While you might not necessarily meet your significant other at the gym, with Valentine’s Day around the corner, it’s as good a time as any to highlight how important it is to train with a friend or family member to help you to achieve your training goals.
While training on your own is fine for many people, training with one other person or in a group brings with it benefits that training alone won’t. If you’re struggling a little bit to find the motivation needed for training, why not consider bringing a friend along? There are many advantages in doing so …
Accountability
Training with a friend or family member with you regularly at the gym will help you to be accountable to yourself and ensure you stay on track to reach your fitness goals.
Just having someone working out with you, even if it’s only temporary and not for every session, will ensure that you are held accountable. You can’t just skip on the last set or final km just because you’re on your own. Having someone there, even if they’re not there to push you, will help you to mentally push yourself through the final few moments to maximise those extra few reps or steps that make all the difference.
Enjoy Working Out
Humans are social creatures and many studies have shown that we need interaction with other humans as a basic necessity. As a result, working out with others won’t just help us from an accountability perspective, ensuring we finish our workout routines correctly, but also to just enjoy working out.
Pushing each other to the next level goes without saying but just socialising while working out will put a smile on your and your gym partner (or partners) faces, helping you to relax and enjoy your session more.
Increased Motivation
Working out with a partner doesn’t only bring with it accountability and socialising but it will also increase your motivation to succeed.
Whether it’s the motivation of a competitive nature, making sure you keep up with the person you’re working out with or perhaps just motivation to get out of bed or go workout straight from work – no doubt working out with someone else or in a group will increase your motivation.
Safety
While working out in a group or with someone else has fantastic benefits for driving you to workout, you can’t understate the importance of safety.
Working out with others will mean that should the worse happen and you end up with an injury, help will be at hand straight away. You don’t want to be in a situation where you are left on your own without help and need to struggle with a serious issue, having someone there will mean that in the worst-case scenario, you’ll be able to receive help almost immediately.
