Guest Blog – Matt Smith

Matt is an established PT based in Harrow and I am sure he is going to be a top voice in the fitness industry VERY SOON!

You can find Matt on his website – Click this Link

And his Facebook Page – Click this Link

 

Are you too extreme to lose fat?

Are you too extreme to lose weight?

 

I want to talk to you about extremism in health and fitness and why it is holding you back. We have all at one time decided that our current regime is not conducive to leading a healthy lifestyle, so we go on a diet or try a new workout routine, and most of the time this diet or this workout routine is the polar opposite to what we were doing before.

Instead of approaching diet in a sensible way such as cutting out junk food or cutting down on the amount of processed food we eat, we foolishly listen to work colleagues or Heat magazine, or check out an article in the Daily Mail and suddenly we are on a 12 day juice diet. Or we decide not to touch another carbohydrate until 2015. Suddenly we can only eat food that a caveman ate 90,000 years ago, or we can eat what we like but only at 6:30pm on a Friday (and only if it’s raining). In short we take dieting to extremes.

Now as a personal trainer I get exposed to a lot of conversations about what people are doing to lose weight and if I bit my tongue any harder I’d need stitches. What is common though is seeing that person again 3 weeks later and finding out that they have stopped the diet and fallen back into their old routine.

This is due to the extreme diet they were following, if you want to look good in 6 months time, you need to be eating optimally for 6 months. If you want to look good and live a healthy life forever you need to eat healthily FOREVER! Will you be able to do that if your diet is so complicated it needs 6 dieticians and a super-computer just to work out what you are eating for breakfast next Tuesday? NO. But if you decide that you are going to incorporate more vegetables into your meals and try to cut down on snacking then your chances of following through with this in the long run are much higher.

I see this with training programs too, we are a nation that is transfixed with novelty. Check out any newspaper on a Sunday and it will be filled with “The latest trend in the fitness industry: High Intensity Morris Dancing” or some other rubbish. There’s Zumba, and Bollywood fitness classes, Aqua zumba, Aqua cycling (Wish I was making that up), Bikram yoga.

All these new approaches to exercise constantly bombarding you with their novelty and people look at them and go “Oh so THAT’S why I haven’t been getting results! I didn’t have salsa music playing in the background so that’s why it wasn’t working for me”.

Now most of those exercises are aimed at women but men are just as bad, especially men who think of themselves as clued up when it comes to fitness. One week they are trying German Volume Training, then next week it’s only compound lifting, then after 3 weeks they are trying their hand at Giant sets, and then Tabata training after that. In short they are addicted to chasing the next BIG thing that will finally get them results. The next weight training extreme that will finally get them absolutely ripped. The funny thing is that had they stayed on their original program for 8-10 weeks they probably would have seen results, not body transformational style results but small measurable results that they could build on over the next few months and years.

If we can get ourselves to stop chasing the quick fix solution, the newest novelty class, the diet that made Kate Winslet lose 35kg in just 7 minutes, and just buckle down and work hard then finally we can start to see the kind of results that the Daily Mail articles, and Heat magazine promised you all along.