.

1. See Better Results

If you want to see better, and potentially faster, results, you need to boost your intensity levels. Going along with number three, keeping your body guessing is a great thing to do. In fact, it’s exactly what you must do if you want to keep seeing improvements. Increasing your intensity will produce overall better results for a number of reasons:

No plateau

• Keep changing up your intensity and your body won’t have a chance to adjust and plateau. This means consistent results over a longer period of time.

Better for Your Goals

• Want bigger muscles? Increase the intensity. Want to burn more fat? Amplify your intensity. Above, these are quick and easy ways to alter your intensity with the benefit being in your favor.

Tell Us What You Think!

 Have you tried changing up your intensity?

What kind of results did you see?

Let us know about it in the comment section below!

Klaus Gebel, PhD, Ding Ding, PhD; Tien Chey, Emmanuel Stamatakis, PhD; Wendy J. Brown, PhD; Adrian E. Bauman, PhD. Effect of Moderate to Vigorous Physical Activity on All-Cause Mortality in Middle-aged and Older Australians. JAMA Intern Med. 2015;175(6):970-977. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2015.0541.