Hi everybody, Kris Stokes from Custom Fitness Personal Training Studio where your health comes first. Today, I want to ask you, Are you doing the wrong workout? No, I’m not going to lecture you on what kind of workouts might be the best for certain body types or anything like that, but I do want to bring something to your attention today. Let me start with a little bit of backstory here. We have a large population of runners in Amarillo and I absolutely admire them for the work that they put in and the miles that they cover each week, because there’s no way that I could do that.
As a novice runner for many years now, I have really, for the most part, only ever had the interest of clearing my mind, but don’t really have the determination to cover the ground that these folks do in a given week. So why do I bring up running? Well, it’s actually a personal story that I see unfold itself in many other people’s lives so often. You see, when I was in that transition between high school and college, I got mixed up into trying to model, and I say mixed up because it was not the place that I needed to be.
A Messy Situation
As I was in that process of trying to learn how to be a model and listening to all the advice being given to me, I started understanding from these people that I needed to change and improve my body and my thought process. Now of course I laugh at it, but I’ll tell you anyways that I should run because runners are skinny and fit. So, obviously, I thought if I run, I will be able to get these modeling jobs and I will be fine because they kept telling me that I was the wrong size for these things.
Well, seriously, that’s what I thought. It’s just messed up and it was something that was being put into my mind a lot. People were telling me they needed to do this. Somehow, if I changed my body, I would get everything that I needed to get, and I’d be able to do all these things. So I started running. Great. I was terrible at it and I had no good form. I started dieting, doing all of these terrible diets that are awful for your body, and pretty much everything else that you could imagine. But soon, I started to see the actual truth come into sight that what I was doing wasn’t working, and I really started to wonder why.
I couldn’t figure it out. I was beating myself up. All these other people did it and it worked for them, right? So what was I doing wrong? Well, I didn’t quite figure it out at that point. I just gave up on that goal because I realized that it wasn’t the right goal for me. So I moved away from the idea of modeling and went more into the idea of fitness and things like that. Through that, I began spending hours upon hours studying and researching, and there was a day I remember when I figured it out. I figured out that at that point in time in the industry, cardio was huge.
Cardio Is Huge, But Alone, It Does Not Get The Job Done
You did 30 minutes of cardio prior to your 30 minutes of weights, and then you did cardio every single day. The people that were teaching this were not always in the best shape. However, cardio alone doesn’t get it done, and all that research I was doing was starting to pull the current science out showing that you couldn’t do that through long-endurance cardio. You see, long-endurance cardio only makes you a smaller version of the shape that you already are. It doesn’t change your body.
So it was then that I realized that cardio wasn’t what I had needed all those years ago, and then I had done nothing wrong. When I dumped down and found my true why, which by the way had nothing to do with modeling at that point. Then I found out that I didn’t want to look like a smaller version of me. I wanted to look healthy and fit. I wanted to be healthy and fit. So I wasn’t just trying to appear smaller. I wanted to actually physically change in a good way. I think a lot of us get lost into that mix where we think, “I want to lose weight, so I’ll go and do X, Y, Z.” Maybe it’s the elliptical or the treadmill or something that’s a long state of your endurance.
But what ends up happening is, you turn into a smaller version of yourself, right? Kind of the same thing as calorie restriction. We end up being a smaller version of ourselves, but we don’t really change that much. So, I was still doing some running. I was still doing some cardio at the gym but I added in cross-training. I got in more cross-training with resistance, flexibility, and mobility work. It really broadened my horizons more than I ever had in exercise. See, you may or may not know this, but growing up I was in dance for about 10 years from ballet and jazz to drill team and all those things.
Cross-Training
So, I was active a lot, but I didn’t know a lot about exercise and health. All I knew was to follow what my team did and what my classes did to promote better health. So, not only did adding in cross-training improved my running, but it also began to re-shape my body. Now, here’s the cool part. I was able to lower my body fat percentage by 8%, and I can’t remember exactly what the time frame was. It was less than six months, but I was able to lower it by 8%. I maintained my weight. Now, I know that’s not good news for a lot of people. They’re like, “Gosh. I just really want to lose weight.” However, my body shape changed so much that people were asking me what I had done differently.
So I lost body fat percentage, which was great. It improved my health. I maintain my weight, which it could have changed, but it didn’t, and I was able to improve my body shape so much that people were making comments. Not only that, I felt like I had gotten into the best shape of my life within about a year after doing this. So, back to the current day, I now coach men and women alike to enhance their exercise routines by adding some element of cross-training.
We build in some resistance, flexibility, and mobility work to make sure that their run improves, but that their health also does. It could also just be someone who has always done strength training, and we encourage them to get some intensity training in there so we can build their heart as a muscle and help it to strengthen. Who knows, maybe you’re with me on this. You’ve seen people day after day at the gym on the treadmill and the elliptical, and they go in there for an hour or however long they’re on there. Everyday you see them, and they never change, right? You don’t see that change in their body.
Time To Change Things Up
The problem is that for those people, that leads to this vicious cycle of depression and frustration where they tend to push harder, they think, “Okay, I’ll run more. I’ll get it done more often. I’ll get three times a day instead of twice a day,” and it just isn’t working. It’s not that it needs to be done more, but that it needs to be changed up. It’s just not the right workout for that person’s body. Now, that can be a piece of their workout, but it’s probably not the whole thing. Just as I said with runners, we bring them in. We don’t make them stop running. We teach them how to cross-train so that they can then make their running better. That’s great!
If somebody loves the elliptical or the treadmill, they can keep doing that, but we want to build it to where they’re doing something that’s more beneficial to their body because it isn’t that you don’t need cardio. Believe me, you do. I have plenty of stories about people who’ve had heart attacks and all sorts of things that you definitely need that cardio. We have to strengthen that heart. It’s about finding the right balance between strength and cardio, flexibility, mobility, recovery. These things are essential to find balance in, especially when it comes to finding results.
So, if you are wanting the accountability and help with creating an action plan to see results, or are wanting someone to help create a workout plan to push you to your greatest potential, then that’s what we’re here for. We work with our clients not just on fitness, but also nutrition. Also, we will ensure that you are supported throughout every aspect of your health and wellness journey, and that includes making those eating changes. We have an entire team of dedicated professionals to help you with your health and fitness goals. To get your consultation set up, give us a call at 806-322-3188 or email us at info@customfitness.biz At Custom Fitness, we are YOUR personal trainers in Amarillo, Texas.
Have a great day!