People engage in fitness training for a multitude of different reasons and the stem from which a majority of these branch away from is improvement. Despite those who use exercise as a social event, the desire for self improvement is something all individuals who participate in exercise possess. But if 90% of people training in our gyms and running around our city are hunting results then why do we not see more dramatic improvements? Why do all your colleagues who ‘go to the gym’ everyday continue to show so very little physical change, run the tan in the same time and lift the same amount of weight? It is because people in general have a tendency to go through to motions when training. This is my time for the tan, this is my weight for the bench press and by operating at this sub maximal intensity the only thing that is certain is that results will continue to elude.

Think about the body’s response to exercise like playing a hole on a golf course. You could take out your putter from the tee and slowly tap the ball all the way down the fairway onto the green and into the hole. You may eventually get there but it is more likely that the course will close before you do. Alternatively and what most people do in golf but not with their fitness, is pull out a big, ugly looking driver and belt the living day lights out of the thing. You will get a lot further in a lot less time. The central nervous system (CNS) is like the golf ball, the harder whack you give it the more messages it will send to the body for adaptations to the stimulus. It basically says ‘That sucked, I never want to go through that hell again’ and so it releases all kinds of great hormones that illicit changes in the body to better cope with the next bout of exercise. If you’re staying in your comfort zone, doing the same routine week after week, your CNS thinks is on a holiday has no need to call for any major adaptations and therefore you will get no results.

So now we are ready to take that diver out of cupboard and get fit, how exactly do we do this in the gym? Through relatively short, highly intense workouts using movements that by their very nature provide a large amount of stress on the CNS. These workouts should last no longer than 20 minutes and by the end the participant should have shaky hands, burning lungs and nothing left to give but a tired smile and a few delirious, incoherent words between gasping breaths. To achieve this level of intensity the participant must try to get as much work done as quickly as they possibly can. This places them in a physical and mental state that is often referred to as “the special place” and can be defined as above 85-90% of maximal physical exertion. In order to achieve the most dramatic results we want to hang out here as long as possible, however, the closer we climb to 100% exertion the shorter our stay must be.

So if a greater intensity delivers greater results and the greater the intensity the shorter the duration then what can be said for the typical one hour gym session? As previously mentioned, impressive physical changes are a rarity rather than the norm and training at low intensity for long duration is the chief culprit.