Breaking out of a well-worn routine and challenging your body to tackle new and tougher exercises is the only way you will ever hope to lose excess fat
When you embark on a quest to improve your health, you may seek the services of a coach to help you achieve your goal in a shorter time. Their knowledge and experience will be a vital source for you to answer questions about your training and nutrition.
One of the most frequently-asked questions is what is the best training programme or exercises for fat loss. The reality is that there is no one great exercise or programme: a programme is only as good as the time it takes you to adapt to it. The problem is that people do not change their exercises or programmes frequently enough.
We are creatures of habit and one of the most common mistakes we make when trying to lose fat is repeating the same exercise routine all the time. We stick to what we know because we feel more confident in doing things we are familiar with.
In honour of groundhog day, you pack your gym bag, drive the same route to the gym, park in the same car parking space and walk straight to your favourite treadmill or bike. You continue like this even though it has failed to accomplish the results you crave.
Your lack of progress starts to bite into your enthusiasm; you become bored and your motivation starts to wane. Initially, when you started training, a 2km run or bicep curls with 4kg may have been very challenging to you. Now, you have no such feedback from exercise.
Once your body has adapted to the exercise or weight you are lifting, it has no reason to change. If you want to change shape, you need to be prepared to keep changing.
Training is like learning a new language: our goal is to improve our vocabulary.
Muscle soreness resulting from training gives us feedback that our body is still adapting. Measurements, taken regularly — like running speeds, distances covered, and weights lifted — give you information about your progress.
Your approach to nutrition, skill, and the number of years you are training will influence how soon you adapt to your exercise programme. When you perform a new exercise the body improves its neuro-muscular co-ordination and it learns to switch on muscles it needs and switch off muscles it doesn’t need.
When you perform the exercise repetitively, you improve the speed of the message transferring between the muscles and the brain, and the body allows you to recruit more muscle to lift heavier weights.
In training, the upper body tends to adapt to exercises faster than the lower body so you must vary the exercises, repetitions and speed of the exercises to keep progressing.
You must aim to change your training programme every one to three weeks depending on your goal and training experience.
Exercises using free weights — like squats, lunges, chin-ups and presses — use multiple joints and many muscles and also create a bigger hormonal response to exercise.
Don’t fall into the machine trap unless you are tired, as you recruit less muscles and hence burn off less energy to burn fat.
You may be reluctant to change, but if you want to improve you must step out of your comfort zone. If you lack the knowledge, you should seek the guidance of a coach. No matter what level you are currently at, you can always improve.
Tiger Woods has five coaches who analyse his golf swing. Those at the top of every profession are always tweaking and learning to continue growth.
It may be uncomfortable for you, you may experience new muscle soreness, but if your goal is fat loss, welcome it, as your body is communicating to you that it is going into a transitional phase.
