When it comes to exercise and food we’ve grown up with the idea that to achieve the body we want, we need to do MORE exercise and eat LESS food.
In fact, when most people begin an exercise regime they are told to do half an hour a day and then as that becomes easier to add another 15 minutes and so on and so forth.
When clients plateau in their fat loss results well-meaning trainers add even more exercise to their clients schedule!
Many of you would have tried this method in the past and probably found that you didn’t last longer than a month. You either collapsed in a heap, or life just got in the way and you couldn’t keep up with your training schedule.
As busy mums and business owners, many women tell me that they just don’t have the time to exercise like they used to.
And here’s the facts:
Hours and hours at the gym each week won’t give you amazing results
What if I told you that you could get in the best shape of your life with just 2-4 hours of exercise a week?
Well, that’s true. You can.
My client Kirilie is a terrific case in point. Kirilie loves exercising and used to sometimes spend up to two hours a day working out – especially if she was riddled with guilt from what she’d been eating or drinking!
When she came to me at the start of the year I told her that she was actually exercising way too much to to create the physique that she wanted. Doing too much exercise was actually stressing her body out and it had become highly inflamed.
I advised Kirilie that actually, if her goal was to shed fat she’d need to reduce the amount of exercise she was doing, and increase her volume of good food.
Our hardest lessons garner the most change
Kirilie nodded in agreement but I could tell that inside she was pretty concerned. And although I did my best to reduce her exercise, she didn’t pay attention in the beginning. Eventually her determination to continue to workout excessively led her to become so injured that she couldn’t exercise at all!
As it turns out that was probably the best lesson she could have had. The hardest thing was that she had a deadline for her fat loss, and she couldn’t use exercise to get into shape. I asked her to keep up the volume of food she was eating, but only train twice a week with resistance training.
Anyone else would have given up at this point and thrown in the towel – I mean, how could she achieve her goal eating more food and exercising less?
To her absolute credit, Kirilie trusted what I said and achieved her goal of fitting into her favourite shorts perfectly!
The lessons I teach my clients are:
- It’s not the length of exercise you do, it’s what you do when you exercise that counts. I give them 4 exercises times 2 sessions 30-45 mins a week, plus 1 x 30 minute HIIT session. That amounts to a grand total of two hours a week spent in the gym!
2. Exercise is just a stimulus for the results we want. More importantly we focus on nutrition habits, which amount to 97% of where the best results come from. And that’s eating the right nutrients at the right time for super hot bodies!
So if you want to shed fat fast, ditch the hours and hours of cardio classes a week. Hit the weights area of the gym twice a week, and focus on eating more often, with the correct nutrients, to optimise fat loss, increase energy and function better.
Transformation Tip: The best results come from being consistent with your training across a year, whether you can only fit some exercise in once a week or 3 times a week, stick to what you can do consistently.
