No pain, no gain. Fitness Truth or Myth?

In collaboration with Cynergi and Nike at Urban Jungle

It’s April already. Why is it that so many people who sincerely, with all their hearts, resolve to turn 2017 into the year where they get fit and sexy, just to once again realise in June or December that they didn’t do it. Well let’s be positive today and hope that a lot of you have embarked on a new fitness program or joined a new gym in January and that you have been really good!

I have just joined Cynergi last month and as I said in my previous blog, I am getting accustomed to this newly refurbished gym, enjoying my weekly sessions with my personal trainer at this gym Aaron Kitcher and using some awesome machines. With Aaron, we have set a goal – Physically we are aiming to achieve more toning to my legs, abs, arm and back muscles across a spread of three months, an achievable goal I would say. Just in time for bikini time!

A personal training session is about one hour long including a warm up together followed my weight training or TRX suspension training and ending in a good stretch. Of course we have a chat and a laugh in between exercises. Otherwise what’s the fun in it haha!

We Must Persevere – No Excuses

How many of you have had this kind of experience of going crazy when deciding to get fit or when starting a new fitness program just to find yourself injured and in pain? If you are like the majority, it wouldn’t take long for you to become disheartened and quit, even if you were told to “work through the pain.” Well yes it is really really tough to still go out to the gym when all I wanna do is have a warm bath and jump onto the sofa in my cute and fluffy PJs sometimes or cuddle up with my baby daughter and play with her cute teddies! But NO – we can’t do that if you want to see a CHANGE in our body. We have to Just Do It as the NIKE slogan says.. We have to hit that gym and then sleep afterwards, more peacefully knowing we did something for ourselves!

No Pain No Gain.

This motto is popular in life but particularly in strength training. And there is some truth to it if your goal is to build muscle. Generally speaking, your body requires a training stimulus big enough to cause your body to adapt. In other words, you need to get your body out of its comfort zone in order to set the variation process in motion. If you do one push-up a day, you are not going to put on muscle. The training stimulus is too low. However, if you do a proper strength training workout twice a week over a longer period of time with enough push-ups to fatigue your muscles, your body will be forced to adapt and improve itself.

Experienced bodybuilders often exercise until complete muscle failure and thus optimise their adaptive responses. But these fitness enthusiasts also make sure to give their muscles plenty of time to recover before attempting their next strength training session.

TRX Suspension Training

This system is something I’m smitten with! What I like about this type of training is that nearly every exercise on a suspension trainer engages your core more than traditional moves do, because they require a lot more balance. The plank-based exercises on the TRX Suspension Trainer for instance aren’t solely dependent on the load (i.e. resistance). You can also adjust your difficulty level by challenging your stability. So let’s say you are doing a chest press and you have mastered the plank, Aaron suggests raising one leg off the ground, or chasing the active plank with a single arm push or pull. As we play with those plank variables, we discover that our core has to work harder to achieve the same quality of movement executed with two arms or legs! Will share more info on this in upcoming blogs!