What’s Wrong With My Workout?

Last week, my husband sent me a link to an article that Shape magazine published, titled “3 Reasons Your Workout Isn’t Working.” At the heart of this article is that you need to be crosstraining, which is something that my clients are familiar with hearing from me. Simply, crosstraining means changing up your workout routine. It is good to “shake things up” with various activities, including changing up your strength training exercises.

Here are my five flubs that keep the flab on:

1. Overeating. Your workout does not give you a green light to eat whatever you want, unless your goal is to gain weight (even then you need to make conscientious food choices). An easy estimate of how many calories you ought to be consuming daily, to support your life function, is multiply your body weight in pounds by 10. Add approximately 400 calories per hour of moderate intensity exercise.
2. Undereating. You already realize that you should be at negative calorie intake, consuming less than you burn, so you eat just 1200 calories per day. Unless you are a 120 pound, sedentary woman, that is not enough for you. If your do not consume enough calories throughout your day to sustain your body’s organ function, your body will go into famine mode, conserving your fat stores and burning your lean tissue-muscle.
3. Overtraining. Yes, you can workout too hard. Intersperse your highly intense workouts (the ones that leave your body exhausted until the next day) with medium and low intensity workouts. You should not do more than two high intensity workouts per week. Appropriate recovery is just as important as your workouts in attaining your athletic performance and weight loss goals.
4. Not crosstraining. Just as your mind gets bored when performing the same activities over and over again, so does your body. When your body gets bored with your workouts, it stops responding. To continue on a path of fitness improvement, mix up your workout routine by varying the mode of exercise (running, biking, stairclimbing, swimming, etc.), the types of strength exercises (strength training machines, cables, dumbbells, body weight, etc.), and pace (slow, medium, fast-only when you have mastered the exercise at slower speeds).
5. Underhydrating. There is scientific research reporting that drinking more water promotes weight loss by altering your metabolism, helping it work more efficiently.

Tags: crosstraining, exercise, exercise prescription, fitness flubs, overtraining, shape magazine, workout mistakes