Everybody, meet Jenny. Jenny, meet everybody.
Jenny is imaginary, but let’s pretend Jenny is a lean, mean, pulsing, pose holding, sweat machine – she attends a fitness class or goes to the gym at least three times per week, eats her greens, drinks lots of water and tries to sleep her eight hours a night. Despite this, she’s not seeing the results she wants. Of course, this isn’t Jenny’s fault. The fault is on a commonly used, but misguided fitness philosophy made of sand.
You see, Jenny prescribes to a popular “thermostat fitness” routine. Jenny’s fitness receipt is dependent on the size of the puddle of sweat she leaves behind. She’s convinced that the more she sweats, the bigger the change in endurance, in body fat, and in strength. Sorry, but your fitness level is not simply a measure of how much you sweat. I hate to shock you, but while heat might feel good on the muscles, sitting in a sauna for an hour, grilling out on a hot summer day with a few friends, or trying on six different outfits in a tight dressing room will certainly leave you dripping with sweat – but none of these things make you fitter.
While heat building and sweating are correlates of your effort, they’re weak correlates at best. Pushing yourself to your own, honest, personal max is the only fitness method that can’t be sidestepped through fake-outs like room temp, or sweat drops on a treadmill. Alchemy will never get easy, you’ll just keep getting better at it. Time for more reps, more range of motion, more weight, more effort than you ever thought you were capable of. Many variables cause the body to heat and sweat, but there’s no faking effort. Don’t believe the lie of thermostat fitness! Want your fitness receipt to show actual results? Time to opt out the sweat façade and opt in on effort. At Alchemy, you can bet your bottom dollar you’ll leave dripping with real sweat – the hard-earned byproduct of your hard ass effort. Rest assured, real life results to follow.
Tyler Quinn is CEO, a coach and co-founder of Alchemy 365. In his spare time he enjoys reading, hockey, jiu jitsu and gun-slinging.
