Angry exercise

As a trainer but more than that, someone who has loved exercise and fitness for a long time, I've seen interesting things in gyms and certain trends that kind of summarise the types of mindsets that people approach exercise with. I'm going to cover a number of them in coming blogs but the first one and sometimes the most entertaining: Angry exercisers.

We all know that doing exercise can be a great way to relieve stress, release tension and just have a bit of a blow out. If you've been in a gym then the chances are you may have seen these types of people.

They're the people that seem to have a permanent grimace, stare into mirrors without emotion, make loud noises when dropping weights and just inject fear into other gym users. It's probably worth me mentioning that it's important not to get these confused with people that properly train with olympic lifting or power lifting. There is a need in this type of training to drop weights fast due to the training mechanics of how they're conditioning the body.

Well, if the description above rings a resonance, it may be nice to know that they're doing themselves no favours strutting their stuff in anger. Levels of cortisol in the body are higher when angry and this restricts growth, metabolism and most internal function which means muscle development is slower, weight loss is slower and it'll take them twice as long doing angry exercise than it would doing calmer and relatively happier exercise.

If the above description feels like a personal statement of your gym visits and you would like to benefit from gym visits or exercise then I'd recommend calming yourself before going? Listen to some calming but inspiring music and maybe include some deep breathing exercises into your warm up.

Having the ability to use a little mental grit within exercise is obviously useful but this should be controlled determination and not the angry teenager gene. Being able to switch it on and then off is a useful skill.

I'm stuck for time but I'll add to this - my next blog will look more at the types of people that just turn up but seem not to actually do very much.