Throw away your scales and love who you are
I was at an amazing professional development opportunity over the weekend; absolutely awesome how much there is to know and learn in the fitness world, so many opportunities to improve skills and help more people on the road to health.
Do you need another reason to avoid bowing to the scale gods and using weight as your primary measure of success?
Did you know that the weight lost on a very low calorie diet will be an average of 32% muscle? So that by the time a client comes to see a trainer after a couple of these starvation stints they will be weaker, more prone to bone and joint issues and have a significantly slower metabolism, in addition, 97% of these folks will regain all the weight and replace all that muscle with fat within the first year.
The key to helping these people regain their strength, functional capacity, preserve their bone density, and reignite their metabolic furnace is to engage in resistance training. Yes, all those adaptations will positively improve their lives, but what do you think happens when that healthy lean mass shows up on the scale?
They run screaming from the gym as fast as you can say holy Yo-Yo diet Batman. Folks, throw away your scale, love who you are, strive to be better and healthier not lighter.
Speaking of getting healthier; one of the consistent messages shared by all dozen of the fitness professionals that I saw, was that posture is important. Who knew? Yes, even professional athletes have the opportunity to do planks in their training. “Wait, planks train posture? I thought it was an ab exercise”. The abdominals are just one of the instruments in the symphony of core muscles holding us upright, protecting our spinal column, and providing a strong base from which to elicit powerful athletic movements. That is exactly why trainers practice resisting forces from all angles in bridges, planks, anti-rotation moves and using tools like TRX suspension trainers. And why some of us constantly remind all our athletes about their shoulder, head, and low back positions in all of these exercises. No sense building strength on dysfunction.
Speaking of dysfunction; I’m turning 50 in a couple weeks. I know I don’t look a year over 55. Funny how your perception of what is old alters as you age. Many of the folks I work with are baby boomers 45-75 years young. Very few of them act their age. L and E just did an east coast bicycle tour 780 Km over 10 days. Swervin’ works out pretty much every day, W water-skis like a banshee, J does all the ranching chores and literally sprints from job to job, P bikes and hikes and just did a major hiking route over the mountains in Spain and all our Walk to Health participants embrace pretty much every exercise we throw at them… truly inspiring. These folks embrace what Plato was trying to tell us 2500 years ago; Lack of physical activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it.
Just keep moving people your body, mind, and spirit will thank you.
Ed Stiles BPE, Certified Exercise Physiologist is a member of the Alberta Sport Development Centre’s Performance Enhancement Team and is the Fitness Coordinator at the Family Leisure Centre he can be reached via e-mail at asdc@mhc.ab.ca, or at ed1sti@medicinehat.ca.