Fitness - No more excuses

Weight loss! It’s what 99% of people are looking for when they take those brave steps into the gym and sweat it out for an hour on the cross-trainer, or when they feel inclined to go through 40 minutes of hating themselves jogging along the waterfront.

There has got to be a better and more efficient way to lose weight, right? Well, thankfully the first of this monthly series is going to focus on the reason why the majority of people who struggle to lose weight are exercising incorrectly for weight loss. It should be noted that exercise alone is not the key to weight loss. A combination of exercise, a healthy diet and behavioural changes result in successful weight control.

The most common reason or excuse today for people not exercising is that they do not have the time. Ponder this: what suits your busy schedule better – exercising 30 minutes a day or being dead 24 hours a day? The time factor is an ill perception of the requirements to lose weight.

And let’s clear up one of the biggest myths about weight loss. You may have heard that it takes hours of exercise to lose weight. This is simply not true. High-intensity (resistance training or running), short bursts of exercise (12 repetitions or up to 4 minutes) have a far greater effect on the body and can be performed over a short period of time. This is the way for 2010, with many health professionals now acknowledging the benefits of high-intensity exercise.

So why is high intensity best? For the body to adapt, we must apply a stress to it. In this case, our stress is exercise. Physical activity is often performed at relatively low intensities, eg walking. Sure, this may be burning those extra calories each day but is it making your body a better machine?

Think about a marathon runner and a 100m sprinter. Both train very differently and their bodies respond differently. A marathon runner is an energy-conserving machine. They require their body to conserve their carbohydrate stores for the possibility of high-intensity exercise. Whereas a sprinter is an energy-consuming machine due to greater muscle mass and high energy requirements.

To change our perception of the intensity of the activity, we must define the difference between the widely-used term ‘physical activity’ and the scarcely-used word ‘exercise’. Physical activity is designed to get people more active than they are in their current sedentary lifestyle. It is not structured and often occurs incidentally. Whereas exercise has a structure, a purpose and is results based.

The current government guidelines on weight loss for adults involve 30-60 minutes of continuous physical activity on most days of the week. Examples of physical activity are walking, collecting shellfish/watercress, getting off the bus earlier and walking the last few stops, and using the stairs instead of the lift. The greatest failing of this is that the intensity of the workout is set very low.

Your body will experience greater changes if you push it beyond what it’s used to. Walking and other low-intensity physical activities only burn calories. They do not provide a high enough stimulus to make your body a better machine in terms of changes to your heart and lungs. Research has shown that even in people with a history of coronary artery disease, a high-intensity interval-training programme provides far greater positive changes to heart and lung (cardio-respiratory) functions than low-intensity exercise.

Research also shows that after weight loss, most people go one of two ways. Either the weight will be regained, or they will keep the weight off and set further health and fitness goals.

Of the people who keep their weight off, 70% monitor their weight on a weekly basis, the majority follow a low-fat high-carb diet, 91% exercise and 60% utilise professional help. These are all important points when considering a successful weight-loss plan and maintaining your success. Remember to consult your registered exercise professional if you are unsure or need guidance in designing a safe and effective programme tailored to you.

Next issue, we will talk about what you can do to make your exercise sessions more effective for losing weight. We will also introduce some basic principles of training and exercise that you can apply to your own routines. This will include some basic resistance training exercises that can be performed at the gym or in the comfort of your own home, and also how to begin an interval-training session for your cardio workouts.