Everybody wants to be in shape right, well most people do, and so you should. Having a strong athletic body is a clear sign that you are in good health and have your sh*t together, who doesn’t want that? Whoever you are there is nothing more attractive than being able and willing to be fit, strong and healthy and therefore destined for a long and happy life doing the things you enjoy with the people you love. 

The best route to achieving an aesthetic and healthy body has become a minefield in recent years with online spaces becoming saturated with low quality information. There is so much nuance when it comes to health and fitness that just isn’t communicated in short form media. Learning what will work for you and your goals, is almost impossible when all of the common resources are diluted with product pushers and “easy fixes”.

There are many different ideas of what “in shape” is and various ways you can become your healthiest and fittest self. Some people want general health, others want to build as much muscle as possible for a thick strong look, some want to go the opposite way and get super lean with visible abs or even a combination of both. Some may want to appear smaller, more petite and reduce body fat. Whatever your body goals are though, it’s likely that they are best achieved with some form of strength training.

Strength training can mean many different types of working your muscles using weights for resistance. And at the same time, there are many ways of working your muscles using weights for resistance that are most definitely not strength training. A big culprit of this is the “body pump” style classes you get in big chain gyms. These classes often mislead people into thinking they are getting stronger because they utilise barbells and dumbbells throughout the hour-long session. Unfortunately, the system these classes are actually training is lactic acid endurance, not strength, which isn’t particularly beneficial. These sessions often place so much intensity on the muscles, in the form of volume, that all that really happens is developing improper motor patterns and producing so much lactate that all your body can do is try to recover before you spank it with another 500 poor repetitions next time. A strength training approach in place of these classes would achieve an awful lot more in much less time and be significantly less painful.

Another form of exercise that I feel gets woefully overused is running. People will wake up one day and think to themselves “damn I really need to lose some weight”, for whatever reason. This call to action will prompt them to do the first thing that comes to mind, which all too often is going for a run. Don’t get me wrong, running can be great, humans are designed to be able to run. The problem with it is the biological adaptation that repeated running induces. Everything your body does, it wants to do as easily as possible. It’s a survival mechanism. If we had to rely on running in order to catch enough food (calories) to survive, then it would make sense to become so efficient at running that we didn’t burn too many calories in the act of trying to catch the calories. The more we run, the better we get at running, like anything really. And the better we get at running, the less effort it takes, so the less calories it burns and your attempt at employing the law of thermogenics (burning more calories than you consume in order to lose weight) starts to suffer diminishing returns. If you continue this approach, you will either have to run longer to burn more calories, or consume less calories so there are fewer to burn. This is not sustainable because you’ll either find yourself Forrest Gump’ing never able to stop running, or starving yourself to death. Unless you program it properly, running plays havoc with your metabolism, and really has very limited benefits that you wouldn’t get from a leisurely walk.

Your metabolism is key when it comes to building your dream body. It is an incredibly nuanced system that even science doesn’t fully understand. The only people who can really affect and harness the metabolism for the superpower that it is are trainers who have experienced the highs and lows of a fluctuating metabolism through their own practice. To that end, what are the best exercises to get you in shape, or boost your metabolism? For most people, the ideal body is one with a relatively low body fat percentage. In simple terms there are two ways of achieving this, reducing the amount of fat on your body, duh, or increasing the amount of muscle on your body. Having a higher percentage of lean muscle mass, by default, means you have a lower percentage of body fat. So the best exercises to get you in shape are those that elicit a reduction in body fat and those that cause muscle growth. These can then be tailored and applied to create the specific type of aesthetic that you wanted. Shapely, muscular, lean, big, athletic, hourglass etc etc etc.

Allow me to introduce you to the compound exercise. A compound exercise is one that requires multiple joints working together to achieve a movement. Great examples of compound exercises are squats, deadlifts, overhead presses, rows, lunges, chest presses and the many variations of them. Really, these exercises alone are enough to build anyone the body of their dreams. There are myriad reasons these multi joint movements are the absolute best for getting you in shape. Firstly, they elicit the biggest muscle growth response. Now depending on who you are you may be thinking, “well I don’t want big muscles, so these aren’t going to be for me…” If that’s you, click here for my prejudice-busting thoughts on women choosing not to strength train for fear of getting “big and bulky”. As well as building muscle, compound exercises ramp up your metabolism which helps keep you lean because you are burning more calories, even at rest, than you would if you just trained individual muscles or carried out lots of cardio training. They are fat burning time bombs. The carry over of compound exercises into everyday life is also and awesome reason to start doing them. If you have a strong squat and deadlift, press and pull, not only are you most likely the strongest person in the room, but you’ll be the most mobile, least injury prone, most likely to rescue a dog that fell in the river, and your body will age slower keeping you looking younger for longer. Each of these exercises will even double down on their wonderfulness by making you stronger at the other compound exercises, it’s a positive spiral that once you start you won’t want to stop. If you’re strong at compound lifts then you are ready to tackle anything life can throw at you. Not to mention you’re less likely to develop all manner of diseases as you age. Women, let’s fight back against osteoporosis before it’s anywhere near us.

In truth, every single body will benefit hugely from proper strength training. It’s such a magical thing, applied correctly, strength training can be used to create whatever physical adaptation you want, it just takes a little know-how. Build a muscular physique, reduce body fat, drop your dress size, get you better at your chosen sport, improve your sleep, create a more aesthetic figure, and reduce inflammation to name but a few. It is so important that everybody strength trains in one form or another, not only for their quality of life, health and appearance now, but the skills and strength you learn really do stay with you and will dramatically improve all of the above later in life. Let’s put in the work now and it can be the best investment you ever make. I firmly believe that muscle is the best form of health insurance.

So there you have it, the best exercises to get you in shape, are compound exercises. If you’d like to learn how to do these safely and effectively and implement them into a program that will get you the body you’ve always wanted, book in for a free session with me and we can make it happen.

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