How hard must you work to reach fitness goals?

Common wisdom: hard, really hard – getting and staying  fit is just plain hard work.

Maybe.

Or maybe that’s a guess – an attempt to measure something when no real measure is available.

To illustrate consider:

Which burns more calories?

A. Running 1 mile
B. Jogging 1 mile
C. Walking 1 mile

Answer: They burn exactly the same number of calories.
So, if you walk a mile seven days a week, you will burn more calories than running it six days a week. (Technically, runners get an extra benefit because their metabolic rate will remain high for a time after running.)

Now ask, which is tougher – running or walking?
Point is, instead of using vague, meaningless and often daunting guesswork, there are objective measures for fitness programs. And how your system responds to them.

One of the most important is metabolic testing. Metabolic testing analyses the volume of oxygen you consume and the amount of carbon dioxide you exhale to define your metabolic profile – a precise definition of how your body consumes fuel.

At the ACCUA Advanced Fitness Training center, we use a New Leaf™ metabolic testing system to measure your resting metabolic rate (RMR) and measure again while you exercise, with a gradual increase in intensity, to define your metabolic profile – your heart rate, oxygen consumed, and your anaerobic threshold.

All of the data is used to develop your ACCUA Advanced Fitness Training program. 

That’s important. As individuals the amount of energy we burn in physical activity is, likewise, individual. The point at which our bodies shift from consuming readily available fuel to consuming stored reserve – also known as fat – to power our activity is our anaerobic threshold. Exercise below that point and you’ll burn no fat so your program will fall short of the results you want. 

Using a complete set of metabolic data and blending it with we know about various types of exercise – such as the facts above – ACCUA trainers define cardiovascular workouts that match your physical system. Then, instead of banging away aimlessly at biking, treadmills or ellipticals, you can work at exactly the level you must to attain your goals – not “hard.”