Are Your Workouts As Challenging As They Should Be?

I occasionally hear complaints from people who claim to exercise regularly but see no change in their weight. The first part of my response when I hear these kinds of complaints is to remind people that weight loss is not necessarily the equivalent of being healthy. Moving, exercising, and getting active does all sorts of wonderful things for your body beyond simple cutting the L-B-S’s, and that’s why the Chris Powell Reshape the Nation program encourages so much activity. Exercise strengthens the heart, lowers cholesterol, improves flexibility, and offers enough other health benefits that I could (and probably should) write an entire fitness blog post on it. Actually, I could probably write an entire year’s worth of blog posts about how important exercise is in ways that are not directly related to looking good in a bikini, so I’m sure you’ll hear more about this topic soon enough. The point is, for now, to remind us all again that exercise does not have to equal weight loss.

The second part of my response is to suggest that, while getting active is great, as we become more active, we need to increase the strenuousness of our physical activity in order to see increased results. For example, when you start your Reshape the Nation trial you’ll see that Chris Powell structures his daily accelerators (the exercise portion of the program) in a way that necessitates increased time for improved endurance and health. Yes, for some people simply walking for a half hour every day is a dramatic improvement to their overall activity levels. But after a while, those same people might have to walk for 45 minutes, and then combine jogging with walking, and then start jogging/walking for an hour, and then jogging the entire time, and on and on and on until they’re running marathons.

So when you do exercise, make sure you’re always trying to increase your resistance, increase your time, increase the weight, etc, ensuring that as you become more physically fit you allow your body to utilize its newfound strength and energy to its fullest potential.

And as a quick afterthought to today’s nugget of fitness advice, I realize the concept of increasing the level of your workout might seem obvious. But don’t be fooled. Even I find myself in ruts where I realize I’ve been doing repetitions on the same weight level for three or four straight months when I should be increasing weights. Just like in any repetitive action, if we’re not careful, we can become complacent. Part of my job at Reshape the Nation is to remind everyone not to become complacent, myself included!

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