Exercise can be your friend or foe, depending upon how well it has been structured to suit your goals.
Before we proceed with this discussion, it is important to dispel a common myth that plagues the industry, resulting in many people obtaining substantial results for their level of effort invested:
More exercise is not necessarily better
That’s right – you can do too much exercise. You can do so much exercise to the point where you are actually doing more harm than good!
Let’s consider two common of the most common goals and understand why more exercise can significantly inhibit your progress.
Lose Weight
Losing weight seems simple on the surface – just create a calorie deficit by performing exercise and restricting your calorie intake. But, when you delve deeper, you will realise that too much exercise can inhibit weight loss.
Building Muscle
If you want to build muscle, just lift more weights…right? Not necessarily. By performing too much weight training, you can actually stop, or reverse the muscle building processes.
So, why is too much exercise an issue for weight loss and muscle gain? Recovery.
Exercise, a form of physical stress, runs your body down. In a controlled manner, exercise is great. It requires energy to perform the bout of exercise and it also requires energy to recover from all that stress that you have placed on your body.
Too much exercise can inhibit your body’s ability to recover. You may feel run down, moody, ill, depressed, restless at night or not hungry. If you exercise far too much, you could actually place a significant strain on many of your organs and potentially cause long-term damage. This is what is known as “overtraining”, a condition that results from your body being unable to recover in between bouts of exercise.
So, how much exercise should I do?
Having covered the myth of exercising more, when it comes to the amount of exercise that you should do, this is a very, very broad question. You need to consider various aspects including:
- Your lifestyle and commitments
- Your level of commitment
- The time you have available
- What you feel would be realistic (not just ideal)
- Your goals
- Your body and it’s ability to cope
Most of these you can do on your own. Whilst it would be greatly advantageous for you to hire a personal trainer, to determine the best approach for you as an individual, here are some basic guidelines purely from a results point of view (note, they are very generalised for general fitness and may not suit your goals specifically):
- Have at least one day of rest from any intense exercise each week (more if you are relatively unfit)
- Do not perform more than one workout a day if you have never exercised regularly recently
- If you begin to feel run down, decrease the training load
- If you are not seeing positive results over a number of weeks, consider increasing or decreasing the amount of exercise you are performing
- Aim to perform a minimum of three exercise sessions a week
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