Photo by Nourdine Diouane on Unsplash
During the first couple of weeks of each year, gym memberships surge. As part of resolutions to the New Year, people decide they want to get in better shape. In those first two weeks, those gyms are crowded and hardly anyone can get time on the equipment. By the end of the month, the equipment is suddenly available. Most of those new members have stop coming.
Why do people fail at their fitness goals? The first reason is that they don’t know what they want to accomplish. In other words, they don’t have a system in place that has measurable results. They either turn to a personal trainer or they simply give up. Trainers come with a pretty hefty price tag. Even when people have an idea of what they want to accomplish, they don’t really know which exercises or equipment to use to reach those goals.
Another problem is that people often consider health only in terms of gym memberships. All too often, people are told that if they go to the gym often enough, they can eat whatever they want. They don’t have to worry about what kinds of food they eat. This is very dangerous advice to follow. Your diet is half the battle when trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle. There are plenty of examples of people who had worked out every day dying from heart attacks. Diet is the likely cause in those instances.
Trainers don’t always concentrate on diet either. While there are exceptions, most trainers will focus almost the entire session on the exercise routines. If they include diet as part of it, usually it’s a passing statement here or there. Most are not dieticians and although they may have a rudimentary understanding of food, they are not equipped to give you good advice in this area.
People mistakenly associate gaining weight with the fact they are exercising. While it is true that muscle is denser than fat, they need to measure their body mass index to confirm that fact. Fat does not turn to muscle nor does muscle turn to fat. You can increase your muscles without burning fat. The fat will hide the muscle gain. That’s why you can do pushups until you’re blue in the face. Without a fat-burning regimen, it will never show.
It’s important to learn more about both dietary aspects as wells as physical activity when setting goals for fitness. You simply cannot focus on one without taking the other into consideration.
