More Exercise is Not Always Better
When starting a new exercise program, it can be really tempting to do as much as possible in order to maximise the benefits of exercise. Consider these viewpoints that seem to make perfect sense:
- I should run more to burn more calories and therefore burn more fat
- I should lift weights for longer and more often in order to build more muscle
- My fitness will improve faster if I train three times a day, seven days a week!
There is one major flaw in this approach to exercise. Recovery is not being considered.
Recovery is the time in which your body has an opportunity to repair and rebuild itself. Without giving your body a chance to recover, you run the risk of overtraining. Overtraining means many things including:
- Hitting a plateau and not seeing any results
- Reducing your appetite
- Gaining fat, losing muscle and decreasing your level of fitness
- Becoming moody and easily irritated
- Reducing quality of sleep
- Affecting your hormonal levels
Let’s consider muscle gain, fat loss and fitness improvement and see why it is not always better to do more exercise. Because this can be a highly complex topic, I’m just going to touch on the main points.
Muscle Gain
No muscle growth happens inside the gym. Lifting weights is only stimulating muscles to grow when they can, which is when they are rested. Exercising muscles too often is, in my experience, the number one reason why people do not see muscle growth.
Lifting weights for too long or too often can also increase the amount of cortisol secretion which encourages muscle breakdown.
Doing too much can inhibit sleep cycles. Quality sleep is imperative for hormonal release to assist in muscle synthesis.
It is imperative that you feed your body to encourage recovery. A reduced appetite will inhibit your body’s ability to build muscle.
Fat Loss
Exercising too often will run the body down and thus will inhibit the body’s ability to oxidise fat tissue and maintain muscle mass. Muscle mass is key to fat loss, since muscle is a highly metabolically active tissue, meaning that it expends lots of calories just being there!
The intensity of each workout will lessen due to your body being so run down. Thus, each workout will expend a lower number of calories.
Cortisol again plays an important role with fat loss. High cortisol levels, which can result from excessive exercise, can encourage fat disposition.
Sleep cycles will be inhibited. Good quality sleep is paramount to fat loss as a number of studies have shown. The exact chemical pathways are still up for debate at present.
Hormones are highly responsible for the amount of body fat that you can oxidise. If these are out of balance, which can be the case from too much exercise, you will not experience optimal results.
Fitness Improvement
Your fitness improves as a result of your body recovering from exercise and thus developing it’s cardiovascular fitness. By inhibiting the recovery process, you inhibit your body’s ability to enhance it’s fitness level.
Muscles are unable to repair and rebuild themselves due to heightened cortisol levels, reduced sleep quality, imbalanced hormonal levels and reduced calorie intake.
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So, it should be fairly obvious that recovery is imperative to big results. If you’d like to learn more on this topic, I’d suggest signing up to our free weight loss course, Conquering Your Body.
