Don’t worry, we are not expecting for you to be perfect.
But at some point you must realise how remastering your HEALTH is the most important action you must take.
Most of the Fitness industry rely on the expectations of 100% devotion to the cause of being fit and healthy, but trust me, not even the fitness industry gurus are perfect, even though they pretend to be.
During my career in the Fitness Industry (with over 20 years experience and more than 40,000 workouts supervised) I could collect enough data from training the general population, amateur and professional athletes to the point of becoming incredibly critical of conventional wisdom and the most popular applications of “exercise”. To begin the conversation around exercise, we must first understand that everyone is different and has different goals, genetic potential and commitment levels, but coming from the principle of humans trying to be fully functional, strong, lean, happy and productive i will invite you to take a step back to redefine our terms in regards to:
What really is exercise?
What is fitness?
And what does healthy really mean?
Exercise is a “stimulus”. A negative (catabolic) stimulus that will produce positive physiological adaptations (anabolic). Considering levels of fatigue and muscle fibres involvement was intense enough (stress) to triggers the mechanical changes in strength levels, muscle mass (hypertrophy), overall capability (conditioning) and natural hormonal environment.
Yes, you heard me, exercise is a stress signal, a negative stimulus. Your DNA as a overall living being doesn’t understand why you are struggling and experiencing momentary weakness, in a way doesn’t differentiate fighting for survival from exercising in a safe environment.
But your brain does knowns the difference and intrinsically make sense of the action of exercising. So now reflecting on the 2 million years of human evolution and human physiology, think for a second, would it make sense to exercise every single day of the week to be fully functioning, strong, lean, happy and productive?
What would happen to the human body if we were to exercise every day of the week?
Humans did not evolved to exercise very frequently or very often- simply because it is encoded in our DNA. We must save energy to survive, find or hunt food and we must store FAT to survive. It makes absolutely no sense to approach exercise with high volume and frequency if your goal is to be healthy and live longer. Period.
Without mentioning the higher wear and tear in our skeleton, risk of injury and pro inflammatory state is the consequences that “super healthy” are exposed to. I must remind you folks, we only have these joints to carry us throughout our lives.
Observing the trends and how humans respond to and apply exercise volume/ frequency & intensity, I’ve seen a lot of individuals accumulating unwanted side effects along with the benefits of exercising on the weekly basis, that was for me a critical turning point in my career 7 years ago and when I started to focus completely on finding the proper application of acquiring the benefits only from exercise and none of the side effects.
Quality over Quantity!
Fitness – The ability to perform any given task above your baseline threshold or energy system to succeed in such performance without compromising the functionality of your entire human system. Enhancing anyone’s specific “fitness level” would be simplified by saying that you are becoming more capable.
Now isn’t what most humans want? Become more capable to enjoy the recreational activities that we all love? Now, consider the fact that to become more capable you MUST strengthen your skeletal muscle system and doing so you will perform better at any given task you put your body through it, not my opinion, simple fact. What is the best form of using exercise as a tool to enhance the human fitness levels? I believe you would answer that one right: strength training!
Now based on evolutionary biology and human physiology we know for a fact that to stimulate such an enhancement the intensity of effort applied must be high enough to your body overcompensate (rest) and produce the positive adaptations you want.
Not Volume or Frequency, yes Intensity.
Again, reminding you about the “super fit” folks that are doing too much and too often exercise, they are simply not training hard enough and that is why they don’t need more recovery or can do it again and again (more wear and tear) and a lot of them are not even achieving the physicality improvements they wanted due to the over stressing of the human body strategy chosen.
How humans can enhance Fitness levels without compromising their HEALTH in the process? Quality over Quantity!
Health – In medicine the terminology of a healthy body can be as simple as the lack of disease or any pathological complication.
So what makes the human body healthy or healthier?
Like I have said at beginning of the post, it can be different to define for everyone depending of your goals, expectations, commitment levels, mindset, genetic potential, body type. Based on the fact that even though we are all humans with the same physiological body, at the same time we are all different and biochemically unique. Life experiences, environment, eating habits, cultural believes, positive or negative mind set, stressed or well balanced, we are all different and full of imperfection.
So don’t worry, at Intense Health we don’t expect you to be perfect and we believe the best answer to make your body healthy or healthier is getting to know YOU! Learn patterns of how you function and have been functioning for the last few years so we can introduce a strategy that has never been tried before, based in quality exercise not quantity. This will enhance your capacity of enjoying the recreational activities you love, protecting your joint while doing so. Educating you about keeping or improving your quality muscle mass is a important task to maintain over the years, giving significant meaning to all the subsystems of your body to up regulated and function at optimum level for a long and happy lifespan.
Health is the real Wealth, your body is the most important machine or asset you really own so when it comes to you health don’t be cheap or at least be critical to the conventional wisdom of majority and ride with the individuals that are living a quality lifestyle you desire to achieve.
The Intense Health individual is not perfect, but is critical and smart enough to experience quality over quantity strategy and understand that 80/20 rule, slow and steady will win the race in regards to long lasting healthy changes as a lifestyle.
The only question remaining is: What are you waiting for?
TAKE ACTION – And follow the success of numerous successful minds that are experiencing quality long lasting results with the Intense Health journey. Click on the results page to check their testimonials and after apply for your free trial.
I will see YOU inside of the training chamber.
Interlude training system: A moment in time, a 20 minutes absence, an escape!
HUMAN. REMASTERED.
Kind regards;
Marcelo Mesquita – Director / Master Trainer