Do you believe working out more will help you lose more weight?

Do you go through cycles where you work out hard for like two weeks, but then stop only to lose any progress you made?

Are you working your butt off, always tired but barely seeing results?

Or worse, are you slowly gaining weight back, despite your additional efforts to lose more?

Have you ever stopped to think that your “more is better” mentality is working against you and is the reason why you’re not achieving your health and fitness goals?


More is not better

Look around and you will see that the idea “more is better” is prevalent in nearly everything everyone does. Working out 6 days is better than 4, more options are better than less, longer workouts are better than short workouts, lifting more weight is better than less. This thought pattern increases stress through wasted time, injuries, imbalances and psychological issues.

In today’s competition world, even weight loss gets glorified and turned into competition. This has led to a world that believes being at the top of the leader board at Orange Theory, having the fastest time in the daily Crossfit WOD and burning more calories doing cardio or at a boot camp is a sign they are doing the right thing to achieve their fitness goals. This get tired, do more approach to training, seems to be the goal of every workout, but may be the reason you never see results.

With a “more is better” mentality; you miss the point of training and don’t get the results you are looking for. The thought that you need to make up for lost time and do more to get faster results is a faulty mindset and strategy. There ends up being too many competing processes and your body and mind ends up tired, possibly screwed up, with very little to nothing to show for the hard work you put in.


Effectiveness & Efficiency

Before you can figure out the best approach, what too much is and the proper amount for you to achieve your goal, you need to be certain and clear what the goal is in the first place.

Tim Ferris, entrepreneur, author and podcaster wrote in the Four Hour Work Week:

“Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task rather important or not in the most economical manner possible. Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe. In excess most endeavors and possessions take on the characteristics of the opposite. Help becomes hindrance.”

It’s one thing to be extremely efficient at what you’re doing, but you can be efficient at something that isn’t effective for the goal you desire to achieve. For example: If your goal is to lose weight and all you do is start working out with zero regard to your diet, the likelihood of you achieving your weight loss goal is low. Yes, you’re efficiently working out and becoming efficient at working out, but the goal was to lose weight.

In the same light, you can be doing a program very effectively for a goal, but if it’s not what your defined goal is, you are only achieving things, not achieving your goal. I don’t see the purpose of increasing the amount of cardio you do when all you want to do is lose weight and tone up, especially if you’re pressed for time.


Working out is not effective or efficient for weight loss.

Working out by itself is an ineffective and inefficient tool when it comes to weight loss. It’s great for making you more capable, will yield certain abilities, can help you feel psychologically better, will help with heart health, prevent diabetes, control blood pressure, and can help with immune system health. But, if that’s all you get, and your goal is to lose weight, it sounds like you worked your butt off for benefits that weren’t the benefits you wanted in the first place.

If your goal is simply to lose weight and you don’t care about performance, capabilities, health, muscle shape, or other health benefits, you don’t even have to work out! You simply need to analyze your diet and set it up right for the level of activity that you are doing, and you will lose the weight.

If I found out I was wasting my time with a program for the wrong goal, I would be angry. Many people spend an incredible amount of time and effort in the gym to achieve the goal of weight loss, but that strategy isn’t a good strategy for their goal at all. The lack of any reward over time discourages and, unfortunately, can end up resulting in an array of psychological disorders such as depression, bulimia, binge eating, anxiety, body dysmorphia and much more.


Why do people believe working out more is an effective and efficient tool for weight loss?

To lose weight you must burn more calories than you consume. Exercising burns calories and can help you increase the deficit. Unfortunately, exercise can increase hunger and lead you to eat more calories than you burned working out. If you don’t know how many calories you are eating in the first place, why is the goal to burn calories?

This burning of calories is one of the major reasons people believe boot camps, Crossfit and such is a good weight loss tool. Understand one thing though, Crossfit does burn a lot of calories but it is a sport that measures who is the most fit person in the world and even at the top level the injury rate is high. Why use a sport that has so much risk as a weight loss tool?

Another reason I frequently hear is because working out builds muscle and that will increase my metabolism and help lose fat. Yes, this is true, but if you aren’t getting enough protein or calories to build muscle, whether you work out or not, your muscle won’t grow, you don’t have the materials to build muscle with. You simply will get more efficient lifting weights with little fuel, which is a recipe for disaster in the long run.

If you eat too little and do too much activity for an extended period, your hormones and metabolism will likely crash and cause a whole host of problems. This makes it extremely difficult to reach your goals.(for more information on this Click Here)


Once you figure out what is effective for your goals, you want to make sure you are being efficient with your time.

Efficiency is cutting away all the fat, getting rid of the excess and getting to the goal as fast as possible. People say they want to achieve their goal as fast as possible, but they end up doing something to go super-fast or they use a bad program they never get the results they want, due to injury, fatigue or giving up.

With so many competing priorities in your life (and we all only have the same 24 hours to work with) and with the endless options to achieve your goal, you need to find the most effective option if you want to efficiently achieve your goal in the least amount of time possible. Knowing you have an effective plan, analyze how much time you are able and willing to dedicate to the achievement of that goal. Then focus on the most effective aspects to achieve the goal during that time.

80/20 Rule

I apply the 80/20 rule to figure out what is most effective and efficient. I figure out what 20% of activities are resulting in 80% of my results and maximize those things. These things are usually the basics. Unfortunately, we glorify the 20%, the new stuff that no one has seen as is different in our quest to have more options, more varieties, another way to do the same thing, but these things are rarely more effective.


Where did the “more is better” mentality come from?

People intentionally behave the way they do because they believe it will make them happier (whether it’s happiness in the short run or long run, or whether it will make them happy or not, as long as they believe it, they will do it)

Nobel prize-winning economist Ronald Coase stated “You can explain 95% of human behavior with the assumption that people prefer more money to less.” There are things that people dislike, such as problems which more of that is not better, but anything one values, assume that they think more is better than less.

Research, though, has shown that the opposite is true.

Having more of one thing may not be as attractive if it comes at a cost of having less of something else. For example: Many people want to lose weight but are unwilling to give up the habits that are hindering them from doing so. The more is better mentality is popular, because having less of anything is most often portrayed as a bad thing, especially the things you enjoy. Adding to your schedule and doing more becomes easier than doing less because doing less forces you to analyze what you’re doing, whereas adding more doesn’t.

Research has shown that too many options leads to feeling overwhelmed and dissatisfied. Paralysis by options was shown by psychologists Mark Lepper and Sheena lyengar in 2000. They observed that the more options of jams consumers were offered, the less likely they were to buy. This research has a profound implication to fitness. Many fitness beginners get overwhelmed by all the options available to diet and workout. This explains why so many blindly follow one way simply because their friend got results from doing it or a personal trainer said so. They don’t acknowledge any other option because it simply will overwhelm them or even worse the plethora of options overwhelms them to the point; they never start in the first place.


Let’s examine other ways the more is better mentality is hurting fitness.

Working out too much too early?

So often the thought of “I need to put in more time to catch up, to get there faster or first” creeps into the mind of athletes and those that want to achieve any fitness goal. The problem is that if a beginner starts off lifting seven days a week to lose weight or get stronger, most likely his body will become overworked and not build muscle or lose weight as quickly as a beginner that is lifting 3 days a week.

Newton’s third law of motion states: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This law applies to everything we do. We have even created the word Karma that is based off this law. Unfortunately, when it comes to fitness, health and especially weight loss, this law gets completely thrown out the window.

You can’t increase the intensity, volume or stress of an activity without creating an equal and opposite response to that activity. If you disregard this and don’t stay in balance by actively and properly recovering, your body forcefully reacts and finds a way to balance back out. These automatic reactions usually show up in the form of injury, slowed performance, disorders, ailments, forced rest, etc.


Lack of initial screening

One major problem I see with the fitness world is the lack of proper screening to assess the abilities and limitations of beginners. The approach of “more is better” than less gets patched on there and for the very first workout, a beginner gets pushed through a boot camp, or Crossfit WOD, or pushed into the orange zone for 30 minutes when she hasn’t been in the orange zone for years. Or the overall flexibility isn’t achievable in most of the exercises being performed, which causes them to stress those muscles and use other muscles and bad form simply to do more.

What I’m addressing is the lack of screening and realizing that fitness and working out is meant to be personalized to what the individual wants to be efficient at. (not simply an all-out sprint to burn the most calories and get the sorest we can)

If weight loss is the goal, then the focus should be on the obstacles standing in front of the way, not a blanket fix of working out.

Injury risk and prevention

If you are lacking range of motion, are pained or feel extremely tight, if you feel hindered in any way, you need to address these things first. If you don’t, you will only make it so far until you will be forced to address them. This goes back to the previous point of the need for proper screening and understanding your capabilities before working out.

Simply doing more and more activity or weight with no regard to your capabilities and limitations will lead to imbalances and ultimately injury.

“I CAN’T SQUAT BECAUSE MY KNEES ARE BAD.” “It sucks getting old, things just don’t work as they used to.”

I hear the above excuses so many times it makes me want to pull my hair out. First off let’s get something straight, age is a bad excuse. All age means is that you had a longer time to do the wrong thing!

Those knees didn’t magically go bad, rather, your muscles were too tight and when your knee went in a range of motion that it couldn’t go due to tightness, overuse or a lack of mobility, damage to the joints and ligaments happened. An overwhelming majority of the time, your bad knees or back are due to a lack of focus on the right things such as recovery and an over focus on doing more weight, more time, more volume.

Many injuries can be avoided, and you could get to your goal faster due to less down time by fully maximizing your time with a deliberate plan to achieve your goal that takes into account your abilities and limitations.


The need for rest

After and during a workout, your body is flooded with hormones from the stress of working out. Afterwards, if you properly recover, you will adapt to the type of signals that were sent. If you don’t allow your body to recover and continue to stress it, your body will begin to break down. This process is called the principle of general adaption syndrome.

Taken too far, if you consistently are breaking down your muscle without ever allowing it to recover, you could develop a life threatening condition called rhabdomyolysis. Rhabdomyolysis is the rapid breakdown of muscle which results in a protein from muscle to enter the blood stream which stresses out the kidneys and leads to death. This can happen in beginners and advanced athletes, both young and old.

Rest days and getting enough sleep are crucial to repair. In order to progress in any goal, there needs to be a balance of ambition and restraint. This can look different as we are all different individuals, but there needs to be a yin to the yang to successfully progress. This is especially true with athletes in sports.

Don’t forget to sleep. Hormone production, recovery immune system and other metabolic processes are maximized while you sleep. If you neglect sleep, you will not be able to effectively and efficiently do anything.


Doing too much weight?

In this highly competitive world, there is a major stress to lift more weight, or there is an assumption that more weight is better than less weight. In the industry they call it “progressive overload.” Progressive overload is the gradual increase of stress placed upon the body during exercise training. You can increase the stress by increasing the volume, weight or both. Unfortunately, people forget the word “GRADUAL” and simply increase the stress as fast as they can. This results simply in OVERLOAD. What happens when you overload a truck? You crash, spill your load, damage the roads etc. Except you have a body and not a truck so this overload will end up showing up in the form of injury, slowed performance, disorders, ailments, forced rest and possible death.

Your body has no clue how much weight it is lifting, what it does know is time under tension and peak tension. You can achieve this by doing high reps and low reps but remember your body becomes efficient in what it does, so what you do, your body will adapt to and try to do better. There is peak tension in lower weights when there is higher reps and peak tension right away when there is more weight, but remember we need to focus on the goal and not simply the performance aspect of things. If you want to lose weight, there is no reason to be putting a heavy focus on weight. Only when lifting more weight is the goal, does weight matter.

What needs to be done is to focus on quality reps and the activation of the muscles. This can be increased by strengthening your mind to muscle connection.

Adding more weight at the expense of form will lead to injury and is an inefficient way to add more weight, or shall I say strength, in the long run.


The Solution

You need to have a clear goal and preferably a reason why to achieve it. Then you need to have a clear strategy of what needs to be done to achieve the goal. When developing the strategy make sure to have effectiveness and efficiency in mind. A true sound plan no matter if you simply want to lose some weight and experience a higher quality of life or if you want to be the best athlete in a given sport as possible has specific components that must be addressed. These include strength, agility, speed, reaction, balance, injury reduction, and mobility.

Remember the need for rest. You should find things outside of fitness that relieve stress. Stress is a killer of gains. Too often with the “more is better” mentality, you become burnt out and then become inconsistent and never achieve your goal. The goal should be to build healthy habits that can last you a lifetime and enable you to consistently grow and become better in all that you do.

Focus on the fundamentals. The fundamentals are the fundamentals for a reason. In a society driven to do everything, to do more and more, we too often get lost in the noise and forget the essentials of fundamentals. Nearly everyone would be far better off with a “do less but do it better” mentality, alongside with a plan that focuses on effectiveness and efficiency. Forming a proper plan to achieve your goals doesn’t have to be complicated and doing more will not get you more.

Simply ask yourself, “Am I being productive or just active?”

Stay consistent and focus on being effective and efficient all while making sure you stay enthusiastic through the journey. This is the secret to achieving your goals fast and safely.


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