I know lots of people who do the same workout every day. They get up and do 25 pushups and situps every morning, they go for a 3km walk, they go swim their age in laps at the pool… Whatever it is, it never changes. (Except age based one… but to increase by only 1 every year is negligible…)

These people do this thinking that just by doing the volume they will increase their fitness. This is not true. Once you get to the point where your workout isn’t hard to do anymore you need to adjust the workload. I don’t know if Id even wait until it was to the point of “easy” before I ramp it up.

Without intensity volume will only take you so far. If you always do 25 pushups in the morning, it’s time to do them faster, or with a weight vest/backpack on. Anything to make them harder and challenge yourself again. Or just increase the number. Do 50 now. If you go for a 3km walk, change it to a jog, then a run. Same for the swimming, swim faster, use a more challenging stroke, jump out of the pool every so often and do some pushup, situps, burpees…

Your body adapts to the stress you put on it. If you don’t increase the stress it won’t continue to adapt. That is what people don’t realize. They see the results they got by doing X so they continue to do X and expect results to continue. Think of it like sun tanning. If you lay out in the sun for 20 minutes every day and get a bit of a tan, would you expect your tan to keep getting darker by laying the sun for 20 minutes? No, it won’t… you’ll need to lay out there for 30 minutes, an hour… It is the very same thing with exercise. You need to continually increase the intensity to continue to make gains (or losses in terms of inches and body fat…)

Intensity also goes for weight lifting, only here it’s not necessarily doing your workout faster, it’s adding more weight. If you bench press 3 sets of x at 185lbs every bench workout you can’t expect your bench press to get stronger. You need to add weight every workout (or at least strive to).

Always increase the intensity, always challenge yourself. Volume alone will only get you so far.

Chris Walls is a Personal Trainer at the newly opened Crossfit Kelowna training centre.  For more information on Crossfit, please visit http://www.crossfitkelowna.com