#Weights

Three steps to Real-time exercise Results

/ Janet Huehls / Leave a comment

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This is the final blog in a series on the Real-time Results of exercise, the ones that will make your brain want to exercise. 

The big-time reasons to exercise are not the ones that will make you do it. What’s more important to your brain is how you feel right now. If exercise does not make you feel better now, your brain will find other things that will.

This is why we have been looking at the Real-time Results of exercise. Let’s sum it up into three steps for using the Real-time Results from exercise to keep you motivated in Real-time too.   

  1. Clarify Your Real-time Why. If your Why for exercise is too far off, your brain will put it off. When you are exercising for some future results but exercise does not make you feel better now, your brain is much more likely to choose something else that will make you feel better in the present. Instead of using future results to get you motivated, get clear about what exercise can do for you right now. Do you want more energy, a better mood, more confidence, more comfort in your body? The only way you will know this is by checking in with yourself each time you exercise to keep the results in Real-time.  
  2. Visualize how the Real-time Results lead to long term results. All of the future benefits of exercise are actually the accumulation of the real-time results of each exercise session. When you are exercising, visualize how you are setting in motion a cascade of events in the present that lead to the long-term results you want.  
    1. When doing cardio, visualize the release of chemicals in your nervous system that keep your brain sharp, your mood more positive, and relaxes blood vessels. Visualize how your cells are using the extra sugar and fats in your blood. Visualize how you are powering up your immune system.  When repeated, each of these leads to health and disease protection.  
    2. When doing strength training, visualize how you are signaling your muscles to be more metabolically active for the next day or so, your bones to make new cells, and your nervous system to keep the muscle memory for ease of  movements in daily life. When repeated, these lead to more strength, stronger bones, and a more active metabolism.  
    3. When stretching, visualize your nervous system releasing muscle tension, your connective tissues becoming more elastic, and your lymph system clearing unwanted items from your body. When repeated, these lead to less stiffness, a stronger immune system, and a more comfortable body and mind. 
  3. After exercise, notice the Real-time Results. This pausing helps your brain make that connection between exercise and your innate desire to be well now. The stronger that connection, the more automatically you will want to exercise, without needing to trick yourself into doing it or rely on others to make you do it.

Even if you follow these three steps, they won’t work without knowing HOW to exercise so you feel better now and get the results you want later. Knowledge is the key to being in the driver’s seat of getting those Real-time Results you want from exercise now. Doing 100 sit-ups won’t do it. Completing a fitness challenge won’t do it. Exercises for ‘toning and sculpting’ won’t do it. Burning more calories won’t do it. Lifting weights while watching TV won’t do it. Why? Because all of these approaches are based on marketing or myths and miss the mark for creating lasting exercise motivation. They are not based on how your body and brain work, so they don’t stand a chance of  leaving you with the Real-time Results your brain wants. Sacrificing the instant results for the possible long-term results is a surefire way to lower your ability to get what you want and stay motivated.

What will do it? High-quality exercise. Moving your body in the way it was designed to function best for the reasons that are most important to you now. Doing quality exercise means your time investment is less and the instant return on your investment is greater.  The key is staying away from all the marketing-based exercises that make you feel like you are “getting a good workout” because you are sore or you sweat. (neither of these are needed for any real results from exercise).  Quality exercise does not need ‘tricks’ to get you motivated. 

The best part of doing quality exercise is that there is no need for a suffering period. You don’t need to be in pain until your body ‘gets used to it’. Exercising for the Real-time Results means you feel better each time and are much more likely to keep that cascade of events going that leads to results in the long term.  

Bottom Line: The Real-time Results of exercise are the ones your brain cares most about.  When you know how to do quality exercise, it leaves you feeling and functioning better now, and your brain knows it so exercise motivation is much easier. It starts with knowing your Why, choosing what to do for that Why, and exercising in a way that makes you feel better now.  

PS: Ready to put this into action?  Join the community of Exercising WELL members who are enjoying this simple, yet science-based approach to exercise.  If you are tired of trying, tired of feeling sore, tired of getting injured, tired of getting temporary results, click here.  Together we will find your way to getting your Real-time Results through Exercising WELL.

Three reasons you are not motivated for strength training

/ Janet Huehls / 2 Comments

This is number seven in a series on the Real-time Results* of exercise,

the ones that will make your brain want to exercise.

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What made you click on this blog? What makes you eat breakfast? Have a cup of coffee? Phone a friend? It’s the same instinct that makes a bird build a nest and a beaver build a dam. What makes us take action on something is the desire to be well. This is where the word motivation comes from: “motive: a need or desire that causes one to act”.   

You’ve probably heard that strength training has many great benefits for bones, balance, and metabolism. Who wouldn’t want to stay healthy and age well and keep weight in check?  From the statistics, though, it looks like 80% of us don’t really care about those things. But if you ask anyone, they would say, “Yes, of course I want to keep my bones and body and metabolism strong!” What gives? Why is it so difficult to motivate for strength training?  

Here are three main reasons:

1) It doesn’t ‘work’. Let’s say you see an exercise on social media that promises to slim your thighs or tone your arms or flatten your stomach. You start doing it diligently every day for a month. But nothing seems to happen. Your body, no matter how much you do, just does not look like the body of the person doing that exercise. You decide it’s not working and continue your search for an exercise that will ‘fix your body’. The problem is not that strength training doesn’t work, it that your body doesn’t work that way. Targeting, toning, slimming, sculpting—all are terms invented by marketing science, not exercise science. Strength exercises do not cause you to lose more fat in a specific area. Maybe your muscles will tighten (or just feel tighter), but you cannot target fat loss in certain areas.

The fact is strength training, done correctly, will work. Really! It instantly activates your metabolism in your whole body, helping you with weight loss and more importantly, maintaining weight loss. But the promise that exercise works like Michelangelo creating the statue of David is honestly just there to make you buy an exercise program. When there is a mismatch between what your brain expects from exercise and how your body responds to exercise, staying motivated for strength training is very challenging.

2) It’s painful. The no pain, no gain phrase is so catchy and believable. Yet your brain is hardwired to AVOID what is painful. Suffering through pain and telling yourself it is a ‘good sore’ might work for a while, but over time, it comes up against your brain’s instinct to avoid pain. Eventually it will create all kinds of excuses why you can’t do strength training today, and the next day, and the next day.  

The fact is there is no gain in pain when exercising for health and well-being. Really! There is no such thing as a good sore. If you are an athlete, pain is part of the package. It’s the consequence of pushing your body to gain a competitive edge. But if you are strength training for the great health benefits, pain is a sign something needs to change. It means you did too much too soon and your body is letting you know it cannot adapt that quickly. When you learn to work with the natural rate of growth for your body, it will thank you by staying strong because your brain will stay motivated to strength train this week and each week going forward.  

3) It’s complicated. Walk into most  gyms and you will see a gazillion weight machines, racks of dumbbells, and people looking like they are being tortured. If you get past that intimidation, then there are all the choices of what to do for strength training. Is it better to use machines or free weights? Is it better to do lower weight and higher reps or the opposite (and what is a set and a rep, again? I always get them confused)?  Let’s face it, even if you want to strength train, figuring out how to do it is enough to make you turn around and just go for a walk instead. Cardio is so much simpler, which is why 80% of people skip strength training.   

The fact is the way your body moves to be strong, and keep your metabolism strong, is not all that complicated. Really! What makes it complicated are programs that are offshoots from bodybuilding or sports training. For feeling and functioning better, aging well, and activating metabolism, it can be simple. When you strip away all the marketing-based exercises and focus on exercises that keep you functioning the way you want to now, and each day going forward, it is not only simple, it is motivating.  Your body feels good right away, strong because it is moving well, and your brain sees the value in what you are doing. Strength training becomes time efficient, energizing, and motivating.

Why not do strength training in the way that works with your body and brain?

It starts with giving strength training an upgrade for those of us who just want to feel better now and be confident we can move to keep feeling better in the future.   

As an Exercising WELL member, you learn how to do strength training in the way that eliminates these drains on your body and your motivation. The combination of coaching and online videos makes it easy to keep you simply strong and your brain simply motivated.

 

*With so many healthy reasons to exercise, motivation should be easier! The fact is, your brain is most easily motivated to do what makes you feel better now, not what might make you feel better in the future. The problem is we mostly talk about exercise in terms of the long-term results.

Strength, beyond your muscles. 

/ Janet Huehls / 1 Comment

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As we discussed with cardio, we often talk about strength training in terms of the long-term benefits. Yet your brain really cares about the instant rewards of doing something. But what if the instant ‘reward’ you get from lifting weights is muscle soreness and fatigue? Sure, you could tell yourself ‘no pain, no gain’ and convince yourself that it is a ‘good sore’ and all that discomfort means you got a ‘good workout’. Your brain, though, is most concerned with you feeling good now and it’s designed to avoid things that are painful or uncomfortable. When your willpower to endure the discomfort runs out, your brain will start to plant excuses in your head about why you need to skip strength training today (and the next day, and the next).

Eighty percent of people are not doing strength training. Like you, they probably know the benefits—stronger bones, better aging, stronger metabolism—but the brain has some concerns—injury, weight gain, getting ‘too muscular’, or looking like a weakling at the gym. This keeps many people living in the ‘should’ when it comes to strength training.

Are you ready to get out of the ‘should’ when it comes to strength training? Ready to reassure your brain that it is all good, because you are going to work with how your body is designed to be strong? Let’s cut through the marketing- and myth-based ‘facts’ and clear the path to your strongest possible muscles, bones, and metabolism now and every decade going forward.

What is strength training? Strength training is also known as weight training, weight lifting, and resistance training. Basically, it’s when you challenge your body to be able to move your body or objects more easily against gravity. If you are thinking the things you do in your daily life like housework, child care, and yard work mean you don’t need strength training, click here to see why these physical activities are different than exercise.

Making your brain want to strength train. From the very first time you do a strength exercise, you set into motion a cascade of events that produce unique and powerful events in your whole body. Yet, most of the effects of doing or not doing strength training are not noticeable right away, so it’s easy to forget why it is so important. In the next few blogs, I’ll show you the Real-time Results of each strength training session, and why pain and discomfort are not necessary. This way, your brain will be more confident that doing strength training will help you feel and function better now, without having to first endure pain, discomfort, or embarrassment.

Why strength is not from your muscles. Although we most equate strength with big muscles, that is not where strength comes from. Before you even move, something very important happens. Your brain is activated and ‘plans’ what muscles will be needed to create the intended movement. It estimates how many muscle fibers are needed to create the force you need to move against gravity. Then your brain sends a signal through your spinal cord to the muscles you need to do that movement. Without this nervous system signal, muscles can’t move. This pre-planning of movement makes it much smoother and more efficient.

The pathway to strength: Just like the first time you take a trip somewhere, the first time you perform a movement, your brain has to work harder to find the most efficient pathway. Over time, it becomes easier as your brain remembers the pathway. Think about how your body learned to walk, ride a bike, tie your shoes, swim, or play sports. All of these are examples of this process we call muscle memory. This building of muscle memory is what makes movements more automatic, so you can gain coordination, balance, agility, and strength.

Confusion about muscle memory: There is some talk that muscle memory is bad, because you burn fewer calories as your body gets used to an exercise and that you need muscle confusion to keep your body burning more calories. Honestly, the calorie-burning difference is minimal and probably won’t add up to any change on the scale. Muscle memory is what allows you to function. If you are exercising to lose weight so you can feel and function better, muscle memory is your friend.

The strength of your brain. Since the brain and nerves are what tell your muscles how to move, strength originates in your brain and nervous system, not in your muscles. That means you need your brain for building strength. You can see why present moment awareness is so important to get the most from strength training. It ensures you are creating the nerve pathways you want, the ones that allow you to access your strength by positioning your body in the right way, and creating nerve pathways so that strong movement becomes more automatic (more on that later). If your brain is distracted by a TV show, or other people around you, it won’t have as much ability to put into building your strength.  If finding the time for strength training is a concern, choose high-quality strength training by focusing your attention on your body rather than trying to save time by multitasking and doing it while watching TV

Bottom line: Your full mindful attention is your best strength training tool!

In the next blog, we’ll look at what happens in your muscles when you strength train that continues the cascade of events that leads to you feeling and functioning better.

What are the most important benefits of cardio?

/ Janet Huehls / Leave a comment

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As you saw in the last two blogs, there are two distinct factors that make movement a cardiovascular exercise (cardio):

  1. Moving a large amount of your muscles circulates more blood through your cardiovascular system causing your heart to beat stronger (not just faster).  
  2. Moving continuously for longer than two minutes so your body starts relying on your oxygen-using, longer-lasting system for fueling muscles.

That continuous, large-muscle type of movement creates a cascade of events in your body with instant or, in other words, Real-time Results such as:

  • De-stressing. The hormones and chemicals produced when your muscles contract in this way shift your nervous system out of the stress response and into the relaxation response (as long as the way you are doing cardio is not more stress-producing for you).
  • Lowering blood pressure. To help your blood vessels handle the increased pressure of the stronger heart contraction, your body releases nitric oxide, a chemical that relaxes blood vessels. This stays in your system for up to 22 hours after one bout of moderate intensity cardio, helping to keep blood pressure at a healthier level.
  • Better blood sugar levels. Because your muscles are using the sugars (glucose) in your blood to help fuel muscles, cardio helps you manage elevated blood sugar levels. Cardio also send signals to the receptors in muscles to be more sensitive to your own insulin. This helps lower blood sugar instantly and for a few hours after you stop exercising.
  • Boost sleep quality. Cardio during the day means that night you have a better chance of falling asleep easily and sleeping more soundly through the night. As we all know, a good night’s sleep means a better tomorrow.
  • Better digestion. The repetitive, continuous movement of cardio helps your digestive system improve its mobility, making it work more ‘smoothly’ from top to bottom.
  • Lifts mood. After about ten minutes of cardio, your brain releases a dose of various brain chemicals that improves mood, calms your nerves, and boosts your ability to hands life’s stressors. These are the same chemicals that are in many mental health medications. They are also the ones released when you eat comfort food. The difference is that cardio releases them in the balanced way that they were designed to elevate your mood naturally.
  • Immune protection.  is boosted for up to several hours. One way is by increasing natural killer cell activity—the first line of defense against colds and flu as well as most forms of cancer.
  • Improves focus. As little as ten minutes of cardio increases the ability of your brain to focus. Cardio can be used as an immediate and effective part of treatment for people with ADD or anyone living in this fast-paced, distracted culture.
  • Strengthens memory. Each bout of cardio stimulates the growth of new brain cells like nothing else does. Your brain releases BDNF, a chemical that has been called Miracle Grow for the brain. Even better, it boosts the parts of the brain that stores memories. Exercising before an exam has been shown to help students improve grades and exercise has helped people concerned about memory loss with aging get more out of brain-training exercises.  

Take a moment to ask yourself, Which of those Real-time Results of cardio really got my attention? These are the results of cardio that are most important. Why? Because they matter most to your brain.  

Even though sometimes it doesn’t seem like it, your brain is hardwired to take care of your body in every moment. When you use the long-term benefits of cardio, like weight loss or health protection, to get motivated to do cardio, it just does not work. Your brain is most motivated by what will make you feel and function better now.  

There are, however, a few Real-time Results of cardio that are not helpful because they are based on misconceptions and marketing.  The top three Empty Results to watch out for are:

  • Sweat: All that large muscle, continuous movement produces heat. That increases your body temperature, possibly causing you to sweat. Whether you sweat depends on many factors including genetics, hydration level, your clothing, the type of activity you are doing, the temperature of the air, the humidity of the air. The fact is that sweat does not mean you ‘got a good workout’. It only means you need to drink more water to rehydrate.  
  • Muscle burn: Feeling the burn may be an outdated saying, but the connection between muscles burning and the benefit of exercise is still alive and well in the minds of many.   You might be told you are ‘working’ certain parts of the body, implying that the burning sensations means you are burning more fat in those areas. The reality is that the burn is just the sensation of muscles fatiguing, not fat melting.  
  • Burning calories:  Although it appears to be pretty easy to find out how many calories you burn with cardio, it really isn’t. The calories your body burns, even for the same exact level of exercise, vary too much to be predictable and the numbers flashing in front of you are only a rough estimate. Burning calories is not as important as we have made it out to be.  More important for weight loss is doing cardio to feel better now, so you are less likely to reach for food to do that.

Take a moment to create your own list of Real-time Results from cardio to help you stay naturally and easily motivated to use this incredible resource for feeling and functioning your best every day.  

Next week, we’ll take a tour through the unique Real-time Results of strength training.  

Whole-heartedly,

Janet

Do you have exercise information overload?

/ Janet Huehls / 2 Comments

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This is fifth in the series on building self-motivation for exercise.  

Click here to read blog #1 , blog #2, blog #3, and blog #4.

The other day, I met a woman who was really motivated to exercise but was not doing it. She knew what was missing. She said, “I was getting so much conflicting information about exercise. I didn’t know what to do anymore, so I just stopped doing it.” If you’re in the same situation, let’s get you out of exercise information overload and free your motivation for exercise.

Condition number three for self-motivation is competence: the need for a sense of control over the outcome and sense of confidence you have the ability to get it.1  How does this apply to exercise? You might have conditions number one (autonomy) and two (relatedness) strongly in place, but if you don’t know how to exercise to get what you want from it, it’s like being lost in a forest without a map and a compass.

For competence, you need to know how to apply the natural laws of the body2 to exercise so you can confidently navigate your way to getting what you want, while skillfully avoiding the quicksand of exercises and programs that break these natural laws.

Use it to keep it. Your body is a “use-it-to-keep-it” system. The movements you use regularly, you get to keep. The ones you don’t use often will naturally fade away. That means that consistency is the most important factor and that means how you exercise must be do-able for you and fit your current lifestyle.

What you practice gets stronger. This natural law means what you practice (specifically) is what you get better at. Sounds simple, but there are many examples of how we break this natural law, such as doing programs designed for certain sports, for dancers, or for military professionals. Design exercise to practice the movements you want to do to function better in everyday life so you can achieve specifically what you want from it.

Natural growth rate. Your body has a natural rate of growth, which is about 10% per week. That is how much of an increase in exercise the body can tolerate per week. If you walk for 20 minutes, your body can adapt to a two-minute increase the next week. We break this natural law when we try to ‘jump start’ our progress by pushing the body hard right from the start to get quicker results. The pitfall is the body doesn’t work that way and you risk your body or your motivation breaking down.

You are unique. Your body is unique and responds differently to exercise than someone else’s. We break this natural law when we copy what worked for someone else or think we should be able to do the same amount of exercise we did the day before or exercise in a way someone else decides is best for us. Your body is also unique day to day, depending on factors like sleep, nutrition, and stress. This is where mindfulness puts you back in control of getting what you want from exercise. Paying attention to your body in the present moment, with kindness and curiosity, allows you to stay out of the ‘shoulds’.

Exercise science is the map. Mindfulness is the compass. When you know how to use them to follow the natural laws of your body, you can navigate through the ‘noise’ out there and have confidence you can stay self-motivated to get what you want from exercise.

Rethink This Week: Try using this statements as a way to simplify your exercise know-how and give you confidence you will get what you want from it.

  • What I do for exercise is do-able enough for my body and my lifestyle to keep me consistently exercising right now.
  • What I am doing is specifically designed for the skills and abilities I want from exercise right now in my life.
  • The level of exercise I do each week is at the ‘just right level’ for my body right now.
  • I use mindfulness to listen to my body, rather than basing what I do on the ‘shoulds’.

 

Exercise WELL,

Janet

 

 

  1. https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/self-determination-theory/
  2. Exercise Physiology, 8th edition, McArdle, Katch, Katch.