INNER DRIVE NOW RUNS ON GREEN ENERGY
Trade the trusty treadmill for laps of your local park to chase down weight loss that you can sustain in the long term. Lace up
The hardest part of any workout is getting started, as the aphorism goes. But as anyone who has embarked on a new fitness regimen only to find themselves burned out and bored by the second week knows, some days the ‘getting started’ part can feel pretty damn difficult.
It’s easy to lose motivation when hitting the gym is not exactly your number-one priority (and it’s not ours either, despite the subject occupying many of the magazine’s pages), but don’t lose faith. The remedy for your waning workout commitment could be right on your doorstep – or a few steps away from it, to be precise.
Researchers at the Université de Sherbrooke in Canada asked a group of participants to complete an hour-long cardio and weighttraining workout, three times per week. Half of the group sweated out their sessions in a conventional gym setting, while the rest of them tackled the programme in the great outdoors. At the end of the 12-week experiment, the open-air group had missed notably fewer workouts than those confined within four walls, attending an impressive
97% of their training sessions.
Unlike members of the indoor group, who experienced a dip in motivation as the weeks rolled by, the green team remained raring to go throughout. The researchers found that they were also more active for the rest of the day than their gym-shackled counterparts and reported greater levels of tranquility, presumably because they didn’t have to wipe someone else’s sweat off the equipment before starting their run.
So, if your desire to get moving desperately needs a reboot, take full advantage of the warmer weather and shift your workout outdoors, where grassroots gains are ripe for the picking.