With restrictions easing, we can finally exercise in groups of up to 20 people and hang out with up to 10 friends socially, which is interesting because:
- We have no more excuses about not going to the gym
- Someone has grossly overestimated how many friends I have
Not to worry, who needs friends when you can re-watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine for the 38th time in its entirety? Nine-Nine!
Alas, while strategic lighting and a tactical five minutes of YouTube research on ‘How to Contour’ may work for your Zoom meetings, you can’t Photoshop life.
Now in that vein, we’ve already discussed the importance of muscle conservation being an integral component of sustained fat loss.
I feel like I’ve made myself pretty clear about the importance of ensuring you maintain muscle, which in turn means you maintain a high basal metabolic rate (don’t let the big word stress you out, it simply means the rate at which you burn calories at rest).
Episode Recap – If you slash calories and massively spike exercise, it results in:
- A loss of both fat and muscle
- Is physiologically unsustainable (irrespective of the fitspirational quotes you might read)
- Results in a worse net body composition than when you first began, meaning when you rebound, and you will rebound, you will be in a much, much worse position than when you began
What's the solution?
In order to alter your body composition in any meaningful manner, you need to ensure ongoing scope to increase the training stimulus you expose your body to, while also maintaining or reducing your total calories and SNACCs (Sugar, Nicotine, Alcohol, Caffeine and Chemicals) over a sustained period.
Your body is in a constant state of energy flux, and fat loss is dependent on interrupting your body’s inherent ability to adapt to stimuli.
Jumping into a 1,000 calorie loss workout may sound hard-core, and that may appeal to you, but these sort of extremist workouts have a tendency of failing miserably at creating any lasting change. Even if you have the willpower and discipline of a Shaolin monk, these sort of workouts generally don’t work because they fail to take into consideration everything you do outside of workouts and do not adequately plan for sufficient rest periods for your body to recover. Inadequate rest and recovery translates into your body actually losing muscle tissue rather than building it. Even if you aren’t concerned with building strength, as we all know by now, the lower your muscle mass, the lower your NEAT. Therefore, rather than speeding up your ascent of fit mountain, extremist workouts actually sabotage your long-term fitness success.
The key is to maintain or (responsibly) reduce your calorie intake, while slowly ramping up the total number of calories expended session-to-session, week-to-week and month-to-month.
Body composition changes (fat loss/muscle gain) are due to the net loss of energy over an extended period of time, not workout-to-workout.
Our recommendation
Take up our ‘Solo Circuit’ classes – With 11x Solo Circuit classes a week, you’ll be able to adequately spread out your workouts to get sufficient rest and allow your body to build new muscle tissue. If a workout is too challenging, your trainer will suggest a regressed version of exercises for you. When you’re ready to step things up and burn more calories, your trainer will suggest a progressed version. Additionally, Solo Circuit incorporates a mixture of resistance, body weight and cardio based exercises for a workout which interrupts your body’s inherent ability to adapt to stimuli, which helps you avoid plateauing.
Safety first
Unlike traditional circuit classes which has people rotating between stations, Solo Circuit will just be you at your very own personal station. Each station has a big safety buffer and is sanitised before and after each class. Additionally, we’ve marked the floor with distance markers so you can easily navigate the gym while maintaining a safe distance from other patrons. Click here to view our class timetable.
TL;DR
- Extremist workout rarely work
- Rest and recovery is essential for muscle building
- Muscle leads to higher NEAT
- Find a workout you can perform which has ongoing scope to increase training stimulus
- Simultaneously, maintain or slowly and responsibly reduce your caloric intake
- Gradual progression is the means to lasting, meaningful body composition change