I feel it is generally accepted that for most of us, our health takes a battering from poor diet, lack of activity and poor sleep patterns!
I know of no single paradigm more effective at reducing the devastating effect of modern life than a well-structured strength and conditioning regime.
Poor Diet
In our experience almost all our clients clean up their nutritional habits because they wanted to enhance results from training.
We may not see a radical overhaul in every client but the following are typical habit changes that most clients adopt without needing a whip or a carrot to incentivize them!
- Reduction in alcohol (better sleep, better recovery, easier weight loss);
- Reduced intake of processed carbohydrates (better energy, better blood sugar and weight control);
- Increased vegetable intake (improved immunity, more alkaline thus facilitating weight loss and better recovery);
- Increased intake of protein (building more lean muscle mass, decreasing body fat, improving immunity and concentration.)
What each of those four changes also achieve is a reduction in junk calorie intake! So, while we rarely get clients to measure calories we absolutely reduce the intake of nutritionally vacant calories and ramp up the nutritionally dense calories.
The educators at Muscle Nerds have a saying that we like: “Calories are not nutrition” and this aligns perfectly with the tips above.
Lack Of Activity
With almost every health department or health guru recommending that we increase activity levels – we need ways to maximize the benefits in the limited time modern life affords us.
In our experience, resistance training is by far the most efficient method for improving our cardiovascular health, reducing body fat, and increasing lean muscle mass.
If you are time poor and only have 3-4 hours a week to dedicate to exercise, then being efficient is paramount and resistance training is the optimal choice.
Poor Sleep
We are the only living creatures on the planet that are arrogant enough to think that we can override our biological need to sleep and not suffer the consequences.
It has become an epidemic in the developed world to compete on how little sleep we can function on – with senior politicians and business people alike pushing the idea that working more and sleeping less is just part of what any dedicated employee would do! And poor ‘new moms and dads’ simply don’t get the luxury of uninterrupted sleep even if they desperately want it!
While absolute evidence is thin on the ground – low sleep has been strongly correlated with depression, low immunity, high biological stress, increased body fat, and diabetes and I feel sure many more problems will surface in years to come.
Quality training is fantastic at forcing our bodies into performance mode and then into recovery mode. This recovery mode must be facilitated with high quality and adequate amounts of sleep!
Most people report instant improvements in sleep quality and duration. Over time we can also correlate poor gym performance with poor sleep patterns, providing more motivation to recover better and get more from training.
We help clients culture healthy habits and improve lifestyle factors critical to their wellbeing. Weight training is a devastatingly effective tool and acts as a catalyst to a gradual improvement in diet, sleep, and overall fitness levels. It doesn’t have to be radical and it doesn’t have to happen overnight – you just have to start. If not now, when?