Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 37: Changing your relationship with exercise
Transcript
- Cameron Cummings: ⁓ Now what I wanted to talk about in today's was about changing your relationship with exercise. Now, I'm gonna make this a slightly shorter episode because there's about 101 things that go through my head about this, but I wanted to touch kind of on some key things around how you can have a better relationship with exercise. And the first place I would start is I would stop worrying about tracking the amount of calories you burn. Whether it's a run, whether it's a cycle, whether it's a gym session, a tennis session, whatever it is. I get that it's nice to an Apple Watch and fit a bit on and until you see that and that's fine, but do not make that the focal point. You should not get to the end of that if you're playing badminton with your friend and you go and play for an hour and then you kind of look, how many calories did I burn? And that becomes more important than the fact that you got to have fun with your friend, get a bunch of cardio in, get a huge mood lift, just feel really, really bloody good and you're focused on what? The calorie expenditure? That is not a great way to look at. your exercise. And the same applies here with strength training. Calorie expenditure calculations of a smartwatch for resistance training, strength training in particular, is woefully inaccurate. It often, but not always, heavily overinflates the numbers. You're not going to be expending 700 calories in a strength training session. It's just not happening, right? It's not. That's not why we're doing our strength training, right? So the first place that I would start, if you want to improve your relationship with exercise, is just to put that as a very much like a, you know, if you look at it you're like, ⁓ that tennis session burnt quite a lot of calories, cool, great, that's fine. Know that it's probably not perfectly accurate, but you can be positive about that, and that's fine, we can be objective. But we don't wanna get too caught up that that was the sole focus of it. So that's one thing I would say. Another thing that I would say that I think's quite useful to think about, is start to think about, okay, why am I exercising? Because a lot of the time what happens is we get very caught up when we're in a weight loss phase of thinking, right, I need to exercise for weight loss. it's like, really, weight training is not special in any way when it comes to weight loss. It doesn't do anything magical for actual fat loss, right? You expend some extra calories, yeah, but you could run, you could cycle, you could probably walk. and you'd be burning probably a similar amount of calories, maybe not walking, maybe a fast walk or kind of up a hill or something, but still, you could be doing lots of other things that expend similar or even more calories to it. So if that's not the best thing to do for weight loss, why would you do it in a weight loss phase? Well, we know that weight training, or strength training, resistance training, whatever you want to call it, is so much more than that. It allows us to improve our body composition, it allows us to get stronger. Now, For a lot of people, when we talk about getting stronger, people often think of you know, like you know, world's strongest man or bodybuilders or whatever, or you know, lifting ridiculously heavy weights. But let's contextualise this. If you are a bit stronger, you start to feel better for it, right? Because when you go to pick something up, you don't worry about doing your back in in the same way. You don't worry about the fact that something's a little bit heavy because you're strong enough to do it. It makes you feel capable, so that's one of the biggest benefits of strength. And of course, Building strength then has that knock-on effect which is building more muscle mass. And having a little bit more muscle is an incredibly important thing for long-term health. It's really easy to kind of get caught in that dialogue of, you know, like, ⁓ but I don't want to get bulky. You won't, like, you're not gonna get bulky. I've trained clients for 11 years and I've never had, and this generally applies to female clients, because mostly this is where it comes from, where you're like, ⁓ I don't want to get too bulky. And it's like, it just doesn't happen by accident. It's... Kind of a bit like thinking that you, I always make this analogy, but it's a bit like thinking that if I jump in my car, my wee Fiesta, that I'm gonna turn into Lewis Hamilton and I don't want to be an F1 driver, so I'm not gonna drive my Fiesta. That just doesn't make sense, right? It's nowhere near that level. If you want to get too bulky, you probably need to be in a calorie surplus and then diet, calorie surplus then diet, many, many, many, many, many times over. You need to train really, really hard. You need to train probably a lot more than you're training right now. and you need to do it for a very, very, very long time. So your time horizon might be four, five, six years before it's probably even possible for anyone to think that you're a little bit on the bulkier quote unquote side. Most people are never going to achieve that, and like, know, that amount of training in their lifetime, nevermind over a four or five year period. So it's really a non-issue. So having more strength, having more muscle mass is so important because it changes our body composition favorably. You look more toned, you look. like give more definition, you have a better shape, you hold your body weight better, and I see this a lot. I've had clients who have gone through a big weight loss phase with me and then over six to nine months we've got into a sort muscle gain or a performance phase where they've got fitter and stronger, and then we've gradually allowed weight to creep back up to a certain extent, not all the way back up obviously, but let's say someone drops 15 kilos and we maybe have allowed their weight over nine months to creep up four or five kilos, and they actually look better, four or five kilos heavier. than they were from their start point, right? So they look way, way different. It's very clear that they're in really good shape, et cetera, so that's really important too. And having more muscle mass has such a pronounced effect on your long-term health as well. So that's another way that we can start to chip away at our relationship with exercises. Don't worry so much about the calories, but also remember why you're doing things and get a better understanding. And it can be multiple things. If you ask me why I weight train, I could say, well, it's actually really good for my mood. Like I feel much better after it. I feel... Like I get a bit of a buzz out after it as well. If I do a good training session, I feel like my mood's higher, my energy's higher, so that's one thing, and that's nothing to do with the physical changes. It obviously makes me look better, that's another one. It makes me feel strong, it keeps my body moving well. It means I don't feel stiff all the time, because what I really notice is because I train quite regularly, if I don't exercise for two or three days, I really feel it. I'm definitely not someone who likes to go. more than like three days probably at a time without exercising, not in an obsessive way, just in terms of like what my body feels best. I always feel stiffer when I don't train than when I do. So all these things can factor in as well. Another thing that I've kind of touched on there as well in terms of improving our relationship with exercise is understanding the impact it has on our wellbeing, right? If we talk about mental wellbeing as well. It's very, very common that a client will say to me, at different phases. Maybe they've been in a weight loss phase for a period of time, some life stuff started to happen, and there's still maybe in a weight loss phase, they're cracking on with that, but they're then sort of saying to me, do you know what? Right now the gym's really good for my mental health. It's really good for just clearing my head. It's really good for giving me some breathing space. Work's really stressful right now. It's really helping me out. You know, it could be anything for some parents who, it's just a breather, right? It's 30 minutes of peace and quiet as well, unless you're training at home, in which case you might not be getting that. That's what it provides you. So I think this is really, important as well is that it also gives you that. And I think this is something that can be really, really helpful too, is if you see exercising as something that's really, really good in terms of looking after your mental health in the long term, it can also be really effective because I think sometimes people get really, really caught up in the physical bit of it, forgetting about that. And I also think acknowledging it makes it more likely that you'll do it. So let's say you are going through a stressful period at work, it can be really, I'm too busy for the gym. It's like, well, here's another way of looking at it. What if you went to the gym anyway so it makes you feel less stressed, less overwhelmed, and less busy? It's not gonna objectively make you less busy, but I see this all the time with clients who are feeling quite stressed with work. Then they go to the gym and they're like, ⁓ do you know what? I feel much better. I feel in a much better head space because you can get so wrapped up, and I've done this before, and so caught up with work that you forget how much of a difference actually going and exercising makes, right? So. We want to be quite mindful of these things because it does have a pronounced effect and it does make us feel better as well. So I think those are a few things that we can start to look at when we're looking at our relationship with exercise. Now there's lots more we could go into and lots more we could change and this idea of, I guess, a final point is. that it's really good as well to see our bodies as something that are not just about image, right? Because sometimes that's what happens. It's all about the way you look, the way you look, the way you look, but you forget that body is the thing that carries around and does everything for you day to day that allows us to do anything, right? So looking after that, feeling a sense of physical competence, feeling fit, feeling strong, moving well throughout the day, that also has a really big knock-on effect too. And actually going to the gym, running, cycling, it doesn't really matter what it is. almost any form of exercise makes you feel more physically competent. It makes you feel better that you are capable of doing these things, right? So I think that's also something that's worth touching on. But hopefully that was helpful in terms of maybe a little bit of beginning to reframe exercise. I'll probably do a more in-depth episode down the line, but I wanted to touch on some of that because I think it's important. And if you are struggling a bit with the exercise side of it, you don't feel like you've got much direction, you're doing the classic going to the gym and turning up and doing a few of this, a few of that, and then going home, then it might be time to get some coaching and crack on so you can see some big visual differences as well as get a really good handle on your nutrition and your relationship with food too. If you are interested in one-to-one coaching, then you can click on the link in the show notes and that link will take you to the little form you can fill out to find out more about you. and to book a call for one-to-one coaching. There's of course no pressure. If you're a good fit, then you'll have space, I suppose. You'll be able to come on as a one-to-one client and we'll take it from there. If however I think there's somewhere else you should go or someone that could help you better, I will also push you or if there's a direction I feel you should go in, I will nudge you that way. And if you are just kind of wanting to get a bit of a feel for anything, if there's any questions you have, et cetera, there's also the link to my WhatsApp number as well in the show notes so you can pop me little message if you've got any suggestions for future episodes, et cetera, et cetera. you're welcome to drop me a message there. But otherwise, have a great day and I'll speak to you soon.