One of the most common issues with people trying to lose weight is that they think they have to spend hours in the gym working out. I’ve seen it in all the gyms I’ve worked in,but believe it or not most people are spending a lot of time in the gym that they don’t need to.
Picture the following scene if you can.
Overweight girl (or guy) comes in religiously after work every day and spends at least 60 minutes on a treadmill. They might even put the incline up to 8 or 9% and spend most of their time walking up hill or on the cross trainer getting a good sweat on. The fitter ones will probably just jump strain into a jog or a fast run and go for a full hour, but at the end of the week they are disappointed because they are still not fitting into their favourite jeans.
Fair play to the because they are doing a massive 5 hours a week of exercise which is a lot more than most people, and is more than the current government recommendations
However the cycle continues and after a few weeks of frustration they give up, usually declaring that they have tried everything to lose weight and exercise doesn’t work.
This is happening in gyms all over the country and is one of the reasons why just getting a gym membership doesn’t work for most people. Getting a gym memberships is like walking into a restaurant and being asked to cook your own food. Yeah you know what you want and you can see all the shiny machines but you’re not really sure what you should be doing, so you do what everyone else is doing. It’s a classic case of the blind following the blind.
But anyway back to the Italian dude. His name is Vilfredo Pareto and he is responsible for what is known as Pareto’s Law or the Pareto principle.
Basically what this means is that you can get 80% of your results with only 20% of your effort and you can equate this with anything in your life. Seriously try it. Here are some examples.
I bet you if you have a look in your wardrobe you probably wear 20% of your clothes around 80% of the time.
How about your friends, I reckon you spend around 80% of your time with only 20% of your friends, watch 20% of your TV channels 80% of the time and if you have your own business 80% of your income will come from only 20% of your customers or even less. Here’s another one what about the foods you eat?
Check out Pareto’s Law Wikipedia Page
So what has this got to do with fat loss and exercise?
What if you could get your best fat loss results from only 20% of the time that you think is necessary to burn body fat. Well you can and that is how the Pareto Principle applies here. At our fit camps we probably only do about 60-70 minutes of high intense work each week, which is around 20% of the 5 hours a week that most people slog away on treadmills for.
Even with this we still manage to get amazing weight loss results. Check out the picture of Carmel below who is one of our fit campers. She managed the results below in less than 9 months with only 3 x 45 minute sessions each week.
If you can make 3 sessions a week and work hard for those 3 sessions and do it consistently over a period of time then you will get results. The culture that we live in these days is one of quick fixes when it comes to weight loss but the truth is that there isn’t really a quick fix. I’m sure that might not be what you want to hear, but I don’t want to mislead you. What I don’t want to do though is help you get results and get healthy and the way to do that is to be consistent in what you do.
The same applies to food, if you can be consistent in what you eat then its ok to go out and binge occasionally because it’s not the occasional binge that determines your results; it’s what you do consistently on a daily basis.
To join our next 4 week fit camp block starting next Monday and start to get results just like Carmel alove click on the link below
