MYTH: Exercise is Easy

One of the greatest myths ever perpetuated in the fitness industry is that exercise is easy.  Sure, it can be easy, but if you want long-term results you have to work hard.  Understandably, this can be a hard truth to accept because everything you earn comes easy… right?  (I hope you detected the sarcasm in that).

Unfortunately, there are countless magazine articles, DVD’s, and books that advertise “exercise is easy”.  Of course, if the exercises involve little to no weights, just have you walking, are single joint exercises, and/or use some kind of contraption like Shake Weight, it’s going to be easy.  In some cases, these programs may be a good start.  But, at some point you’re going to have to push it. This is true for all age groups (read It’s Too Late to Get in Shape and Kids Shouldn’t Lift Weights).

By the way, I should mention that this not only applies to lifting weights, but doing cardiovascular exercise as well.  Sure, going on a walk is better than nothing.  However, if you want to get results, you have to work it.  You can’t keep moving at the same “mall paced” walk and be working hard enough for the body to adapt.

Besides the law of life that you have to work hard to achieve results, there are physiological reasons why fitness can never be easy.  Let me explain these reason.

Gotta Break a Sweat- If you don’t break a sweat, you’re not working hard enough.  The reason you sweat is related to body temperature.  When it goes up beyond normal body temperature, you have to sweat to cool your body to a safe level.  The reason your body temperature goes up is due to the amount of energy your muscles are using while exercising.  With the release of energy, you have the release of heat.  The greater the intensity of the exercise, the greater amount of energy used and heat released, thus, exponentially you use more calories.  Make sense?  It just so happens that working hard enough to sweat correlates strongly with physiological changes in the muscles.  This can be better explained with progressive overload.

Progressive Overload- Progressive Overload is the concept that if you want to progress, you have to overload the muscles. It’s not just about the calories used, it is about what happens in the muscle at a microcellular level. In order for muscle adaptation to take place for sub-cellular change, the muscles have to be stressed.  Once your muscles adapt to certain stimuli, you have to change up what you’re doing (i.e. increase the weight, increase the incline on treadmill). You can’t just keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting to get better results.  Understandably, your limits can only go so far (there is such thing as overtraining too).  This is not only true with muscles, but with bone too.  If you want to increase bone density, you have to stress the bones just hard enough to have physiological change as well (read Wolff’s Law).  It’s because of the stresses that the cells in your body become stronger and more efficient.

Compound Movements (aka multi-joint movements)-  A single joint movement is where you only have one joint moving  and a small number of muscles involved (e.g. leg raises only involves hip flexors), whereas, a compound movement is where two or more joints are involved, plus multiple muscle groups (e.g. squats include a large number of thigh muscles).  There are times when single joint exercises are called for, especially when it comes to recovery of injury or you’re starting from scratch.  However, at some point you’re going to need to do compound movements.  Once again, these movements require more muscle groups, which means you’re going to feel it more.  The more muscle groups involved, the more energy expenditure required, thus, more calories.  It just so happens that real world movements, such as squatting down to pick up an object or lifting dishes into a cabinet are compound movements.

Results!

Exercise is not easy if you want results.  You are going to need to feel a little discomfort and a little pain at times (not in the joints).  I’m saying this within reason.  Don’t try to kill yourself.  The more consistent you are to doing exercise, the more you have to push it as time goes by if you want to continue to get results.  There are times that you will be sore.  Each time you change the types of exercise you’re doing, you probably will.  However, you will notice that you begin to recover faster.


written by:
Kelly Huggins
Exercise Science, B.S.