Fight The Fitness Temptation

Being healthy is great.

You look and feel better and are able to do more with your life due to your body being able take on more in any given day.

But many people fall into a few simple traps that mean the desire to get fitter backfires.

Make sure you avoid these common mistakes that people make:

-         Too much too soon
Many people throw themselves into exercise with a huge amount of vigour but your body needs to recover between training sessions whether these are walks or full on gym sessions. Start with every other day at most. If you are getting more and more tired do less! Your training needs to be sustainable not lead to burn out and illness. Start sensibly and build up

-         Exercise to exhaustion
As above some people go into things too hard. In each session they do as much as they possibly can. This is not sustainable. Your exercise should be split mostly between ‘easy’ and ‘steady’. In other words you should be able to hold a slightly breathless conversation in easy sessions and speak a sentence or two at a time in those that are steady. Training too intensely drastically reduces the quantity of exercise you can do and, therefore, stops you getting as fit as you could.

-         Eating too little
To lose weight you need to eat less calories than you are burning. Some people however try to slash the amount they eat and increase the amount they exercise for quick weight loss or to ‘tone up’ more quickly. This is unhealthy. Your body will move into a defensive mode to preserve its vital activities leaving you less energy for day-to-day activities. You will not have enough fuel or nutrients to recover from your day’s activities and so run a high risk of illness and injury. Even your concentration will suffer. Any weight loss is unlikely to be sustainable.

-         Eat unrealistic diet
While not as radical as above some people switch to a diet that looks like something out of a Hollywood actor/actresses ‘preparing-for-the-demanding-role’ regime. This may or may not be a healthy diet. The trouble may well be that it is not sustainable. Are you really going to drink nothing but water or fruit juice? Get into habits that are healthy and sustainable. Allowing yourself the odd bar of chocolate can be a good energy top-up when needed and won’t do any harm if your diet is based on good principles.

-         Isolate what you feel the need to work on
You may think that your bum looks big or that your chest needs developing. Don’t just work on these areas though. Your body won’t just burn fat from these areas. Trying to get one group of muscles to develop out of proportion to the surrounding ones is likely to lead to injury. A good, wide base of fitness will strip excess fat and allow a greater amount of work to be done. Working a wider range of muscles will allow those in the areas you are more focussed to develop in a more effective way.

-         Sweating off weight
A litre of water weighs a kilogram. But dehydration affects everything from your ability to exercise, to your skin condition, from to your concentration to your digestive system. Drinking too little and becoming dehydrated may make the scales look better but it will make you look and feel worse. Stay hydrated by drinking two litres of water a day and also replacing any fluid lost during exercise.


The bad news is that short cuts to fitness don’t exist. The good news is that doing the right things may lead to you where you want to be more quickly than you expect and a sustainable healthy lifestyle will keep you fit and healthy for a long while. Find a sustainable, effective and enjoyable training programme plus a healthy lifestyle to get the most out of yourself.

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