Wisely choose the person next to you at the health club

When choosing a workout area in a new club, one should always consider who is always on an adjacent piece of equipment. In other words, who is on the stationery bike right next to yours? Is this person actually doing their workout or are they carrying on conversations with someone else? While social courtesies are generally good to maintain, too much talk can detract from one's workout intensity.

The same is true for cell phone usage. One should determine whether those on the exercise floor are spending more energy talking or possibly even texting than they are logging in miles on the bicycles or running around the track.  An atmosphere of this type of laxness is far different than the training areas of Olympic athletes.

It may be true that few of us are of  an Olympic caliber  such as Dara Torres or Michael Phelps. Clearly, if we were this way we would hardly be concerned with getting to the club everyday to insure that we complete an entire week's worth of training. We would be looking for ways to do better than last month's best time, which may have been a record in the first place.

When starting out and even in the early years of establishing a fitness lifestyle, we need all of the help that we can get. This is generally thought of only as coaching from a respected trainer, but it also extends to those who work out beside us. Their commitment and intensity impacts us at an unconscious level. That is,  it influences how we feel about what we are doing and thereby either makes it easier to keep coming in or nearly impossible to maintain a responsible pace.

Generally if the mood of the gym is one which is more like that of as social club than of a serious gym, we will be less inclined to go for that extra quarter mile or that one more repetition on the squat machine. Some may think that this is good, as if taking it easy were more in line with  maximizing one's longevity. But the opposite is true. The harder we work,the easier it becomes. Yesterday's plateaus soon become replaced with new levels of performance.

Choosing the right place on the gym floor will encourage this type of personal investment into your workout. Therefore you should look for this type of dedication in the others on the workout floor before deciding which piece of equipment to habitually use. Doing that gives you the greatest chance of staying at workouts, thereby inevitably exceeding your fitness expectations.