Why your workout isnt working
As a fitness rep at a gym I saw every year what I called “the New Year’s crowd”: a flood of people joining in January and many of those same people cancelling by mid-March. Now, as a personal trainer, I hear a lot of stories from frustrated people wondering why they haven’t lost weight even though they had been going to the gym faithfully. The fact is that many of these people end up quitting the gym and their weight loss goals not because they are lazy, or don’t have enough time or money—those are just the excuses. The real reason is that they are discouraged. Why? Because they aren’t seeing results. And why aren’t they seeing results? They have absolutely no clue how to get results. They use all the wrong or outdated methods and then wonder why they aren’t making any progress. In my experience, the top two biggest mistakes newcomers make are:
They never move off the cardio equipment. This is especially true of women, though I’ve seen some men do the same thing. Women seem to be afraid of gaining too much muscle and looking too “bulky.” They think that if they lift a single weight, they will all of a sudden look like a female body builder. Thus, they stick to their twenty minute to half hour sessions on the elliptical. If this sounds like you, let me clarify something: those women who look “bulky” spend hours in the gym conditioning their bodies to look that way. In other words, this is not going to happen by accident or overnight. Another common misconception is that you need to lose weight before you can start really working out; in other words, overweight people can’t train as hard as the people who are in shape. This isn’t true at all. Yes, you may not be able to do the same exercises or use as much weight or do as many, but no matter what fitness level you’re at, you can benefit from strength training. The reason being that muscle burns fat—even when you aren’t trying. The more muscle you have, the more fat you will burn during a workout, walking and just sitting on the couch doing nothing! In fact, you can easily burn an extra 100 calories a day just participating in your normal activities. Therefore, everyday you aren’t weight training is a day wasted, because it will result in that many calories not lost. So don’t make a rookie mistake. Hit the weights. This brings us to mistake number two:
They isolate their muscles. The majority of machines in a fitness club are machines that help you isolate your muscles. There’s the leg extension to isolate your quads, the caber curl to isolate your biceps and various abdominal machines to isolate your abs. There is nothing wrong with these machines. In fact, they do exactly what they were designed to do: isolate that certain muscle. The problem with using only these machines is that no movement in your everyday life is going to use only one muscle or one muscle group, for that matter. In order to make your body more efficient in everyday movement, you should be teaching your muscles how to work together. You can do this by doing total body exercises like dumbbell swings, pushups and burpees. As an added bonus you will be using your time more effectively, because you will be working more than one muscle at once.
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