3 Common Workout Mistakes – Nanaimo Chiropractor

As a person who is passionate about health, I love hearing about people taking up an exercise routine. But there are pitfalls that we can make. I’d like to cover three of the most common mistakes:

  1. Doing the same routine: There’s a number of reasons for not doing the same routine day after day, week after week. First of all, it’s boring! Unless you have an amazing will power, you will lose interest in your routine and you will find yourself not keeping up with your exercise.

    Secondly, you’ll burn less calories. As your body becomes more efficient at a skill, you will burn less calories to do that skill. For example, a poor swimmer will expend more energy to swim a length than a world class olympian.

    Also, you will plateau in your training if you use an unchanging routine. Want to improve your running speed? Mix it up. Vary between trail runs, some hill sessions, and some track/interval work. By challenging your muscles in different ways it becomes more versatile.

  2. You only do cardio. I’m the first to espouse the benefits of cardiovascular exercise but there are hugh benefits to including a weight routine in your exercise program. Your muscles are your calorie burning engine. Even at rest, muscle burns calories. More muscle means more calories burned, even at rest. This is why low calorie diets fail. If you lower your calorie intake too much, your body will start breaking down your muscle tissue for energy, thus decreasing the size of your calorie burning engine. Those starvation dieters then try to go back to a normal food intake and gain all their weight back.

    Also, weight bearing exercise is THE best way to reduce the risk of osteoporosis. Most people have a good calcium intake. And the osteoporosis drugs don’t do a great job, plus they have side effects (including esophageal cancer and, unbelieveably, fractures). The body follows the old saying “Use it or lose it.” By using your bones in weight bearing activity you give your body the best possible chance or reducing your risk of osteoporosis, or brittle bone disease.

  3. Staying in the fat buring zone: Many people only exercise at low intensity, the so-called fat burning zone. You see, at lower heart rate exercise your body burns a larger percentage of fat for energy. As you exercise harder, you burn proportionally less fat and more carbohydrate. Because of these facts, many people stay in the lower heart rate zone thinking they will burn more fat. The fact that is overlooked is that although higher intensity exercise burns proportionally less fat, more calories are burned overall, meaning more fat is burned overall.

There’s lots of other workout mistakes. Why not leave one in the comment section below?

Thanks for reading! Dr. Jason Hare, Chiropractor at Pure Chiropractic, Nanaimo

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/itsholly/5405661492/sizes/s/in/photostream/

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