Effective Exercise Simplified

Articles

Feb 8

EFFECTIVE EXERCISE (IN A NUTSHELL)

Exercise isn’t complicated, it’s actually pretty straight-forward when you strip away all the hype, myths, and fancy gadgets and get back to the basics.

If you want results you have overload (stress) your body and if you want to continue to see results you need to increase the difficulty level as your body adapts and becomes fitter (more efficient).

And that’s pretty much it, simple right?

It's simple in theory. The difficult part actually exercising effectively is the ability to constantly challenge yourself and push your limits.

THANK YOUR GENETICS

From an evolutionary point of view our bodies are genetically designed to conserve energy, which was great back in the day when there was an abundance of sabre tooth tigers & food was in short supply, but today with the current of sabre tooth tiger shortage & abundance of food this is no longer such a great thing. Why? Because it means that our bodies will rapidly adapt to any stressors (e.g. changes in diet & exercise habits) and quickly become as efficient as possible in order to conserve maximal energy (work less). This means that what might be a ‘killer workout’ today won’t be nearly as effective 3 weeks from now.

EFFECTIVE EXERCISE (IN A SLIGHTLY BIGGER NUTSHELL)

You can’t keep doing the same thing every day and expect great results, and no, alternating between Day 1 and Day 2 won’t cut it either, sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. To actually benefit from your workouts you need to continuously increase the difficulty in order to overload your body and muscles.

HOW DO I CREATE MORE OVERLOAD/STRESS?

1. Increase the load (weights)

If the last rep of your set is really challenging (no way you could squeeze out one extra rep), awesome, you’ve chosen a weight of appropriate difficulty. Now, if this feeling doesn’t sound familiar, guess what, it's time to go up a few pounds (bigger weights look cooler anyways)