Tuesday tip: Think outside the gym

Tuesday tip: Think outside the gym 🏋🏼‍♂️

Whilst you can’t out-exercise your diet and diet is undoubtedly king when it comes to fat loss it’s obviously still important to be active and to exercise for lots of reasons – not least of which is health and well being.

It’s very hard to create a meaningful calorie deficit via exercise and activity alone. You have to work extremely hard to burn more than a few hundred calories in a workout. Studies show we usually over estimate cals burnt and how active we are. Even if you’re working out every day you may not be as active as you think if you spend the rest of the day sat down. So we are likely to perceive a workout as burning more calories than it actually does. There’s also a tendency after a tough workout to eat more- either because we reward ourselves for the perceived effort or because we’re hungry. There’s also a tendency to be generally less active too if you’re exhausting yourself in workouts.

The end result is that by being focused on workouts as the only source of calorie expenditure we can end up moving less generally and eating more.

So as well as workouts try to think beyond the gym. The calories you burn in a 45 min workout will be considerably fewer than what you burn being generally active for the rest of the day. So think about how you spend the rest of your day. Do you find yourself sitting more than perhaps you need to? Do you amble instead of walking with purpose? Do you take the lift instead of the stairs. Think beyond the gym and focus instead on making yourself more active – get up, stand instead of sit, walk faster, walk more!

Also don’t be tempted to eat exercise calories back – just treat them as bonus cals rather than something to eat back.

Happy Tuesday 🤗

Xx