On our 12-week nutrition course we spend 2 whole sessions on the topic of exercise. The reason for that is its such a misunderstood area of achieving optimal health and an ideal body.

I want to un-confuse this topic for you. So lets first start with the definition of exercise:

A regular series of specific movements designed to stress and activate muscles, causing new cellular developments – Not merely the burning of calories.

I want to focus your attention on 2 things. 1). designed to stress, and 2). not merely the burning of calories.

Most people think the purpose of exercise is to burn fat, when in reality, the calories burned during exercise are very few. However the delayed fat burning effects of exercise are quite significant.

The purpose of exercise is to trigger fat burning hormones to burn fat.

Fat burning happens at rest therefore most of your fat burning potential happens through the night when we are sleeping… unless you are not sleeping. I want you to think of exercise as a trigger to the quantity of fat burning hormone that will be present when you sleep.

The body likes stress but not too much stress.

The idea with exercise is to stress the body enough to stimulate fat burning hormones but not enough to produce fat storing hormones – like cortisol. The type of exercise that produces the most amount of fat burning hormones is high Intensity exercise – unless you are already stressed.

With an unstressed (healthy) body, the body will very quickly adapt to the stress of exercise, increasing its ability to handle more stress.

This is why you have to keep raising the level of difficulty and adding stress in order to continue burning fat.

BOTTOM LINE: Exercise is only as good as your ability to recover from it In other words, if you cannot recover from exercise without it stressing you out. You will not be receiving the benefits.

In my next article about exercise I’ll help you to know what exercise is right for your body type.

If you haven’t already taken the body type quiz you can go ahead and take it now. A series of question will help you reviel what underlying hormonal weakness you may be experiencing.

From there you can enrol on one of our free webinars. Check the Home Page for ‘Free Webinar’ or check out more info on our 12-week personalised nutrition course it can be taken anytime, from anywhere with the full support of our team.

Yours in Health,

Tarryn Thompson