Are you getting the most benefits possible from your workouts? You may be working hard to get lean and defined but unintentionally doing things that sabotage your results. How many of these diet and fitness mistakes that make it harder to improve your body composition are you doing?
Common Diet and Fitness Mistakes: Not Being Disciplined in the Kitchen
After a workout, do you hear a little voice in your head saying you deserve that brownie because you exercise? Some people think exercise means they can liberalize their diet. After all, you’re burning calories. If that’s the case for you, you’re making it harder on yourself.
Even the most consistent exercise program can’t make up for a poor diet. You can shovel in food a lot faster than you can burn it off through exercise. It takes almost an hour of running to burn off a Big Mac – not to mention the fries they’ll try to stick you with. You should be avoiding foods like this anyway, irrespective of the calories.
Stay accountable by keeping a journal of everything you eat and drink – meals and snacks. Add up the calories and take an objective look at what’s going in your mouth. Are you out-eating your exercise sessions?
What about the composition of your diet? Processed carbohydrates put your body in fat storage mode by creating insulin spikes that make it easy for your body to store fat. Stick with whole foods and include enough lean protein and healthy fats. There’s no room for junk food when you’re trying to change your body composition.
Common Diet and Fitness Mistakes: Restricting Calories Too Much
Under-eating isn’t a good approach either. When trying to lose weight, too many people lower their calorie intake to the point they’re starving most of the time. Your body is smarter than that. When you don’t feed it properly, it makes behind-the-scenes adjustments to compensate. As a result, your metabolism slows and you end up in a futile cycle of eating less and exercising more to lose weight. Not a healthy situation – or one that’s sustainable.
Approach your fitness goals with a long-term perspective. Don’t use the “crash plan” to get into shape. Slow and steady gives more sustainable results.
Common Diet and Fitness Mistakes: Not Lifting Heavy Enough
There’s a widespread misconception among women that lifting heavy will make you bulky. Unless you have a higher-than-normal level of testosterone due to a medical problem like polycystic ovary disease there’s little danger of bulking up. What WILL happen is you’ll get stronger and leaner and more defined. High-intensity resistance training is also better for building and maintaining bone mass. Choose a weight that’s 70% to 85% of your one-rep max. You should only be able to lift it six to twelve times. If you can do 15 or 20 reps, you’re not using enough resistance to build strength and lean body mass.
Why go heavy? High-intensity resistance training boosts the release of anabolic hormones like growth hormone and IGF-1 that help your muscles grow and maximize fat burning. Lifting heavy doesn’t bulk you up – it helps you get leaner. High-intensity resistance training also creates more of an afterburn than lifting lighter weights. This added afterburn forces your body to burn more calories during recovery. Over time, this added calorie burn helps you get leaner.
Common Diet and Fitness Mistakes: Doing Too Much Cardio
Moderate-intensity cardio may burn a lot of calories while you’re doing it, but high-intensity resistance training and shorter periods of high-intensity cardio create a more favorable fat-burning environment due to the afterburn effect. Plus, long periods of moderate-intensity cardio, are stressful on your body. They elevate your cortisol level. Cortisol causes you to break down muscle tissue so cells can convert it to glucose as a fuel source. Fueling up before a cardio workout helps prevent this to some degree. Still, doing extra-long cardio every day increases your risk for injury and overtraining and isn’t the best use of your time.
Increase the intensity of your cardio workouts so you can do less and focus more on resistance training. Resistance training is the best way to change the shape of your body.
Common Diet and Fitness Mistakes: Never Changing What You Do
Your body will stop changing if you don’t keep challenging it. One way to keep challenging your muscles is to progressively increase the resistance you use when you weight train. Bodybuilders often take this a step further by cycling their workouts and using more advanced training techniques like drop sets, super slow training, negatives, pyramid sets, and partial reps, to name a few.
Even making small adjustments like changing the order you do exercises or the angle at which you do them introduces enough change to keep your body adapting and growing. Add more compound exercises that work more than one muscle group, which burns more calories.
The same applies to cardio workouts. Think of all the ways you can get a cardiovascular workout – step aerobics, high-intensity interval training, kettlebell workouts, kickboxing, spinning, etc. Why do the same one every time you work out? Use change to stay motivated. Don’t let yourself get in a rut.
Common Diet and Fitness Mistakes: Not Having a Plan
Planning is important for any kind of goal you’re trying to reach. You won’t get very far if you just “wing it.” Be clear about what your main goal is. Is it to lose body fat or become stronger? Tailor your workout around your primary goal initially. If your goal is to get stronger, don’t spend hours doing cardio. Focus on progressively overloading your muscles. Decide what muscle groups you’re going to focus on during each workout – make upper body one workout and lower body the next so you give the muscles you just worked a chance to recover.
Keep a fitness journal with your goals and plans. Create specific short-term and long-term objectives and a way of measuring your progress. For example, if you’re training to build strength the amount of weight or the number of reps you can do with the same weight should go up over time. Make sure you’re seeing measurable progress. Keep re-evaluating your current goals and adding new ones.
The Bottom Line?
Each of these six fitness mistakes can sabotage your fitness gains and keep your body from changing. Avoid these diet and training errors and you’ll be well on your way to transforming how your body looks and feels.
References:
Am J Phys Med Rehabil 2001;80:65-77.
Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, 10 (1), 71-81.
Resistance Training and EPOC. Jeff M. Reynolds and Len Kravitz, Ph.D.
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