Exercise can be a double-edged sword.  Whilst the right amount and type of exercise is an important catalyst for rapid, fantastic results – too much, too often, or the wrong type, can create a metabolic environment that makes the improvements you desire, impossible to achieve.  

Consideration should be taken to ensure that you are using your time efficiently and not sabotaging your results with too much exercise or the wrong type!  

So how much exercise should you do? 

Most people starting out on their journey to get fit and in shape should begin simply by training twice a week! Yes, just 2 times! For the best results, they should make those two sessions an effective resistance training program that is focused on building or maintaining lean muscle mass. 

Whilst two sessions each week is a good rule of thumb, how much exercise you should do comes down to your ability to recover. If you are exercise/train more than twice each week and are sore, tired/exhausted and feeling low in energy and drive, then reduce your number of weekly sessions to the point where you don’t experience these complaints. 

What type of exercise should you do? 

The best improvements in body composition come from resistance training. This is going to be your most efficient and effective way of toning up (and no, if you’re female, you won’t get bulky, that’s a super challenging objective to achieve). 

Effective resistance training isn’t simply about lugging the heaviest weight possible from position A to position B! Technique is one of the X factors in body transformation. It’s about programming appropriate exercises, choosing a suitable weight and then moving it with the correct posture, position, and joint angle to optimise muscle recruitment and ultimately produce results.  

Once you have established the above, it is really important that you record every exercise, the number of repetitions achieved and the amount of sets completed. The recording of this data enables you to identify patterns in the data to ensure that you are working towards achieving your goals and if you aren’t, you can problem solve from there.  

This is where using a trained professional is beneficial and your investment in time and money will pay off hugely! At Legacy we not only use the best exercises to get our clients in great health and shape but we teach them how to document and analyse the data recorded in their sessions so that every session they complete they can learn to recognised what’s letting them down (sleep, nutrition, stress), or whether they are on track, and another step closer to reaching their goals. 

What about nutrition? 

There’s nutrition habits that need to be created to get in great health and shape and maintain it are pretty easy once mastered. The more advanced you wish to become and the more muscle or body composition changes you wish to see, the more precise you need to be in eating enough of the right nutritious foods, getting adequate rest and recovery and identifying and recording your habits. 

What most people fail to do is match the quality of their nutrition with their activity level. In an effort to get in shape, people drastically cut their calorie intake and increase their exercise volume which is a recipe for disaster! Initially it may prove successful with some quick weight loss but within weeks, energy levels flag, people get run down and sick, despondence kicks in and the motivation to keep going stalls and those early, fast “results” become unsustainable.  

It’s very important that your nutrition habits compliment your training habits or you’ll find that you’re just not getting anywhere.  

Summary 

If you wish to be in good shape and a healthy body weight then do exercise that protects your lean muscle mass. 2 resistance training sessions a week, some intense cardiovascular exercise 1-2 times a week and some walks, combined with a diet that is highly nutritious, will keep you in awesome shape and condition. 

For those who have nailed their nutrition and are more advanced (been doing this type of exercise consistently for a few years) they will get the best results from resistance training no more than 4 times per week, alongside some conditioning work. 

We hope this article has helped! If you have further questions reach out to us via our contact box.

In our next issue we’ll look at why strength training is so beneficial for women.