Is Over Exercising Doing You More Harm Than Good? | Nutrition, Diet & Weight Loss | JJ Virgin

Are you killing yourself at the gym or on your peloton and waking up at 4am to go some extra miles? How's that working for you? Look, if you're exercising to lose weight and it's not working, there's a reason. I know it's tempting to think you're not doing enough. So then you're frustrated and you go to the gym, you push harder and harder. As crazy as it seems, there actually is such a thing as too much and over exercising. It could be keeping on the pounds. Want to know what works? Stick around. Hey, I'm J.J. and if you want to keep up with things that will help you lose weight and keep it from coming back, let's stay connected. Hit like on this video and subscribe to this channel and that'll get it done. All right. I've been doing this series on on all of the reasons other than your diet that you can't lose weight. So far we've talked about stress, your gut sleep and toxins. So check out those other videos as well if you really want to make sure you give yourself the best chance of losing weight and making sure it doesn't come back. Now we're going to talk about exercise. Now, exercise is a good thing, right? What's the first thing you think of when you decide to lose weight? What should you do? Diet and exercise. Diet and exercise, it's all you ever hear. But too much working out could be working against your weight loss goals and may even do more harm than good. I've had clients who've exercised every single day and the pounds didn't budge. What the heck is going on? Let me start by saying exercise is an amazing and necessary thing for your health. And you know, little things like how long you want to live. So there's that. It gives you amazing benefits like stronger bones, better insulin sensitivity. And better insulin sensitivity is key to being a better fat burner. A better metabolism because you know muscle requires more energy to stay on your body, healthier brain, and it helps detoxify you. But it was, it doesn't do as well as everyone previously thought is to help you lose weight. Now a little exercise, sure you'll drop a few pounds, but more and more research is being published that suggests exercising won't help you lose as much weight as you probably think. In 2016, researchers showed that the calories you burn basically plateau at a certain point because our bodies adapt to the increased physical activity. This is what they said, and I quote, total energy expenditure increases with physical activity. At low activity Levels burned, but plateaus at higher activity levels as the body adapts to maintain total energy expenditure within a narrow range. Alright, that's a mouthful. In other words, exercise has diminishing returns. Some of the dangers of extreme exercise, like ultramarathoning are pretty obvious. And I'm guessing that's not your issue. It's definitely not mine. But if you want to lose weight, it makes sense that you're going to hit the gym or soul cycle or go out for a run on top of going on a diet, right? So that's great. It's when you constantly overdo that, the bad things can happen. Of course, it depends on things like your age, your gender and your general health too. But over exercising for anyone can wreak havoc on more than just your weight. It can impact your heart, your tendons, your ligaments, your immune system, you name it. In fact, one study showed that women were less likely to have a heart attack or stroke if they were physically active and at least once a week. But the risk of heart attacks and strokes shot up for women who exercised hard every day. So intense exercise doesn't actually give you more benefits and it could be hurting you. Now that's intense exercise, hard every single day. Okay, get me, listen to me on that one. But let's go through this. So if you are overdoing it, exercise boosts stress hormones and spikes cortisol, because your body doesn't know the difference between exercise, stress and. And normal stress. So over exercising means high cortisol and that starts a bad cascade, this cascade of breaking down muscle instead of building it, storing more fat around your belly and can even mess with your thyroid function. Plus too much cortisol also makes you moody, irritable, you can't concentrate or sleep, and sometimes can even make you hungrier. So you feel bad and you're hungry all the time, which of course can boomerang you into overeating and weight gain. And again, now I'm talking lots of high intensity exercise, like you're doing big time CrossFit every single day, not rotating it in a couple times a week. All right, Number two, another sign of overtraining is obviously being tired all the time. You feel like every workout is a struggle and your performance is either not getting better or it's getting worse. Or maybe you just can't go as long or as hard as you used to or lift as much. And being constantly exhausted beats you up mentally and physically, which means you could get hurt. So if you notice that your resting heart rate is riding higher, than normal or your workouts are making you feel exhausted rather than energized, it's another sign that you could be overdoing it. Next one, your immune system is probably taking a beating, too. So moderate exercise can help your immune system, but when you overdo it, it actually suppresses it. So you think you're getting healthier and you're setting yourself up to get sicker. Plus, that over exercise also increases something called oxidative stress, which is a marker of accelerated aging. So then what is the answer? How often should you exercise? How long? How hard? All right, here we go. I'm going to break it down. Here's what I recommend. First off, move more. So before you do anything else and start all the fancy stuff, just get moving. And this is where it's great to use a Fitbit or an Apple watch or an Oura ring, something that will actually track you. And especially those ones that say stand up, right? So you want to just move more throughout the day. And big, big one is moving after you eat your last meal. Boy, that helps lower the blood sugar response to a meal. So work that into your routine. Then hit high intensity interval training. That is where you're changing your steady state cardio, like going out for a jog and changing into warming up with an easy walk and then sprinting for 20 to 60 seconds and walking it off for twice as long and repeating to accumulate four to eight total minutes of the hard stuff in small bursts. Why is that important? That actually helps your body so stimulate the growth of the boost of growth hormone. And it also helps train your sympathetic nervous system on how to handle stress better. So I like you to do that three times a week. Next up, resistance training. Pump it up. And I always say you want to pump it up to build your metabolic spanx. What do I mean by that? Well, you know, Spanx holds everything in tighter. Metabolic Spanx means when you build muscle, it holds everything, everything in tighter and boost your metabolism along with it. So I like you to hit each body part at least twice a week with resistance training. And then finally, what I call mindful movement. This is things like yoga and tai chi and qigong that really create that mind body connection that helps heal and reorganize your nervous system. And most importantly, I want you to mix this all up. Cross train your diet, cross train your exercise, right? And make sure. And this is super important. Probably the most important of all is that you have good recovery. That if you're going to push a really hard workout, make sure that you Eat well and rest well afterwards. Now the other thing I'm going to throw out there is that if you're super focused on weight loss, you might be overdoing everything. And on top of working out too hard, maybe you're also overdoing the dieting, not eating enough. And you know, I am not a fan of that. That is if you're not eating enough and your body doesn't get the fuel it needs, it is not going to be able to recover from these workouts and build the muscle that you need for a good healthy metabolism. And remember, you got to heal your metabolism in order to lose weight. When you do that, if you're working out too hard and you're losing muscle, it slows down your body to of consist, conserve calories and guess what? Then you can pack on more fat or get sick. So if the main reason you're out there over exercising is because you want to lose weight and the scale is not budging, rethink how much you're exercising. I mean, how much more can you do? Really listen to your body, get some rest, cut back or stop exercising when you don't feel well or under a lot of stress. Case in point, in my 20s, my body fat was going between 22 and 25%. I was working out like a crazy person. When as a personal trainer I would go running with clients every day, I'd always end the day at the gym myself. So I was working out a couple hours a day. 22 to 25% body fat in my 20s should have been easier, right? In my 50s, I'm 13% body fat, working out 30 to 60 minutes a day, averaging usually about 30 minutes. So proof is in the pudding. Well, the dairy free pudding, let's make it low sugar. So I really want you to change that mental programming that tells you if you're doing something bad or wrong. If you're not exercising hard every day. No, just make it that you move every day. All right? It's just like what I tell you about food. Too much healthy food is unhealthy. Well, too much exercise is too. So I'm giving you permission to take your foot off the gas, which again may seem counterintuitive from a fitness hall of Famer, but knock it off. All right? So eat to support your level of exercise. Hydrate more when you work out and get at least eight hours of sleep every night because you gotta do that rest and recovery workout hard, rest and recover hard. And on those other days, hey, yeah, take it a little bit easier. Do a nice walk, do some mindful exercise. All right. I hope you got some good tips in this video and you get the most out of those workouts in the future. And don't forget to like and subscribe so you get more tips to help help you live your best healthy lifestyle. Now in the next video, we're going to tackle how to address the super common issue of thyroid fatigue and its impact on your metabolism. See you there.