KATE DAVIDSON is a writer and a personal trainer and has worked in the fitness industry since 2009. Over the next few weeks she will be sharing her professional expertise to help motivate you to stay active and improve your health through winter and beyond.
Exercise fact or fiction. Are fewer, harder workouts better than regular, easier workouts?
A common misconception when beginning a new fitness regime is thinking that exercise intensity is more important than exercise consistency. It has become normal to believe that working out really hard at vigorous intensity, is more important that exercising regularly at a lower intensity. This puts people off getting started in the first place, or leads people to choose overly challenging routines that cannot be maintained long-term.
The cult of intensity has been propagated by the health and fitness industry to keep you in a stop-start cycle that does not achieve lasting results. By convincing you that high intensity workouts are what you need, they are setting you up for failure knowing these programs are not sustainable. They know that every time you quit, you have to start again at some point and will end up spending more money on the next miracle training plan or product.
The secret is this: by prioritising exercising consistently over exercising intensely, you will set yourself up for success and end the stop-start cycle. You’ll be healthier and happier, and so will your bank balance!
Working out consistently involves shorter, easier, practical, and enjoyable activities that leave you with enough energy to get through the rest of your day. By incorporating regular, achievable exercise sessions into your week, you will build up a habit that you can maintain. If at first you don’t feel like you’re doing enough, trust me, you are. When it comes to your strength and fitness, progress is incremental. It begins gradually and as you continue exercising consistently, your progression begins to compound and accelerate. Before long you will have built up the strength and endurance to manage higher intensity workouts.
By comparison, an intense workout is often physically demanding, time consuming and exhausting. These types of workouts often lead to fatigue, lack of enjoyment and motivation, and risk of injury. Exercise is a form of physical stress and when the intensity of the exercise is increased, so is the stress on the body. For this reason, intense exercise requires longer periods of recovery, meaning that you are unable to exercise as frequently as someone who exercises at a lower intensity. If your workouts are too challenging, take too long to recover from, or leave you with little energy for anything else, they are not sustainable. Once you stop exercising, besides not making any progress, you risk going backwards.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t push yourself when you exercise, but intensity without a foundation of consistency will not yield long-term results. The key is to find something that you enjoy and work hard enough so that it doesn’t feel easy, but don’t push yourself so hard that you need to take several days off afterwards to recover. It can be helpful to work with a fitness professional who can program sessions for your individual needs and who can ensure that you are making progress without over-training.
