More Exercise is Not Always Better
One of the most common things I see in the gym is people thinking doing more is always better when it comes to exercise.
The thinking is often if three sessions is good, then four must be better than five or six has got to be even better. I see so many people start in the gym with an overly ambitious training plan. Many people start up spending hours in the gym several days a week. The problem is their focus is on doing more, not on making progress. What ends up happening is, they get so burned out after a while that they give up and stop training all together.
They are then confused why it hasn't worked as they have spent hours training.
As a result, I'll often hear these things from people who haven't been able to get the results they want,
The reason for their lack of results isn't because of not doing enough work. They need to train smarter, focus on making progress and not just spending more time in the gym.
You make progress when you recover from training, not when you're training. If your training so much that you aren't able to recover from it, you won't progress with your lifts as fast as you should, and you might actually regress. When I speak to people who have made the mistake of training too much at the start, I'll often find they haven't been following a plan and all their training has been random. When you cut back on how much they're training, give them a proper program and sort out their diet, they start moving towards their goals again.
If you're struggling to lose weight, you need to look at your diet first. While being more active is obviously a good thing when it comes to losing weight, far too many people make the mistake of thinking they can out-train a poor diet by training more days. This doesn't work. 30 minutes of jogging can burn roughly 200-500 calories. Two pints of Stella has 450 calories. You can see how much easier it is to create a calorie deficit by eating less compared to just training more.
Your training plan needs to be something you realistically will be able to follow for the long term. I know someone who decided to start training. He was telling me how he lifts weights for 1.5 hours and then does 1.5 hours cardio. He said he would go to the gym 5 or 6 times a week. He was working 12 hour shifts and had young children. This wasn't ever realistic and he stopped training after one week. He would have been better off lifting weights 2 times a week, fitting in cardio when it was convenient and sorting his diet out. You can achieve a lot strength training only two days a week.
I've talked before about the importance of consistency. There's no point training for hours six times a week if you then take a four week break from training because you overdid it, or just can't go to the gym that often as life gets in the way.
Get in touch if you want a trainer to help you prevent making mistakes and write a program suited to you and you're lifestyle.
The thinking is often if three sessions is good, then four must be better than five or six has got to be even better. I see so many people start in the gym with an overly ambitious training plan. Many people start up spending hours in the gym several days a week. The problem is their focus is on doing more, not on making progress. What ends up happening is, they get so burned out after a while that they give up and stop training all together.
They are then confused why it hasn't worked as they have spent hours training.
As a result, I'll often hear these things from people who haven't been able to get the results they want,
- I've tried everything, but nothing works, no matter how hard I work.
- It's genetics. My body can't change.
- They can't lose weight no matter what they do.
The reason for their lack of results isn't because of not doing enough work. They need to train smarter, focus on making progress and not just spending more time in the gym.
You make progress when you recover from training, not when you're training. If your training so much that you aren't able to recover from it, you won't progress with your lifts as fast as you should, and you might actually regress. When I speak to people who have made the mistake of training too much at the start, I'll often find they haven't been following a plan and all their training has been random. When you cut back on how much they're training, give them a proper program and sort out their diet, they start moving towards their goals again.
If you're struggling to lose weight, you need to look at your diet first. While being more active is obviously a good thing when it comes to losing weight, far too many people make the mistake of thinking they can out-train a poor diet by training more days. This doesn't work. 30 minutes of jogging can burn roughly 200-500 calories. Two pints of Stella has 450 calories. You can see how much easier it is to create a calorie deficit by eating less compared to just training more.
Your training plan needs to be something you realistically will be able to follow for the long term. I know someone who decided to start training. He was telling me how he lifts weights for 1.5 hours and then does 1.5 hours cardio. He said he would go to the gym 5 or 6 times a week. He was working 12 hour shifts and had young children. This wasn't ever realistic and he stopped training after one week. He would have been better off lifting weights 2 times a week, fitting in cardio when it was convenient and sorting his diet out. You can achieve a lot strength training only two days a week.
I've talked before about the importance of consistency. There's no point training for hours six times a week if you then take a four week break from training because you overdid it, or just can't go to the gym that often as life gets in the way.
Get in touch if you want a trainer to help you prevent making mistakes and write a program suited to you and you're lifestyle.