Slow and Steady Wins the Race!

Exercise is great, so the more you do the better you feel? Wrong. If you are trying to out exercise a bad diet you will never reach whatever large or small goals you set for yourself but I am not talking about your nutrition this time. The amount of exercise needed to "cancel" out a bad meal is enormous. In addition, it usually leads to injury. It certainly is possible to do hours of intense exercise a day, but it's something that has to be worked up to. For most people that want to be fit and healthy and look good doing it, a few intense workouts a week combined with staying active is plenty to get the job done.

I am not saying stop your current workout program. I am saying I try to get in some form of physical activity 7 days a week. However, 4 of those days are leisure activity like walking, biking, or hiking. I can get by taking it easy on those 4 days of the week because the other 3 are very intense workouts. They include a combination of strength training and HIIT cardio. My exercise program has everything I need to build and maintain muscle, and improve my cardiovascular system. Most importantly though, it gives me ample time to rest and recover.

  

When I first started to pursue my fitness goals I had developed a bad habit of over training, doing multiple workouts each day and following that schedule for a few weeks at a time, usually until my body gave out. Let your body rest and try not to overdo it!

If you look at the graph to the right you will see what I am talking about. I often teetered between the success on the right and the failure on the left. Over-training will leave you feeling sick, with flu like symptoms, dehydrated, fatigued and sometime in pain. 

There will be times when you can push the intensity and workloads harder for periods of time, and there are very sport-specific training programs which require that. However, for the majority of people that just want to be healthy, fit, and leaner than the average person, the key is finding consistency in your workout program, and that means finding something you can handle long term, being patient, and letting the fat come off over time. The longer you can stick to your current exercise program, the more successful you will be. Over exercising is not going to get you to your goals any faster.