True180 Personal Training | High Intensity Fitness – A Good Idea Taken Too Far Essential Fitness

High Intensity Fitness – A Good Idea Taken Too Far

The shift towards more intense exercise began as a great idea for most people. It lead people to realize that walking on a treadmill while watching TV won’t help with weight-loss, strength, bone density, or even your cardiovascular fitness. Strength and interval training deliver far superior results and massively improve the quality of life, but only if done responsibly. Unfortunately the most popular forms of intense exercise have taken a great idea too far and turned it into something that can be dangerous. To help you get the great results without the risk, here are 5 do’s and don’t’s for intense exercise.

Don’t make exercise a competition. Exercise is something you to do to enhance your life and/or sport, but it’s not the end goal. Competing on who can do the most exercise leads to sloppy form and extreme exhaustion, which lead to injuries and health problems.

Do challenge yourself. Your body will only change – more toned, expend more energy (lose weight), add muscle, add bone density – if it’s progressively overloaded. If it doesn’t challenge you it doesn’t change you.

Don’t train to failure: pushing until you can’t move is taking the above idea too far. End your set of exercise knowing that you could’ve done 1-2 more repetitions than you did. This is challenge that you can recover from, and you only get better in between workouts (while recovering).

Do remember the 3 P’s: at my studio we have the “3P” – no pain, puking, or passing out. Exercise should challenge you, but never hurt, make you feel nauseous, or make you feel dizzy or faint.

Don’t do plyometrics for cardio: a recent trend in DVD’s and fitness classes is taking very stressful jumping exercises and doing them as a 30-60min class. To put this in perspective Olympic athletes limit their plyometric work to fewer than 100 reps per week (or 20 min including rest) because exceeding these limits puts you at high risk for stress fractures and tendon ruptures.

 ????                           ????                         ????                        ????                       ????                           ????                    ????               ????

 If you are in the Charlotte-Ballantyen area, and want help with what you should be doing (nutrition and exercise), and the accountability + social support to get it done, we would be honored to guide you. Check out our 10 Day Trial to see if we’ll be a good fit. 

Schedule your free intro

Talk with a coach about your goals, make a plan to achieve them.

Fill out the form below to get started

Take the first step towards getting the results that you want

By providing your phone number, you agree to receive text messages from True 180 Personal Training For Women