4 TRAINING MISTAKES
When it comes to fitness as an industry, it is in its infancy. The fitness industry is highly unregulated. This allows for information to be misinterpreted and spread to the masses through poorly educated channels. One of Jolt’s missions is to change the face of the industry. We challenge the fitness industry to bring educated information to the table that helps our clients reach their goals in a way that is supportive to living their highest quality life.
It’s no surprise that at Jolt we spend a lot of time sharing education with our #Joltfam. We want to empower you to make decisions to live your best life. Many people hsve preconceived plans of how fitness should work or what they have been told in the past. Fitness is ever changing, growing, and developing. Our coaches are the best at what they do because they are constantly learning and growing with the studies, new data and education. There’s so much information out there and we are happy to help sort through it and progress you closer to your goals.
THE 4 MOST COMMON TRAINING MISTAKES
TARGETING FAT LOSS
Thousands of sit-ups later and we know this isn’t true. We cannot target fat loss. What is true is that fat loss and gain is highly based on genetics. This means that the places you store fat and lose fat from first are determined before you step foot in the gym. The good news, we can target BUILD. All those sit ups can make our ab muscles bigger and therefore they will appear aesthetically when paired with healthy nutrition. Another example of this is the glutes (butt), squats, deadlifts, and hip thrusts are a great way to build the muscles of your glutes. Building the glutes allows you to shape your body up rather than trying to target it down. Consider the gym a place to BUILD rather than burn.
2. CONSTANT VARIETY
We may have heard that the body needs to be “tricked” into fitness or that we need to “shock and confuse” our body into great shape. This is a great example of how educated studies and great information gets miscommunicated through click bait headlines and over simplified tweets. It’s almost like the game of telephone; remember, the one where you whisper down the line in hopes for the story to stay the same by the end of the line? Except, it never does. It always ends up a skewed story that vaguely represents the original. Fitness studies always seem to end up like a game of telephone.
The fitness headline “Switch It Up for Muscle Confusion” seems to be a victim of telephone. Studies do prove that variation in exercise is important, but not in the ways that we may have interpreted. Switching up the workouts every time we enter the gym, is a recipe for plateau. The constant change does not allow room for progression. Imagine this, you’re preparing to ace a big test in Biology, but each time you sit down to cram you study a different class (math, english, social studies, etc). The studying is making you generally smarter, but it’s not helping you get closer to the goal of crushing your biology exam. Changing your workouts up each session produces the same results. You’re generally physically active, but you’re no closer to your specific goals. The body needs to practice the stimulus consistently to adapt.
At Jolt, we do all the programming for you. We keep our main lifts consistent in class, so that you can focus on progressing them forward. We encourage you to work in four week cycles of intensity, so that you have enough time to practice the skills without always switching it up. But we still offer enough variety from four week block to block that we do not plateau from repetition. Our personal training sessions further customize this by progressing you based off your testing results. Instead of “muscle confusion”, we should call this “strategic progressive variation” This may sound like a complicated process, but we look after it all for you at Jolt whether in class or personal training.
3. ABUSING CARDIO & NEGLECTING RESISTANCE TRAINING
People often bust down our doors with the goal of fat loss and their eyes glued to the treadmill. We do a lot of re-educating on the topics of resistance training and cardio at Jolt. The idea that cardio is best for fat loss is one of the biggest myths we bust at Jolt. It’s been blasted into our heads that we need to “burn more, and eat less” to lose weight. Although, this is true it's a simplified equation of how are metabolism works.
While at the gym, cardio does burn more calories. Yes, thirty minutes on the treadmill will burn more calories than 30 minutes of lifting weights. However, the weight lifting will continue to burn calories for 24 hours afterwards. The muscle building effects of weight lifting allow our bodies to burn more calories at rest (even while sleeping!), more so than that 30 minutes on the treadmill.
Often, when we use ONLY cardio to try and stimulate fat loss, we will gain that weight back. This is because it does not build muscle tissue, which helps us burn calories on an on-going basis. This means, once our body adapts to the cardio, it needs more cardio to stimulate caloric burn. Yet, we can only add so much cardio (there’s only 24 hours in a day!). Cardio burns both fat and muscle tissue, this leaves us feeling “soft” or looking “deflated” rather than toned and chiseled with healthy muscle. You can read more about the benefits of resistance training here. This is not to say cardio is not important, you can read about that here.
4. POOR RECOVERY
Lots of people love working out, the gym, and crushing their goals in the gym. We love to see it! However, the gym is place to stimulate change. It’s not where the change happens. The workout is the stimulus, and the recovery is where the opportunity for change happens. Most people crush it at Jolt, we’re sweating, moving and having a great time. The problem revolves around the typical day outside the gym - high stress, on the go, always available, sedentary lifestyle prevents us from reaching our fitness goals.
When progressive resistance training is paired with good nutrition, sleep and stress management strategies we set ourselves up to be muscle building and fat loss machines. You can read more about how to optimize your recovery here.
When it comes to fitness, it’s so important to trust the experts, to follow the data and science, and commit to high quality fitness education. You know how those at-home pandemic haircuts turned out despite following the fancy Youtube tutorial? Enough said. At Jolt, we are happy to answer any questions about fitness, it’s so important that we work together to help change the fitness industry. We pride ourselves on having the most educated members and look forward to helping people change their outlook and beliefs about fitness. We are here to empower you to build a resilient body and live your highest quality life.
