Exercising is, hands-down, one of
the best physical things you can do for your health.
Besides being beneficial for weight
management, exercise can reduce your risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes,
and depression, and it can increase your energy levels, help you think clearer,
and slow down the aging process.
Unfortunately, exercise is also one
of the first things that tends to fall by the wayside. And, even with the best
intentions and follow-through, progress can stall and intentions can go awry...
Shape magazinei
lists
eight exercise mistakes that could be keeping you from getting the full benefit
of your fitness program.
Interestingly enough, one
specific type of exercise can help you circumvent or overcome most of these
pitfalls, namely high intensity interval training—exercises in which you
go "all out" for about 30 seconds, followed by a 90-second recovery
interval.
(One session consists of eight such
intervals.) Here, I'll reveal how...
Skimping
on Sleep to Work Out Could Backfire
While I do recommend exercising
first thing in the morning, I don't advise sacrificing sleep to do so.
Fortunately, you don't have to! The research that has emerged over the
past several years clearly indicates you don't need to exercise for long
periods of time—as long as you're exercising correctly! As it turns out, the
most effective and efficient way to work out is to 'remember' your ancestral
roots, meaning, how humans used to move.
Both young children and animals
clearly demonstrate the proper way to exercise: in short but aggressive or
intense spurts with rest in between.
High intensity interval training
using an elliptical machine or stationary bike can mimic this, and a growing
body of research tells us the benefits from exercising this way are FAR greater
than slow, long-distance forms of exercise. Interval training can dramatically
improve your cardiovascular fitness and fat-burning capabilities in a fraction
of the time--because you're utilizing your body as it was designed to be used.
A high intensity interval session
only requires about 20 minutes or less, two or three times a week, opposed to
an hour or more on the treadmill, several times a week. Most people can carve
out 20 minutes without losing sleep over it. As mentioned in the featured
article, getting enough sleep is an important aspect of health, and lack
of sleep can hamper weight loss efforts and contribute to a wide range of
health problems.
Concentrating
on a Single Body Area is Counterproductive
As tempting as it may be to believe
you have to do 100 crunches a day to achieve washboard abs, the truth is that
such spot-specific focus tends to fail miserably. One of the main reasons for
this is that in order to achieve muscle definition, regardless of what area of
your body you're targeting, you need to lose fat, and spot-specific exercises
like crunches are not an efficient way to boost fat loss...
High intensity exercises can make a
dramatic difference here, because these exercises not only boost fat burning,
they also automatically help create muscle definition all over your body, while
simultaneously improving your aerobic fitness.
While I don't recommend doing just
one form of exercise, IF that's all you have time for, then doing short but
high intensity Peak Fitness exercises will give you the greatest
all-around benefits, and this form of exercise differs from others in that it
benefits your entire body. This is because high intensity exercises
sequentially recruit all the different types of muscle fibers in your body,
starting with the smaller motor units made up of slow-twitch fibers—which are
primarily aerobic in metabolism, have a lot of endurance, and recover
quickly—to the intermediate fibers; followed by the fast-twitch fibers.
The key to activating your
fast-twitch muscle fibers is intensity, or speed.
Your fast-twitch fibers are largely
glycolytic and store a lot of glucose. When these muscles are recruited, it
creates the stimulus needed to grow muscle. At the same time, it enlarges the
glucose storage reservoir in the muscle, which in turn enhances your insulin
sensitivity. I've often stated that normalizing your insulin is one of the
primary health benefits of exercise, and this is particularly true in the case
of high-intensity exercise. Conventional aerobics does not do this as
efficiently.
Activating your fast-twitch fibers
also prompts your body to create human growth hormone (HGH), also known as
"the fitness hormone," which plays an important role in slowing down
the aging process.
Jumping
on Every Fitness Fad that Comes Along May Hinder Your Progress
As mentioned by Shape Magazine,
mixing up your workout is a great way to challenge your body and keep things
interesting. But jumping on every exercise fad that comes along can be
counterproductive. You need to stick with your program to give yourself the
chance to reap the benefits from it.
That said, there's certainly nothing
wrong with trying something new. After all, exercise is part and parcel of a
healthy lifestyle, so it's a lifelong endeavor. There's plenty of time to
explore. I'm a perfect example of this myself; after 30 years of being a
dedicated long-distance runner, I stopped running over three years ago and
switched to interval training instead once I realized just how much time I was
wasting, and how many more health benefits I could reap from the switch.
Now I just do one high intensity
Peak Fitness exercise on the elliptical once a week, along with two weekly
strength training workouts. I go up to three Peak Fitness workouts a week if I
don't have access to weight equipment when I am traveling. But I pay
careful attention to my energy level during the workout and during the day. If
I notice that I don't have the energy to finish the workout or the weight I can
lift is decreasing and not increasing, I know it is time to take a break and
get some more recovery time.
Over-Exercising
Could Do More Harm than Good...
Switching from long-distance running
to high intensity Peak Exercises has saved me a TON of time while improving
my physical fitness. There's no doubt in my mind that most people are wasting
loads of precious time in the gym, or running outside, as I once was... Some
may even be doing more harm than good by exercising too much—either by
exercising too intensely, and/or too frequently.
As discussed in the featured
article, the "no pain, no gain" methodology can backfire, as can the
practice of hitting the gym twice a day... Granted, over-exercising is far less
common than not exercising enough. But it does happen, and tends to be
counterproductive in most cases—at least if you're exercising for general
health and longevity.
Part of the equation of creating optimal
fitness is recovery. Besides intensity, recovery is a key factor
of high intensity workouts. An equation to keep in mind is that as intensity
increases, frequency can be diminished. In fact, you need to allow your
body to fully recuperate in between sessions, so it's NOT recommended to do
high intensity exercises more than three times a week. Both Phil Campbell and Dr. Doug McGuff have addressed this in previous
interviews.
If you don't allow your body to
fully recuperate and rebuild, your efforts will not pay off beneficial dividends....
I made that mistake, which is why I cut back on my frequency. If you're
competing, you can certainly increase the frequency, but if you're exercising
to get healthy and live longer, then make sure to give yourself sufficient
recovery time in between sessions.
One of the keys here, as with any
exercise program and lifestyle change, is to carefully listen to your body.
With exercise you have to pay careful attention to recover if you tend to be
someone who pushes yourself hard. If you only work out occasionally, this is a
non-issue. But for those who are really committed and disciplined, it is very
easy to over train, so please understand that recovery is every bit as
important as training and if you work out too much you will not achieve the
results you're seeking.
Over-
or Underestimating Yourself Could Nullify Your Efforts
As described in the featured
article, many make the mistake of either pushing themselves too hard, or not
hard enough. Or, when it comes to strength training; using weights that are too
heavy or too light. In order to maximize your workout efforts, you need to
strive for that 'Goldilocks' Zone' where you're pushing hard enough to
challenge your body at your current level of fitness. Needless to say, this
will change over time, and that's the crux—a lot of people forget they need to continuously
up the ante as their fitness improves.
This is especially important as it
applies to high intensity exercises. To perform it correctly, you'll want to
raise your heart rate to your anaerobic threshold, and to do that, you have to
give it your all for those 20 to 30 second intervals. (As a general guideline,
you can calculate your anaerobic threshold by subtracting your age from 220.)
