1. 1. You end up spending up to the equivalent of a workout getting there! The majority of people live at least 5-10 minutes away from their chosen gym, total this up over the week and you get at least an hour’s wasted travel time that could have been spent running in the great outdoors.
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2. Are you sure you have an effective workout? 9 times out of 10 the people that I see in gyms, either do the same thing every time they go into the gym and without variety and a challenge you will hit a plateau and your workouts will have no effect, or have no game plan go in and just wing it. A lot of thought should go into your workouts, with a full body approach, challenges and progression in every session.
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3. I’m super fit I can run at 14km an hour on the treadmill….wrong. For all you gym cardio demons, get outside!!! When training outside you work twice as hard, particularly all you treadmill runners. With the right trainers to take away the impact on your joints, there’s no excuse. The treadmill does half the work for you, due to the pull back of the belt, not only meaning you burn less calories than the treadmill tells you, but also putting you at risk of injury due to muscles imbalances particularly in the quads.
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4. It’s a waiting game. Take a stop watch in with you the next time you go to the gym, and total up on a busy night, how long you spend waiting for all the equipment that you need. Bet you actually spend about 20 minutes in total hanging around, so that hour long workout you told your friends you did was actually only 40 minutes.
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5. Just because you’re on a piece of equipment doesn’t mean you’re working hard. The amounts of people I see in the gym that don’t even break out in a sweat….what are you doing? If you’re not sweating even a tiny bit then you certainly not working hard enough! If you’re excuse is that you are super fit, up the incline and the speed I bet that problem gets sorted quick enough. Sweating is the body’s way of cooling you down when your heart rate has increased and the blood is pumping round your body, it’s also a way of showing that you’re working at an intensity that will have a health benefit for your body.
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6. Nutrition, nutrition, nutrition. This is the main part of a healthy lifestyle mainly because it’s the biggest. A twenty minute, high intensity cardio workout burns just over 200 calories. A bottle of orange lucozade has 280 calories. Drinking a bottle of lucozade while running on the treadmill for 20 minutes, you still have consumed 80 more calories than you have burnt off…..get my drift?
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7. Useless equipment. You pay that massive monthly fee because there is lots of fantastic shiny looking equipment that surely you will use. Truth is the majority of it is useless and can be done with free weights which get you to work harder and are better for you long term.
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8. Mirror syndrome. Mirrors mirrors everywhere. The majority of people train what they see. The result is bad posture that long term can result in severe back problems. A full body approach should always be used and you should never train what you can see in the mirror alone, remember we have back muscles that need strengthening people!
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9. Gyms don’t have me.
Great article... but it's like you stopped writing :-(
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