Wednesday, 16 November 2011

All work and no pay


Day in and day out you have been busting your balls, sacrificing those office cupcakes, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, substituting your usual double brandy for a Castle Lite, bypassing the sweets isle in the grocery store and even spending 3 hours a day on the treadmill.  Yet come month end, you sneak into the bathroom, peer over your shoulder and jump on the scale, and that hated little indicator hasn't moved a notch.

You putting in the time, you feel like you paying the price yet you not getting the results?  So you resort to the couch with a bag of cheese curls.  High five.  Now that's taking initiative.

Firstly you need to get into the gym, because driving past it doesn't count.  Also, talking about going to the gym is like being a beauty pageant and talking about world peace.  A little less talk and a lot more action is necessary.

If you are however religiously hitting the sweat shop, on a daily basis and still not getting results. You need to reassess your workouts.  Most gym revelers are all about quantity and not quality, people tend to go into auto pilot with the backing track of some recently downloaded idols favourite, and are to busy learning the lyrics then concentrating on doing what they came to do.

Keep it fresh, provide a stimulus because the body easily adapts.  Going from the bench press to the pec dec to the treadmill, day after day, at the same intensity, your body is going to adjust.  The body recognizes exercise as a form of stress and when we stress our body the right way for too long it adapts.

Plan each workout thoroughly. Focus on what you are doing and increase the quality, push your aerobic capacity and your strength, increase the intensity, the volume and the duration of each exercise.  Brace yourself and push your boundaries all the time, every time.

Inconsistency is another ball player on the field of result-less effort.  The weekend comes and all goes out the window.  Going to the gym and then to happy hour is about as effective as eating your morning cereal with a fork.  If you want to see changes and feel changes, you need to change the way you think.  If you are going to set yourself a goal, commit to it.

Another huge mistake people tend to make in their drive to reach their goals, is in that they 'klap' the gym so hard, 3 hours a day, 7 days a week. Yet still, no results. You are doing more damage than good. Pushing yourself to that extent just results in overtraining.  Overtraining breaks you down and makes you weaker.  It is during the rest and recover periods that you are getting stronger, it is in this time that regeneration occurs.

Too much training does not allow your body the period to restore.  Overtraining results in degeneration, fatigue, lowered performance, lowered resistance to illness, mood swings, consistent muscle pain, and the list goes on.

An important note to bare in mind is that abs are made in the kitchen and not in the gym.  Its 70% diet and 30% exercise that contributes to weight.  There are a million books on weight loss, hundreds of methods and most people unfortunately try and fail with each program, and each one goes up in smoke, and then they turn to the next one. 

What they don’t realize is that yo-yo dieting causes a ‘metabolic disaster’, when cycles of weight gain and weight loss are repeated over and over, their energy burning process decreases with weight loss as the body adapts to the lower energy intake, and then when they start eating energy rich foods again they gain more weight than before.

Every time the destructive yo-yo cycle is repeated, the body’s ability to burn fat decreases until you reach a point where weight loss theoretically becomes close to impossible. 

Following a healthy eating play combined with daily exercise is the only road to success, and not just for the next 2 months but for life.

Improve your lifestyle, make the necessary changes and follow the basic rules and you too will receive a satisfying pay check at the end of the month