A New Year has started and the gyms are packed with people hoping to quickly lose weight and change their lives. I admit I’m guilty of being irritated by the lack of parking and equipment at this time of year. Sadly, the influx of new people will only last a few weeks. Then, they will get discouraged by the lack of progress and turn back to their old habits. I recently read two great articles on why people don’t see progress. I will briefly sum them up and also provide links to the original articles. Hopefully, someone will find something they can use.
Group Fitness Classes Don't Work1
How many people do you know that faithfully show up for Zumba or Jazzercise week after week and never see progress. They are putting in the effort, not seeing results, but keep thinking just a few more classes will get them that six pack they want. These classes are missing two of the main principles needed to see progress.
Overload- Basically, you have to give the muscles in your body a reason to change. In weight lifting you can do this by increasing the weight or tempo. But in these classes, people tend to use the same weights week after week. The instructor tends to do the same reps or moves at the same tempo and may not encourage the students to progress.
Progression- How many of these classes are trying to progress the participants from week to week? It’s difficult to make the class progressively more challenging if new people are constantly showing up. So, they end up changing the sound track but not the moves.
What they don’t tell the participants is the truths of fitness: (1) Sometimes reaching goals is not going to be fun, (2) Following the crowd won’t always get you where you want to be, (3) Don’t waste your most precious resource, time.
Lastly, this is not to say that group classes never work. If you go from doing nothing to taking classes, there will be some improvement but you probably won’t reach your final goal.
Running and Women2
Women tend to use running as a means to lose weight. This is for many reasons. Women are often highly recruited for fund raisers that involve running. These seem fun and easy to participate in. Not to mention make one feel good about supporting a cause. Many coaches recommend huge amounts of cardio to lose weight. However, steady-state cardio can devastate a woman's metabolism. It can do it to men as well, but not as often. The last trap is that we so often hear that to lose weight we just need to do more cardio. But this only seems to work if you have no base cardio rate.
T3 is a hormone produced by the thyroid. I,t along with the T4 hormone, are responsible for regulation of the metabolism. It is very important for weight management that this remain stable.
It has been shown, that in women, T3 rates can soar due to cardio overwork, causing fat gain just when the people are trying do the opposite. It can also start to burn muscle and cause excessive bone loss. Things that no one wants.
Conclusion - Both articles go much more into depth and I hope you will read them. The idea behind them can benefit not just women but anyone trying to meet a fitness goal. Good luck to anyone with a fitness goal in the New Year! Here are links to both articles.
1.Group Fitness
2.Women Running Into Trouble
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