Are Your Gym Sessions Giving The Desired Outcomes?

Question:

"I have been visiting the fitness centre for quite a while now. I in fact want to get ripped and develop my chest and arms, but don't feel like I am making any significant progress, even though I put in plenty of effort whilst I am at the gym.  Can you recommend any specific programmes that might help?"

Answer:

Shortly after graduating as a Personal Trainer I was employed in a leisure centre. I worked there for a number of years and observed the same faces everyday. What surprised me the most was how infrequently individuals really seemed to have developed their body composition and health in that 2-year period! I would go as far as to announce that 90% or more of the individuals who worked out routinely in the health club not at any time demonstrated any decent improvements in their shape, body fat percentage or fitness!

Let me tell you at this time that the purpose of cardiovascular exercise isn't only to use up extra body fat. Weight training exercise isn't only about developing lean tissue. If you want to see sizeable advancements then you need to think about how your selection of exercises are going to Enhance your body.

Did you know that with the right types of endurance exercise you can change your body to burn surplus calories when you are not working-out? Your body actually adapts into a fat burning machine! On top of that, your weight training should change if you are hoping to develop muscle, become strong or become more dominant. The exercise programme needs to be varied because the goal is different. What's more the body turns in different ways to new work out methods.

The kicker is, there are specific training principles that should be included into any exercise schedule. Without going into excessive amounts of depth, the 6 principles are: individual requirements, progressive overload, specificity, rest and recovery, the FITT principle (frequency, intensity, time and type) and reversibility.

I don't expect you to know everything there is to know about each of them, but certified Personal Trainers will know how to mix them into a training schedule. If you don't know how to build exercise regimes using these principles in mind then your working-out is not likely to be effective.

Take 'progressive overload' and 'reversibility' as examples. Most people go into the fitness club and do the same set of exercises month in day out. But this will not encourage improvements in the body. Worse still, it won't even allow you to maintain you existing level of fitness because your body will get used to the schedule and your health will begin to drop!

I am not suggesting that everyone reading this article needs to get a Personal Trainer, but there is an element of knowledge required to build an effective work out schedule.

For further health, fitness and exercise support, please go to the Complete Health Toolkit website or check out our Kindle E-book with this link: Take Charge of Your Health, Fitness, Weight and Vitality