How To Fine Tune Fitness For Maximum Impact

Why do you exercise? Health benefits, me time, weight loss? From taking on a triathlon to improving mental health, whatever the goal, staying healthy needs to be a priority for all of us. But how do we do this efficiently and with maximum benefits in the little free time we find ourselves with? Belle spoke to James Staring, founder and lead fitness coach at Fit to Last Personal Trainers, about how to finetune an exercise plan to fit in with your life.

Injuries limit benefits

To get the most out of exercise you must be able to move well, and if you are injured, you can’t move fully when you exercise. Full movement during exercise is what helps you become stronger and fitter. If you can’t move fully, your shortened movements can potentially lead to further injury.

If you feel pain when you exercise, seek professional guidance to help find out the cause and a possible solution. Do not try to push through pain. This can lead to bigger problems.

Plan your exercise

To achieve your fitness goal, you must be realistic about what you can commit to on a weekly basis, and then make weekly appointments with yourself so you keep doing it. And it is very important that when setting your weekly workout targets that you allow sufficient time to recover.

Professional athletes usually focus on three things 24/7: exercise, sleeping and eating. As a non-professional athlete, you need enough recovery time between exercise to maximise the benefits bearing in mind that you also have other commitments (not just sleeping and eating).

Recovery

When you exercise, your muscles are slightly damaged due to the stress of your workout. This is why you feel sore after. Recovery is essential because it is during recovery that your body rebuilds.

During recovery, your body heals the damage from your exercise. This healing results in those sore muscles adapting to make you a little bit stronger to meet the challenge of your next workout. Recovery takes time in between workouts, and it needs to be planned for, just like your exercise.

So, as you plan your weekly workouts, also plan recovery time between them. I recommend a 24 to 48-hour recovery period. This doesn’t mean sitting on the sofa and doing nothing. Recovery is light activity, like walking or yoga, nothing too intense. Light activity during the recovery time will benefit you more than no activity at all. If you are aching and don’t feel like moving around much, try at least to walk around as much as you can to loosen up your muscles and prepare them for movement again when you next workout.

Body fat

One of the most common health and fitness goals is weight loss. But numbers on a scale should not be the main driver of this goal – we need to talk about body fat.

If you are carrying excess body fat, reducing it will improve your health and fitness. Losing body fat means changing your body shape (which is actually what most people want when they talk about ‘losing weight’), not the number on the scale.

Body fat loss is a much more reliable measure of progress than chasing pounds or kilos. If you focus on the number on your weighing scale, you might see the number decrease and therefore think you are improving. However, if the weight you are losing is muscle mass, this can be detrimental to your health, rather than an improvement. It also may not give you the shape you are hoping for. The simplest way to measure body fat loss is to try on the same outfit on a regular basis and see if it fits differently. If it is getting looser, you are on the right track.

Are you new to exercise?

The newer you are to exercise, the more initial success you will have. This is referred to as the ‘Novice Effect’ by powerlifting author Mark Rippitoe. When you expose yourself to a new fitness routine (for example, lifting weights for the first time), you will achieve some change at first because you are doing something new and different. Your body will respond quickly to a new set of challenges and trying exercise that you haven’t done before is a great example.

However, this will be a short-term change – your body will get used to the new fitness regime. When this happens and you stop changing, you will need to adapt your fitness routine to ensure it remains challenging. As a general rule, exercise regimes should be changed every four to six weeks.

If you are more experienced, but you have been doing the same exercise routine without change or progression, it is time to change things around.

A good example of this is running. Think about the type of running workouts you usually do. If it is the same type of run each week (i.e. same route for 30 minutes, same pace, twice weekly), it is time to throw your body a curve to stimulate change.

This could include adding a new fitness class, a higher-intensity interval run, or better still adding in strength training. Strength training is the preferred choice because you will run faster and your body will get stronger in the process. Also, gaining lean muscle helps you lose body fat and keep it off.

Food is fuel

The choice of increased exercise is often accompanied by (sometimes extreme) calorie cutting. However, extreme calorie cutting is an ineffective strategy when you exercise regularly. This is because you need to feed yourself enough energy to both fuel your workouts and the changes you want your body to make.

By drastically cutting your overall energy intake, your body will burn both muscle and fat to maintain itself. This means that the effort you put into your exercise will be undercut because you will end up losing the muscle tissue you are trying to build.

The success of any fitness goal depends on a strategy that combines supportive eating habits along with a progressive exercise routine. You need to feed the change you want your body to make by concentrating on eating consistent quantities of healthy, whole foods alongside your exercise regime.