Fitstreet - Mobile Personal Training in Surrey that guarantees results

Not seeing results yet?

For some of you, your fat loss efforts may seem too slow. After starting the Strive for 5 program nearly everyone feels better and more energetic almost immediately. But even after several weeks, some of you do not see a noticeable change in the mirror, so far as fat is concerned. After sweating hard for weeks you go to step on the bathroom scales and there's no change! Of course, if you haven't been following your program to the letter, it's clear why this may have happened. However, this situation can also occur when you've been training hard and careful about limiting your eating portions.

Let me explain what's going on. Fat is stored in several places, within your muscles as 'intramuscular' fat, under the skin as 'subcutaneous' fat and around the organs as 'visceral' fat. When you become less active, body fat starts to store itself in your muscles first. Your muscle tissue can become 'marbleised'.

After these intramuscular stores are full, the fat spills over into subcutaneous stores, which is when body fat starts to become more noticeable in the mirror. Finally, if you are particularly unhealthy or overweight, excess fat will have started to spread into your visceral stores.

When you begin to exercise regularly and eat more healthily, this fat storing process tends to work in reverse. Intense interval training and progressive weight training tend to draw significant fat from your intramuscular stores first, so instead of seeing a major change in the mirror, you may instead feel your muscles getting firmer. That's a good sign. Don't give up!

Fat loss from your subcutaneous stores becomes more evident in the mirror once your intramuscular stores have shrunk a little bit. The more body fat you have to lose, the slower the change may appear to be in the mirror, but believe me, fat is being burnt - it's just deep within your muscles.

Women with large thighs and calves often worry that resistance training will make these muscles even larger. The fact is that their thigh and calf muscles may well be 'marbleised' with fat. Resistance work will actually draw from those intramuscular stores, so that the muscles become leaner and more elongated rather than more bulky. Women simply cannot get bulky through weight training, unless heavily supplementing.

By lifting heavier weights, you will be increasing your lean tissue (muscle) at the same time that you are losing fat. Since muscle weighs more than fat, you could well be under the illusion that your weight isn't shifting, when in fact you are very likely to be dropping body fat while gaining lean tissue. In some cases this can lead to an equal drop in body fat with a simultaneous rise in lean tissue. Result - no weight loss according to the scales!

Believe me, you're going to have nights when you look in the mirror and say "all this work and I look the same", and mornings when you just can't believe the improvement. Don't base your enthusiasm about your fitness program on either
of those short-term impressions. Don't get despondent - Stick with it!

Many of you will only see limited changes for the first 5 weeks or so. That
seems like an awfully long time to wait, but remember, fat doesn't "spot reduce" - it comes off in sheets, like an onion. The upper body generally shows improvement first. But expect that the areas you've always thought were "too fat" will still look too fat for a while, even though you feel good, look "healthier", and can gradually measure that your fat percentage is going down.

There's so much pressure to see quick results that it's easy to forget the point
of this, which is quite frankly to lose body fat and keep it off for life. Don't ignore increases in strength and the overall feeling of health and well-being along the way. These are just as important.

If you were able to look inside your body's cells and see your "good" enzymes increasing, your energy multiplying, your cholesterol falling, your arteries clearing, your blood vessels becoming more efficient, your muscles strengthening, your bone-density improving, and all of the remarkable changes that this program triggers, it would be clear that the scale and callipers are just insufficient ways of measuring success. As these internal changes become significant, your external progress accelerates. Some people just start out needing more internal changes than others, because of their prior lifestyle, long-term yo-yo dieting, and other factors. Please understand that if you're following the Strive for 5 exercise program and carefully limiting your eating portions, the progress is happening, whether it's obvious or not.

So don't force the numbers. They'll come. Adhere to this winning pattern of
action that will produce results if you follow it consistently. If instead, you insist on measuring your success by whether or not the scale or calliper show progress today, you're creating a game you can lose faith in. You're following a program that works - keep the faith!