Exercise “Hooligans”
1. Hooligan: I haven’t got the time for exercise
You don’t need to spend hours in the gym or run/swim/cycle for miles and miles to get the benefits of exercise. Indeed overtraining can actually be detrimental to your health.
High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is one tactic you can use to reduce the time required, from hours to minutes. ( See High Intensity Interval Training).
2. Hooligan: I don’t want/can’t afford to join a gym
There are lots of exercises that don’t require gym membership or expensive equipment. It is perfectly possible to enjoy a good workout at home and just use your own body weight for resistance.
3. Hooligan: I don’t enjoy exercise.
Of course it helps if you do something you enjoy – walking, dancing, cycling, swimming, computer games! There are lots of activities to choose from, just find one that suits your team.
4. Hooligan: Aerobic exercise is better than weight training
For Premiership Health you need both. Increasing muscle mass is actually a good tactic to use if you are diabetic because it allows you to store more glucose in the muscles (glycogen), making you more metabolically flexible.
5. Hooligan: If you exercise it doesn’t matter what you eat.
If you exercise it matters even more what you eat – If you don’t get the nutrients in your diet to help you recover from the stresses and strains of exercise, then you won’t improve. Premier League football teams recognise this, which is why they put so much emphasis on diet.
6. Hooligan: Weight training is only for the younger players.
Although it’s important that you develop strength and muscle from a young age – the benefits of maintaining/building muscle actually becomes more important as you get older.
From around the age of 30, most of us will see our body fat levels increase, as our metabolic efficiency decreases with age. We then start to lose muscle and strength in middle age as testosterone levels fall off.
Then, when you are playing in the senior league, if you don’t focus on maintaining strength, you will find your team is considerably weakened and the golden years become the slow down years.
A study at Tufts university, on men aged between 60 – 72, showed that by weight training 3 times a week, they could significantly increase their strength and flexibility.
As a GP, I reckon we would see big improvements in health levels, if we all got stronger, especially the elderly – yes walking’s great, but lifting’s essential.
So, what stops people:
Back to those Hooligans again:
7 Hooligan: For women especially – weight lifting will give you “bulky” muscles. Well, unless you’ve got exceptional muscle-building genetics, or start messing with anabolic steroids, that is never going to happen. What you will probably see is a leaner more toned body.
8 Hooligan: It’s going to take a long time and the longer you exercise the better the results.
This is simply not true – like anything, there is a law of diminishing returns, which will be different for everybody. To workout smarter, you need to find the amount of time needed to stimulate an adaptation response in your own body, then stop to recover.
That’s because muscles don’t grow while you’re exercising, they grow while you’re resting. The same goes for the muscle of your brain as well, the time when you consolidate memories and learn the most, is when you are sound asleep!