The 3 bad attitudes/beliefs hindering your exercise progress & how to fix them:

Photo by: Martin Angerer

Making mistakes is an inevitable characteristic that makes us human. No matter how perfect you think someone is, they have most likely made mistakes. The difference between those who succeed and those who fail is that the successful ones identify their mistakes and learn from them. The time it takes you to succeed is directly related to how fast you replace your mistakes with effective approaches. Believe it or not, making mistakes is in your favor and with the correct attitude, you will grow. So let us apply this philosophy to our physical efforts in the gym and rid ourselves of the top attitudes that will only set us up for failure.

#1 You only do cardio (aerobic) training for weight loss:

Cardio is any activity such as running, swimming, cycling, elliptical, Zumba class etc. While cardio exercises are an excellent method of maintaining your health and improving your heart function, it will not be very effective in weight loss. First off, cardio will only burn the number of calories you expend while you are exercising. To add to that, and without going too deep into metabolism, excessive cardio will use your muscle mass as fuels and thus effectively lower your metabolism. Now this isn’t meant to scare you and I am definitely not saying you should cut out cardio activity from your routine.

The fix:

Balance it out; add 2-3 days per week of resistance training to your routine so you can build more muscle. Building your muscles will increase your metabolism (yes having more muscle cells burns more energy throughout your day than having less muscle, welcome to the 21^st century). The problem with cardio is that it never places enough stress on your muscles to cause them to grow .Also try mixing up your cardio, top trainers use interval training with their clients for better weight loss and healthier hearts: run fast for 1-2 minute, walk for 1-2 minute, repeat 5-10 times.

#2 You only workout your upper body if you are a male, you mostly only workout your lower body if you are a female:

Yes you can always wear jeans to hide your lower body and put on a tight t shirt to show off your strong upper body (boys) and yes you can work your lower body non-stop to try and increase your butt size because you think your top half is fine (women). But in reality it is never that simple, and playing favourites with your muscles will only cause you to develop weaker ones over time. Forgetting about legs, which are the largest muscles of the body, will severely hinder your weight loss efforts.

The fix:

Give your muscles equal time and attention, especially the bigger ones. You lose more fat when you work your legs as opposed to your arms, don’t believe me? Do a set of biceps curls then do a set of lunges, when did you sweat more? Also, this is to all the lovely women out there, YOU CANNOT get huge and bulky by doing resistance training in the gym, it’s just not genetically possible so do not worry about it. If it so happens you are the rare bodybuilder breed that doesn’t need steroids, then you will not get bulky overnight anyways.

#3 You complete each set based on a fixed number of repetitions

This one is a bit advanced and more of a personal pet peeve. If you are always used to doing 10 repetitions of biceps curls or squats just because 10 is an even and fair amount of repetitions then I guarantee you are hindering your progress. The only times you can pre fix your repetitions are when you know for a fact that by the 10^th repetition you will be exhausted and that you will fail. My next post will talk about failing during a resistance exercise so please stay tuned for that instead of going all out and injuring yourself now.

The fix:

Given you are doing the exercise properly, safely and with correct form, skip the counting. Counting is psychological and your body will eventually pace itself. Completing 10 repetitions of an exercise doesn’t mean you have worked as hard as you can. The bottom line is your muscles will only grow when you place them under a considerable amount of stress. When my most dedicated and enthusiastic clients ask me “how many repetitions am I supposed to be doing?” my answer is always “as many as you can.. + 1”. Now while you do not have to take that literally since you are not exercising under an expert’s supervision, you should try listening to your muscles as to when they can stop as opposed to listening to what your tired mind is trying to tell you.

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Mohamed