Take a look at the stereotypical hardcore fitness fanatic nowadays, and see how you too can become super fit in just a few easy steps. First, you must clear your entire weekly schedule and start spending all evening, every evening, in the gym.
You must completely overhaul your diet and familiarise yourself with sections of the supermarket you never even knew existed, including the health food section where you will find an array of nutritional supplements that are absolutely vital to your success.
You are going to need specialised contour-hugging and breathable gym attire, running shoes and gloves. Hours of reading and research on the internet lay ahead of you, and while you are online, you must also start posting inspirational gym quotes on social media daily and evidence of purchasing all of the aforementioned items as and when you acquire them.
“Really?!” Well, actually no, not really. If you would like to traverse this path, that is absolutely fine, but remember that it is entirely optional. We might coin an entirely new term to define an alternative route: ef-fit-ciency. Exactly how much training is enough? What does true efficiency in fitness actually represent in practice?
Through my involvement in gyms and personal training companies, as well as in various sports and fitness courses, I have seen no shortage of exercise programmes. Whether written by fully qualified or trainee fitness professionals, my thoughts are all too often the same; too many sets, too many exercises and too many similar or repeated movements.
All of these elements combined automatically result in too many overall sessions in the week, which in themselves are usually too long. When the body is stressed continuously for an extended period of time, it begins to secrete stress hormones to sustain the continued provision of energy, a process that does not create a positive environment that facilitates healthy and desirable adaptations. Unneccessarily long sessions can therefore turn out to be counter-productive, as well as increase your risk of sudden acute injury caused by mistakes or deteriorating technique.
10 repetitions performed correctly are far more effective than 100 performed incorrectly
To compound this problem, too many sessions of this type, performed too often, do not afford the body enough time to recuperate and undergo the desired adaptations. Over the long term, such a regimen can lead to overtraining, over-tiredness, a compromised immune system and ultimately a delay in achieving the overall programme objectives.
And finally, add in too many of the same movements or exercises that are too similar and target the same parts of the body excessively, then overuse injuries to the muscles, joints or surrounding structures likes tendons, ligaments, cartilage and bursae may result.
These types of injuries start as nagging aches and pains and progressively worsen over time. Without going into too much detail about the physiology behind these shortcomings, there are also a number of more practical reasons to favour quality over quantity.
A lot of us do not have all that much time to exercise in the first place, so having an efficient programme could mean the difference between actually starting to exercise or not. If somebody has only one or two slots available in the week to dedicate, it would be a mistake to give up before one has even started, based on the mistaken premise that such a routine “wouldn’t make much of a difference anyway”. On the contrary, once or twice a week is actually enough to see some very real benefits and certainly beats doing nothing at all, by a long shot.
In fact, by removing unnecessary or repeated movements from a given programme, it is often possible to slash it down to less than half its original length, with the added bonus of gaining more rest in between, allowing increased intensity to be put into the remaining exercises, which are, after all, the only ones actually making the difference.
As a general rule, where there exist no other reasons dictating otherwise, seek shorter and more intense solutions over longer and easier ones. A brief interval session on the rower for example, alternating sprints with periods of rest, will expend more energy than a longer, easier bout of continuous training on say, the stationary bike.
When it comes to selecting exercises, favour compound movements over isolations or, in other words, exercises that involve the most muscle groups at the same time. In terms of how many sets to perform, while research has shown two working sets of a resistance training exercise to be more effective than one, the benefits to be gained from the second are less than those to be gained from the first, and so on for every additional set performed. In other words, multiple sets are better than one, but not significantly better.
If investment of time and effort into sets of a given exercise is likened to investment of finances in the bank, every additional set is equivalent to increasingly lower interest rates with each additional account opened. Remember also here that 10 repetitions performed correctly are far more effective than 100 performed incorrectly.
So whenever you are confronted with decisions related to your exercise regimen, remember that time and physical recovery resources are precious, and we can often get far better results with less training than that which might first seem necessary.
In short, if you are short on time, strive to train ever more ef-fit-ciently.
matthew.muscat.inglott@mcast.edu.mt