Your 2023 Fitness Strategy
A new year and resolutions and fitness goals abound. So many new gym members, each convinced that this is the year those five, ten, or twenty pounds finally come off. Many of those with fitness-related resolutions have done the research and determined the optimal exercise and diet to lose their excess weight. They intend to execute these plans at a posh gym in new Nike sneakers and Lululemon tights while drinking cucumber-infused water. They then plan to follow up these workouts with California rolls and kombucha.
Most of those people will see some early results from their efforts (any workout is better than no workout and California rolls and kombucha are better than fries and a Coke) and then revert to their old ways because they don't have time to commute to the posh gym, they don't enjoy the expert-endorsed workout program of 2023, and they can't afford to keep eating California rolls. Every year a mass of people with the best intentions formulate plans just like this, only to see them fail within weeks or months, at which point they give up on the year and promise themselves to do better next year. Your 2023 doesn't have to be this way.
So many people fail because they are trying to be perfect (more on those dangers here). The experts have decreed this year to be the year of the rowing machine. We are told it is the most efficient way to burn calories and will enable you to achieve all your goals. That cycling stuff is old news, as is CrossFit. So, of course, people follow this advice. We are all pressed for time, and if there is a more efficient way to do things, why wouldn't we do things the most efficient way?
Of course, the problem is that the experts don't have our best interests in mind. They have themselves to consider and their need for page views, followers, and sales. This isn't to say the experts are completely wrong. Maybe rowing is a highly effective weight loss exercise. But efficiency is only part of the fitness equation. It is good to be efficient, but it is great to be consistent.
If your goal is to burn the most calories possible in twenty minutes, then the rowing machine may be a great choice, depending on your rowing ability relative to other exercise forms. But if your goal is to burn the most calories possible in three months, the choice of which tool or tools to use becomes less clear. You could do as many twenty-minute rowing sessions as possible in the three-month period for maximum efficiency. Yet, if you hate rowing, it hurts your back, you aren't very good at it, or you find your blister-covered hands not up to the task, your results at the end of the three months may be below your expectations.
By rowing, the time in the gym may have been maximized for efficiency, but if you only went to the gym nine times in three months, your results, if there are any, will suck. That is because even maximally efficient exercise, executed three times a month, isn't enough to reshape your body. According to one calculator, even an intense two-hundred-watt effort for twenty minutes will only burn 286 calories. If you put in nine of these 286 calorie-burning rower workouts, you would have burned 2,574 calories after three months. This is a lot, but considering that a pound of fat consists of about 3,500 calories, you would have put in all that effort to not even lose a pound.
What if you weren't so focused on efficiency and instead focused on consistency? What is an exercise or set of exercises you could do five days a week most weeks? One idea is walking. It is simple, requires no memberships, no special gear, and can be performed anywhere. You can walk and listen to music or a podcast or the birds or call your mom. Twenty minutes of walking flies by. And it flies by with results. By walking twenty minutes per day, five days a week for ten out of twelve weeks, a 155-pound person could burn a total of 4,450 calories. That is almost double the cumulative calories burned by our begrudging rower.
This isn't an exercise regimen prescription. We are all at different levels of fitness, and for some, this could be too much exercise, or more likely, this could be far too little exercise. Therefore, the purpose isn't to tell you what to do. Instead, the purpose is to prompt you to do something. Any form of exercise is better than no exercise. Why drain our limited willpower on fighting ourselves to exercise? We have more important things to do, so pick the one that comes easily and is easily repeatable and do it. Do it often and every time you finish, pat yourself on the back for making progress, even if it is tiny progress. 2023 could be the year you achieve great things because you tuned out the noise and focused on consistent progress.