Hitting the Wall

In any form of daily exercise, the body will have a stored amount of ATP to get by.   Your body has to maintain digestion, heart beat, contemplative thinking, locomotion, hormonal balance in addition to dealing with a daily exercise routine.  Humans have been able to condense all the above (not counting the daily exercise) to efficient levels of burning up calories.  It has been measured to be about 3-4 liters of water and 2000 calories daily.  That's an average and demands change depending on the amount of work, walking, disease your carry.  So with the old concept of "you burn up what you eat"....if you eat more than normal-it gets stored as fat.  If you are more active than normal, you maintain weight.  With the invention of social media, the couch potato routine has taken over many lives and obesity is rampant.  If you have never like exercise and then dive into it after 20years of nothing, you will either get hurt and fail, be lucky and find that you like running, of give up because you picked the wrong way to start.  Signing up at a gym that is having a sale is not the correct way to go that is unless you have some knowledge of successful lasting exercise in the past.  This does not mean signing up for a local fast pitch softball team since it was your love 20 years ago.  The routine has to be somewhat age specific and match the lifestyle/career.  (cant just quit your day job so we have to work it in)

Step in the power of an Exercise Physiologist.  As I have mentioned in previous blogs, experience speaks for itself.  A newly hired personal trainer at Planet Fitness may not have as much experience as an EP who took extra time in college to learn about the human body.  (I love Planet Fitness and work out regularly-however I also am a runner, bodybuilder, yoga instructor, and sports medicine physician so there is some training in my background)  Being accountable to a "3rd party" will increase the chances of success and having an Exercise Physiologist contemplate your BMI, Metabolic Rate, personal loves, career limitations, economic level, outdoor environment, fluctuating body dynamics and restrictions will take the guessing out and save time and money on your journey.  If you don't believe me, write down how many times over the last 10 years you tried to start an exercise program, how much it cost, how much you paid for medical insurance in the last 10 years and all your co pays for immediate care visits, cough and cold medicines, prescription medicines for ongoing medical disease (usually related to being overweight!!!)  Once you tally this up, call your local exercise physiologist (feel free to call my office 847 593 3330 and ask about price for Aimee Weber, EP at our Fit Academy) and find out about cost to enroll in a training program for 4 weeks.  (For an average American, if you make it past 4 weeks, there is a decent chance to continue to 6 months.  After 6 months, change is usually permanent.)  The total amount you spent over the last 10 years will overshadow the amount a good Exercise Physiologist will charge unless you hire someone like Jillian Micheals (she's not an EP).