What’s the ultimate in lazy behaviour in big box/commercial gyms?
Doing classes.
Closely followed by circling a gym doing random exercises on machines. Followed by random apps that spit out random exercises.
I once started a workout with a gym-owner mate and another guy, it was called the “deck of cards” workout. You can access this app and it randomly spits out and exercise with reps and you just keep doing them……I stopped after 3-4 minutes it was ridiculous!
Why is doing a class lazy? You’re doing it because you don’t have to think about planning a session (or circling the gym doing random stuff). In a nutshell, that’s why.
Remember if you don’t have a plan, you are planning to fail. It doesn’t matter what part of your life you’re applying this too, your employment, love life, your finances, your state of mind. No plan, no result.
As a fitness professional I know quite a bit about programming and session planning. The big names in classes whether its Les Mills or F45 generally, not every time but usually, deliver extremely basic sessions that will make you tired but will generally not improve you. Yes some will lose weight, some will get fitter (and some will get injured) but most won’t get much value out of them.
But at the end of the class participants are usually exhausted and that is what tells them it must have worked. This being the single most misunderstood part of exercise and fitness.
There are however certain conditions in which a class can work. The first condition is the class is small, limited to 6 or possibly 8 people. This permits the coach to spend enough time to actually, well, coach. Classes of 20-30 people or more, the coach/instructor is basically a cheerleader.
And secondly with a smaller class or what’s more commonly known as small group training, it’s possible to use a whiteboard or screen to explain the session in broad terms enabling participants to determine what would be more or too challenging and to get the exercise scaled or changed.
Larger classes often place participants out of their depth in basic exercise competency and/or skill-set and results in these people poorly executing or rushing exercises. This leads to several key issues being firstly injury (an accident or worse development of a chronic long term problem) and also a lack of results.
The primary issue with classes however is you have no control over what you are doing. Sounds very simplistic, right? And it is because if you’re planning to let someone else determine what they want you to do, so truly what control do you have over your preferred outcomes?
None.
But typically your expectation is fat-burn because the class is called “Fat-Burn Zone” or “Fat-Blast” or “Muscle Up” means you will get muscly etc etc. How can someone in a room in for instance New Zealand writing session plans for a global program get a plan right for you? They cannot, it’s very simple.
The only way to get muscle, lose fat or get fitter is plan out something that works for you based on first principles which starts at where you are now. Next where do you want to get to and how will you get there are the subsequent questions. The actual intervention isn’t the easiest thing to determine but there are a lot of resources out there.
I will add a link to my free eBook below as one resource.
I strongly urge you to consider planning your own exercise regime. There is a very high percentage of people out there unsatisfied with their own level of fitness, their weight, how they sleep, how they look in the mirror.
Doing a weekly class could be a part of your plan. But classes can never be all you do.
Take control and plan for success!
