Stop The Insanity!
You SHOULD be confused....
...if you've exercised in a program that preaches high heart rate, always doing high-intensity interval training, and/or tons of reps when lifting “weights” (three-pound pink dumbbells don’t really qualify as weights for most people)....
....and start to feel worse instead of better.
The Right Dose Of Exercise
Tune out the Jillian Michaels-type trainers who always push going harder--you know the old, "If I can still walk out the door, I didn't work hard enough" mentality.
The best results come from finding the balance between not enough exercise and too much.
Nothing discourages a new exerciser more than starting too hard and fast and overdoing it.
No matter what your fitness level is, over-training won't deliver faster and better results. It leads to injury and/or burnout.
So, how much exercise is enough?
We all know that we don’t exercise enough as a population.
Going from nothing to something is, well, something. If you haven’t exercised in 20 years and you decide to dust off the old workout shoes, just going through the motions and perfecting your form 3 times per week is a GREAT start!
You simply don’t need to do insane workout DVDs or go to extreme boot camp classes.
Getting your butt kicked doesn’t mean you’re getting a good workout.
breaking muscle
Consider this....
A 2009 study had sedentary, overweight, postmenopausal women increase their amount and intensity of daily exercise: “…we observed no difference in the actual and predicted weight loss with 4 and 8 KKW of exercise (72 and 136 minutes respectively), while the 12 KKW (194 minutes) produced only about half of the predicted weight loss.”
Exceeding the minimum effective dosage does NOT deliver greater results.
By the way, 72 minutes is too long to work out for most people. Studying exercise in a laboratory is different from analyzing workouts that are crowded in between shuttling kids around, working, making dinners, and having a life.
Most people only need about 30 minutes of intense exercise to get great results.
Tim Ferriss writes in The 4-Hour Body that “More is not better. Indeed, your greatest challenge will be resisting the temptation to do more.”
If you blast out of the gate at top speed with an intensity you can’t possibly sustain, you will burn out and likely give up.
What you do consistently is more important than what you do every once in a while.
One of my clients is looking at getting an exercise bike and jokingly messaged me, "I figure I'll ride about 100 miles a week."
I responded, "How about 20-30 minutes 2-3 times a week?" 😉
Remember, Rome wasn't built in a day--it was built one brick at a time!