Even the fittest of people can fall out of love with exercise.
In fact, a couple of years ago, top personal trainer Nicola Addison – who’s trained Elle Macpherson, Daisy Lowe and Erin O’Connor – didn’t train for a year.
She says there are many types of motivation, but two of the major ones are intrinsic and extrinsic:
- Intrinsic motivation is the self-desire, the ability to self motivate.
- Extrinsic motivation comes from influences outside of the individual.
“I had fully ran out of intrinsic motivation,” Addison explains. “I knew myself well enough to know that. So I turned to the help of one of my trainers, Luis, to motivate me.”
Sometimes you just get bored of your exercise regime, you might plateau in your progress, and making yourself do something you really don’t want to do is incredibly hard.
It happened to me. At uni, I would go to the gym a few times a week, take dance classes and swim. But then I moved to London, started working, life got in the way and I told myself I could neither afford to exercise (be that joining a gym or taking classes) nor find the time.
Excuses, really. But it meant I’d completely fallen out of love with exercise. I didn’t like that fact, and I’d done sporadic workouts or classes in a bid to kickstart my fitness but had never got anywhere.
Slogging it out on the treadmill for 40 minutes just wasn’t fun – and wasn’t really making any difference to my fitness.
It’s not in the slightest bit new that resistance training and weights are the key to getting fit, but when you want to shift the pounds, it’s hard to shake the idea that you need to do cardio, as that’s what was drilled into us all for years.
Plus, running on a treadmill for however long is easy as you don’t have to think – working out with weights and scary-looking machines means you have to know what you’re doing and plan your workout.
The thing is, just doing cardio isn’t very effective if you want to burn fat – you need to build muscle to boost your basal metabolic rate. And by doing that, you’ll burn more fat over the course of the day.
“Muscle is three times as dense as fat (so you are heavier),” Addison explains, “But the same weight of fat over muscle will take up 19 per cent more bodyspace. That’s why we (and most fitness professionals) will recommend a measuring tape over the scales any day!”
Strength training doesn’t have to mean lifting heavy weights, you can do brilliant resistance training using just your own body.
Addison told me she could get me back into fitness in three weeks. I was sceptical, but as I was desperate to rediscover my fitness motivation, decided to take her up on the offer.
With just three workouts for three weeks at Addison’s personal training studio in Knightsbridge, Eqvvs Training, I re-realised how good it feels to work your body and use your muscles.
What’s more, with each session lasting just half an hour, it was never daunting. Addison not only understands that most people don’t like exercise, but she admits that the main reason she works out is to look good.
Booking sessions into your diary means you have to go, and having someone pushing but encouraging you is really motivating. Your colleagues, friends and family may always be urging you to just have a piece of cake or skip the gym, but personal trainers genuinely always have your health in mind.
For a personal trainer, Addison is refreshingly normal – she drinks alcohol and her favourite food is curry, which I was thrilled to hear as I turned my face tomato-red in the gym.
By doing lots of different and creative exercises, I never got bored and not only started looking forward to my workouts but genuinely felt a bit sad when I had a few days without a session. Could this really be me?
The workouts were based around resistance training and compound exercises – there was strictly no cardio, but I finished each session sweaty, red in the face and was frequently out of breath. I felt it in my muscles the day after each workout, in the most glorious and satisfying of ways.
But of course, if you really want to lose weight and get fit, you have to look at your diet too. As I didn’t want to completely overhaul my lifestyle for three weeks, Addison recommended little changes such as not drinking caffeine after noon and making sure I eat dinner at least two hours before bed.
And the thing is, it helps. When you start feeling fitter, you genuinely want to eat healthier, and vice versa. It’s an upwards spiral.
Addison is a big advocate of the 80:20 rule – that is, making healthy choices 80 per cent of the time and allowing yourself to enjoy what you want for the remaining 20 per cent.
And she takes this attitude to fitness too, saying it’s better to be consistently quite good than inconsistently great – don’t workout crazy intensely for seven days in a row and then do nothing for three months.
“You are far better off being consistently good at 80 per cent than being inconsistently excellent at 100 per cent!” she told me.
After three weeks of training I lost two per cent of my body fat, which was a pretty pleasing side effect of simply trying to rediscover my fitness motivation.
In fact, one of the best things I’ve taken away is about my posture – young women in particular have the tendency to stand with our pelvises at an angle that makes our bums stick out (probably subconsciously influenced by Kim Kardashian).
But if you tilt your pelvis so it’s vertical and suck your tummy in, you look so much leaner and slimmer. It’s revolutionary.
Of course, having a personal trainer makes things easier, but there are so many free online workout plans and videos you can find that tell you exactly what exercises to do and how to do them. That way, you don’t have to think.