Why Exercise Programs Fail

It happens all too often, people want to make a change to their health for the better: loose weight, tone up etc. They invest in a gym membership or some exercise equipment, get a workout from an instructor or a book or magazine, see some initial results for a month or two and then nothing. As the weeks go by and become months motivation dwindles and eventually they give up because they can’t see why they are doing it anymore thinking exercise doesn’t work for them.

The most effective way to loose weight and tone up is to build muscle. Each additional pound of muscle burns around 35 – 50 extra calories a day. Muscle takes up one third of the volume that fat does, so anyone can put on an additional 10 pounds of muscle without looking bulky, in would lead to the much sought after toned appearance at the same time as burning up to 500 extra calories a day! This approach is far more effective than doing endless hours of cardio where the body often only burns extra calories during the workout.

So what goes wrong? Basically the body adapts as it does to everything. Exercise is seen as a stress, given an appropriate application of stress, the body needs to adapt and become stronger in order to handle it in the future. Building muscle is one way in which the body becomes stronger; however it is not the only way, nor necessarily its first choice. The body can also achieve this by becoming more neurologically efficient and recruiting more of the existing muscle fibres (for most people the body will never use more than half of the existing muscle fibres present in the generation of force), or by change in technique e.g. slightly altering its position to achieve an easier line of force.

Growing muscle isn’t easy for the body, it takes a lot of energy for it to synthesise new muscle. Often a new workout can lead to growth in muscle for a limited time, after which the body still appears to get stronger as it lifts heavier weights or performs more repetitions with the same weight. However no additional muscle is built nor is any additional fat lost. After a while even the strength gains slow and stop and the famous “plateau” is hit.

The single biggest reason for this plateau effect in exercise programs is the lack of variation within the program. As stated earlier, the body adapts to everything and just changing the weight of an exercise isn’t enough. Trainers often place their clients on the same workout program for 8 – 12 weeks because they are taught to do. The idea being that you won’t see much in the way of results in less than 8 weeks. This is untrue, results can be measured on a weekly or fortnightly basis, even though the differences might be small, its better than waiting for 8 weeks to see if a program actually works. More to the point it has been clinically shown that most people get the most benefit from the same workout as far as within 4 sessions. If a trainer is using exactly the same workout beyond that they either don’t know what they are doing or are just being lazy.

Variation within a workout is not something that can be placed into a simple formula. That’s the point! If there were a pattern to it then the body would adapt to it. People often find one thing that works for them (for a time) and stick with it, however for a person with average genetics the effects will be short term. Most people need professional instruction to reach their fitness goals, unfortunately the field of personal training isn’t regulated and there are probably more poorly educated trainers than not! Personal training is also very expensive; however at Alternative Conditioning we offer an innovative, far more affordable and flexible approach to personal training.