Why You’re Probably Focusing On The Wrong Thing At The Gym.

 

Sometimes it’s all too easy to get caught up in the habit of looking to PR every time we’re in the gym.

The dopamine response we get from lifting a heavier weight, performing a more difficult movement, or completing a workout in a quicker time can be addictive.

Once we experience this high, we look to replicate this each time we train.

There are many problems with this kind of approach:

• You can only keep adding weight to the bar for so long. At some point, your skill will merge with your strength and you’ll plateau. Then you’ll get bored, then you’ll get injured.
• You can only go faster for so long before you find your workouts are fatiguing you outside as well as inside the gym. Life starts to suck when this happens.
• The gym then becomes a place of annoyance or irritation. It isn’t delivering what it did at the start.
• We get injured, and the gains we did make are eaten away by the inactivity forced upon us by the need to recover.

There is another way

At CFHV, we know all the above is true because we’ve made these mistakes too. Year’s ago, we signed on to the high intensity, constantly varied wave of fitness.

We focused a little too much on the performance side of fitness, and not enough on the all-round health and wellness aspects.

Over the last eight years, we’ve had the benefit of learning from experience, readjusting our focus, and designing our programming to reflect the needs of our clientele.

We now focus on the primary benefits of health and fitness first:

– More energy

– Better sleep

– Happier mood

– Better self-confidence

– Improved health markers such as blood pressure, resting heart rate and body fat %

 

Two Years Ago

Take Rose for example.

Two years ago when she started with us, Rose had a blood pressure of 190/131.

A reading like this indicates a potential for hypertensive crisis. BP in this range can put you at the highest risk for heart attack, stroke, and other life-threatening issues.

Rose was also eating poorly, sleeping on average 4-5 hours per night, and feeling like things couldn’t really get any worse.

Unfortunately, this is an all too common scenario for many of us. Stress at work, stress at home, poor eating and sleeping habits, combined with short term ideals around fitness, health and nutrition.

 

The Plan

Together, we put together a plan to get Rose back on to the healthy side of life.

This involved the sensible prescription of intensity and resistance, along with gradual changes to lifestyle habits such as relaxation and sleep, along with reviewing and modifying Rose’s nutritional intake.

The aim of all this was to create a healthy and meaningful long term relationship with health and fitness.

Now, Rose will be the first to tell you this was not easy!

Changing habits is very challenging, especially when they are deep-seated and the product of failed attempts to lose weight or get fit by applying boom and bust, get fit lose fat quick approaches.

However, and this is a credit to Rose’s desire to achieve her goals, she stuck with the process.

She trusted that patience and consistency would deliver what boom and bust had not.

She trusted that being in a reasonable calorie deficit, whilst working out 3-4 times per week would be the road to success.

That drinking more water, eating a balanced intake of proteins, carbs and fats, and mindfully relaxing would be more lasting in the long term than calorie counting, skinny teas and stress.

 

Two Years Later

Come full circle to Monday this week, and it was time for a check-in with the Doctor.

121/80

That’s right

Rose had dropped her blood pressure from 190/121

To 121/80

A phenomenal achievement, made all the sweeter by the additional benefits of fat loss, dropping kilos and sleeping on average 6-7 hours per night.

 

The Crazy Thing Is..

Many of you reading this will be saying to yourselves things like, ‘Two Years! Pfft, that’s way too long. I’ll never last that long”, “My mate Vicky went to a boot camp and lost 15kgs in 7 days”, “Dave did keto and lost loads of weight” or “Ashleigh went to HIIT classes and dropped 70% body fat in 6 weeks”.

The problem with this is, where are they now?

I’ll bet almost every person you know who’s experienced radical short term change, hasn’t sustained it in the long term.

Social media tells us health and fitness is easy, all you need to do is cut out bread, stop eating sugar, thrash yourself to bits every time you go to the gym, and you’ll achieve your goals quick smart.

The problem with that is it isn’t sustainable.

If you were going to study law, you wouldn’t expect to be able to complete a 4-year degree in 12 weeks

If you were going to France on holiday and wanted to be fluent in French, you wouldn’t start learning 2 weeks before you depart.

 

Patience and Consistency

Rose came with many of the same ideas as we’ve discussed above.

She’d been disappointed by the gym in the past and blinded by the flawed advice she received.

Thankfully, she chose to trust in our patience and consistency model.

Rose realised the same approach she’s taken to parenting, to career development and her relationship with her husband, are totally compatible with this model.

In fact, it’s the very way she lives her life.

Now she’s reaping the benefits of it in her health and fitness.

We’re proud of you Rose, and the success you’ve achieved so far!

 

To get started on making 2020 the year of the fittest healthiest you, click here to schedule your Free consultation.