As a kid I loved to watch cartoons. Not Pokemon or any of that rubbish. I’m talking about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Bugs Bunny and some of the Disney cartoons like Duck Tales. I’m sure most cartoons are simply a waste of time, but now and again they make you realise something.
I’ll always remember the Duck Tales episode where Scrooge McDuck tells the story of how he became so rich. As a very young duck (hey it is a cartoon) he went out into the world to make his fortune but all the work he could get was cleaning people’s shoes while they had their hair cut. On the first day he worked extremely hard on his client’s shoe until they sparkled clean. All the client gave was a quarter. Scrooge was so angry as he had worked so hard and yet received minuscule returns. He eventually figured out that to get ahead he’d have to work smarter not harder. The next scene we see him cleaning 5 people’s shoes at one time by creating a bicycle-powered contraption so all he had to do was sit and pedal. The rest is (cartoon) history.
What an earth has Scrooge McDuck got to do with fitness?
We need to realise that it’s not just how hard we workout or how strictly we keep to a diet that is going to bring us success. If we aren’t following sound advice then we may not ever reach the goals we are aspiring for. We need to be smart about the exercises we choose and the food we eat, otherwise we are just wasting our time and effort.
No matter how much you want it and no matter how hard you try, you won’t reach your fitness goals unless direct your efforts to exercises/diets/lifestyle changes that really work.
For so long I wasted my time working out by just doing what I thought was going to help me get leaner and musclier. In hindsight a lot of what I did was never going to get me where I wanted to be. First of all I needed to find out how I was going to lose flab, how I was going to gain muscle and how I would keep my body that way.
So just how do we workout smarter instead of harder?
Take a step back and see what you’re doing. What is your diet like? What kind of exercises are you doing and how often? Are you making progress and are you measuring/tracking this progress? These are all questions that you have to be able to answer decisively. “I think so” is not a good answer. You need to be sure that the time you are investing is actually going to produce the output you are looking for.
I talk about ‘bang for buck’ exercises in an earlier article published on Take Fit. This article explains that before we focus on isolation exercises such as crunches or dumbbell curls, we need to make sure we are doing exercises which involve our whole body. That way we are maximising output (causing muscle growth throughout our whole body) while minimising input (if you are doing nothing but ‘bang for buck’ exercises you’ll probably decrease the time it takes to workout while seeing increased results)!
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