Your Top Fitness Question Answered: How Long Does It Take To See Results Once You Start Exercising?
Fitness is the key to a happy and healthy life. There are fitness clubs in virtually every town and city in the country, so you don’t have to travel far to find a place to exercise.
Cardiovascular and weight exercises can elevate your mood and make you feel better. If you have not exercised in a long time, you will feel more energized and happy after your first workout session. Of course, your muscles and joints may be sore, but that is natural because you’re finally waking them up.
Do you have exercise goals that you want to reach? Are there specific results you’re trying to achieve for your physical or mental health? If so, the speed of the results will vary based on the goals and aspirations you have for your health.
Most people want to achieve the following results from their exercise workouts:
Weight loss
Better breathing
More energy and stamina
Increased strength
Increased muscle mass
Thinner waist
Lift more weight
Look and feel better
Attract more women or men
Do any of these goals sound familiar? Losing weight is perhaps the number one goal of most people who exercise and work out in the gym. But how many of these people actually achieve their weight loss goals?
You’ve heard the countless stories of people making a New Year’s Resolution to lose weight and get in shape during the New Year. But then, after about two weeks in the gym, they stop working out and forget about their fitness goals. Why? What happened?
People get discouraged. If they don’t see immediate results when they look in the mirror, they stop putting in the effort to exercise. So you must learn to break that habit if you ever want to meet your fitness goals. Otherwise, you’ll end up just like those who quit and never achieve anything.
Patience and Consistency
There are two types of people who fail at exercise.
People who get discouraged and quit quickly
People who quit exercise after achieving their goals
You must plan for the long game by making exercise a lifestyle change rather than a temporary solution. Even if you aggressively train in the gym with high-intensity workouts and lose weight after two weeks, what comes next? Are you going to keep up the training or quit exercising altogether?
Patience and consistency are how you achieve sustainable long-term results. Develop a daily exercise regimen for each day of the week and stick to it. And when you achieve the desired results, aim higher by creating more challenging goals for yourself.
How Long Does it Take for Results
Everyone wants to know when the results will come. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to answer that questions because so many factors contribute to the speed of the results. These factors include:
Current weight and fitness level
Amount of experience in exercising
Access to a gym and exercise equipment
The intensity of your exercises
Level of emotional support available
Professional guidance / personal trainer
Nutrition and diet
Desired goal
Let’s look at some examples of fitness goals and the average amount of time it takes to achieve them:
Weight Loss – Minimum 1 to 3 weeks
Building muscle mass – About 3 to 6 months
Better aerobic endurance – Minimum 1 to 2 months
Lower blood pressure – Around 1 to 2 weeks
Reduced stress and better mood – Immediately after a good workout
These examples assume you are already eating healthy and exercising at least 30 to 60 minutes per day for a minimum of 4 days per week.
How to See Results Faster
Would you like some tips on how to see results faster from exercise? Let’s look at the six helpful tips below.
1) Strength Training
Strength training (aka resistance training) can burn extra calories from your body for hours after your workout and throughout the night when you rest. It can also build your muscle strength and improve your muscle tone.
Strength training exercises are any physical exercises that enhance endurance and strength. You can use dumbbells, barbells, weight machines, and isometric bodyweight exercises to strength train.
The best examples of strength training exercises include:
Leg squats
Push-ups
Crunches
Pull-ups
Bicep curls
Deadlifts
Walking lunges
Overhead tricep extensions
Add some of these exercises to your workout regimen, and the results will come sooner than you think.
2) Increase Workout Intensity
This tip relates to strength training because it requires you to increase the intensity level of your workouts.
However, you don’t necessarily need strength training to increase your intensity levels. The idea is to take whatever exercises you are doing now and do them harder or faster to burn more calories and build more strength.
For example, suppose you jog on the treadmill at 3.0 mph for 30 minutes per day. You may notice some weight loss after the first couple of weeks of jogging. But then, you might not see any more weight loss after the next couple of weeks.
Why not? Lack of intensity.
If you don’t see results or stop seeing results from your current workout routine, it is a clear sign you need to increase the intensity of your workout. Otherwise, you will only be working out to maintain the weight and strength you already have rather than losing more weight and building more muscle.
Of course, you may only have a goal to maintain your current weight and strength, which is fine. But if you’re still trying to improve your weight and strength, you need to boost the intensity of your workouts.
3) Allow Yourself Time to Recover
Training hard at the gym is excellent, but you don’t have to overdo it. Your body needs time to recover from the intense exercises and workouts you’ve put it through, especially if you’ve just started your regimen.
Recovery time allows your torn muscles to recover and rebuild into stronger and more massive muscles. If you don’t give your muscles time to recover, they won’t be able to rebuild themselves and get bigger. Then you could end up pulling or injuring a muscle if you overwork it.
Three days should be enough time to allow a particular muscle group to recover. That is why most weightlifters will work on one specific muscle group each day they go to the gym.
For instance, a weightlifter might do chest on Monday, back on Tuesday, arms on Wednesday, legs on Thursday, etc.
4) Improve Your Diet Even More
How well are you sticking to a strict nutritional diet? Are you eating any cheat meals or snacks?
Some people get to a point where they work out as intensely as possible but still fail to see new results. When this happens, the reason is almost always due to poor food choices.
Sticking to a nutritional diet is not easy. It can even be more complex than your exercises because you must focus on eating right every day. You never get a break from it.
When you begin a diet regimen, you may have one or two comfort meals per week to help you transition into better eating. Then it won’t be such a shock to your body to start eating healthier because you still have some comfort foods in your regimen.
Eventually, however, you’ll have to continue to transition away from comfort foods after you grow accustomed to eating healthy foods. The ultimate goal is to transition away from them entirely.
5) Switch Your Workout Routine
Have you been doing the same workout routine for several weeks? If so, you have probably stopped noticing weight loss or muscle gains.
The human body can recognize and adapt to workouts when they are the same each week. You cannot build strength and endurance if your body adapts to your workout routine.
For this reason, you must switch to a new workout routine every couple of weeks. The new routine should include new exercises you didn’t do in your previous routine. Then your body and muscles will get shocked and have to learn to adapt all over again. That is how you maximize results.
6) Hire a Personal Trainer
You don’t have to figure out this workout stuff alone. Hire a personal trainer at your local gym and let them guide you through the workouts and meal planning. They can answer your questions and motivate you during workouts to ensure you give them your best effort.
Between the knowledge, guidance, and motivation you will get from your trainer, you should see results much faster than you would if you were working out alone.
Conclusion
Are you looking for a good gym or fitness club in your local community? Nicelocal.com gives you easy access to a directory of local businesses with customer reviews and ratings posted for them. It will give you a good sense of which local fitness clubs in your community are worth visiting.