How to exercise smarter, faster and more effectively than you’ve ever done before

Albert Einstein is credited with defining “insanity” as doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.

By that definition, Einstein would call what most people do for exercise these days insane! What else would you call spending hours and hours at a gym, doing the same thing over and over, without any results.

We’d call it dumb. “Dumb Training” to be precise. It’s why so many people try, and repeatedly fail, to stick with a regular exercise routine on their own.

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A Sweaty Conundrum

Figure this one out: According to Michael Wood, CSCS, and Chief Fitness Officer of Koko FitClub LLC, there are more health clubs in America than ever before; more than 30,000 at last count. And there are more Americans belonging to health clubs today than ever before; nearly 50 Million!

So how can it be that more Americans today are obese and overweight than ever before? Government figures show that over 60% of all US adults are currently overweight or worse.

It doesn’t make sense. And it looks even worse when we look ahead to our children.

Despite unprecedented spending on public awareness initiatives educating families about the benefits of exercise and good nutrition, no generation of American children have ever been fatter than our kids today. Nearly 30% are overweight or obese. That’s triple the percentage from just two decades ago.

Overweight or Worse

It doesn’t make sense. And it looks even worse when we look ahead to our children. Despite unprecedented spending on public awareness initiatives educating families about the benefits of exercise and good nutrition, no generation of American children have ever been fatter than our kids today. Nearly 30% are overweight or obese. That’s triple the percentage from just two decades ago.

More gyms, more obesity. Are gyms part of the solution or, as the numbers would imply, part of the problem?

Whichever the case, something is clearly not working when it comes to providing the vast majority of Americans a way to exercise that actually works.

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Case in point: Recently, a Harvard study of 34,000 women over 13 years published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) concluded that 60 minutes of moderate exercise (brisk walking,) every day, was not effective in helping overweight women lose or even maintain weight. They need to do more.

An hour each day! Only a small fraction of the population is able to devote that much time to exercise as it is, and even it’s not enough? What’s a person to do?

What’s Wrong With “Exercise?”

Although couch potatoes may defiantly swear off anything resembling exercise, let’s start off from the scientifically

proven premise and common sense conclusion that exercise is a good thing.

Exercise makes you look better, feel better, live healthier and more independently. It fights off all sorts of physical diseases and ailments, reduces stress and may likely even extend your life.

It’s not exercise that’s the problem. It’s how people do it, or how many people think they should do it. That’s the problem.

To repeat, it’s not exercise that’s bad or ineffective, just the opposite. It’s the way people have been trained to think about exercising, especially in gyms, that dooms most people to failure before they even start.

Exercise is too time-consuming for most busy adults. It’s not as effective as it could be.

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It’s boring and often demotivating. And it can be the cause of many injuries.

Why do something that wastes time, costs money, doesn’t produce results, and may even get you hurt? It’s dumb.

That’s why we call it “Dumb Training.”

Is the way you are exercising undermining your own success? Is it fooling you into thinking you are getting the most out of the time you spend working out? Are you dumb training?

To see, check out how many of these truisms and exercise traps you have fallen into.

The 7 Signs of Dumb Training

1 ”If I have time to do just one thing, I do cardio.”

WRONG- Strength training, especially circuit training, will deliver more functional benefits and a longer lasting calorie burn than what most people do as a cardio workout.

2 “The longer the workout the better.”

WRONG- Quality of exercise is far and away more important than quantity of exercise. How you choose to exercise and the effort you expend doing it is critical to boosting results. Plus, shorter workouts are easier to fit into your day. So you’ll exercise more consistently which boosts your results further.

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3 “It worked for me when I was younger, so I’ll just stick with my usual routine.”

WRONG- Live in the now! A forty- or fifty-year-old has very different exercise needs than a twenty-year-old. As our bodies and lifestyles change over time, so should your workout. Plus, variety is essential to maximizing results no matter how old you are. You’ll not only reduce injuries, you’ll be more apt to exercise consistently if you have an exercise plan that offers variety and adapts s to your changing life stages.

4 “No pain no gain.”

WRONG- Exhaustion and muscle fatigue (“burn”)--those are good things. They are signs that you are pushing yourself. Pain during exercise is not good (sorry “Ahnold”). It’s your body’s way of telling you that you are hurting yourself. Listen to your body.

5 “Light weights and high reps keep women from getting too bulked up.”

WRONG- Our body’s physiology, genes and testosterone levels determine how we carry muscle. Women naturally lack the testosterone levels of men and therefore are unable to pack on the bulky muscles many young men can. Strength training for women is essential to build vital calorie-burning, metabolism-boosting, lean muscle mass.

6 “Exercise will make me lose weight.”

WRONG- Exercise alone, for most people, will not lead to weight loss. Diet plays a significant, perhaps even leading role. However exercise is vital to the equation. The type and intensity of exercise, in conjunction with dietary changes, determines weight loss success.

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Why do something that wastes time, costs money, doesn’t produce results, and may even get you hurt?

7 “If it works for Lance (or Tiger, or Madonna, or any fill-in-the-blank supermodel/actress) it will work for me.”

WRONG- This one-size-fits-all approach is futile. The only exercise plan that will work for you is the one that you can do consistently and effectively over time. If you don’t have 4 hours a day to devote to exercise like Lance Armstrong, don’t expect the results he gets.

The Four Pillars of Smart Training

The opposite of Dumb Training is Smart Training

For the vast majority of people with things better to do than spend hours at a gym, we believe any successful exercise regimen must possess four vital elements: It must be

1. Fast 2. Efficient 3. Effective 4. Engaging

These are the four guiding principles of Smart Training.

Fast:Time, or more accurately lack of time, is the hands-down, number one reason people claim they don’t exercise enough (or at all.) For an exercise plan to fit into most peoples’ lives for the long term, it can’t take much more than 30 minutes.

Efficient:In addition to being downright miserly when it comes to how it uses your precious time, your exercise strategy has to be hyper-efficient. You can’t spend hours at the gym, so you need to make sure every moment is maximized. Fortunately, exercise science has proven time and again that quality of exercise trumps quantity.

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Effective:Next and most obviously, it has to be effective. Your program has to provide your body both the quality and quantity of physical effort that will yield results. This equates to real exercise that accomplishes 3 things:

1. Increases your heart rate and cardiovascular capacity

2. Builds total body strength and daily “functional” flexibility

3. Increases your metabolism by increasing your body’s lean

muscle mass

This last point is vital. It’s the key to weight loss. More lean muscle mass means a higher running metabolism which in turn means you burn more calories each and every day, 24/7, exercising or not.

Engaging:No matter how good an exercise program is, no matter how famous the trainer pushing it is, no matter how fabulous the celebrity doing it looks, the ONLY exercise program that will work for you is one you are motivated to do consistently. It needs to be more than a physical activity. It needs to become part of your mental psyche as well, engaging you mentally in ways that are very personal and motivational to you.

For example, maybe exercise becomes a way you clear your head. Or a way to take control of your life. A way to avoid ending up like one of your sick parents. Or it becomes the thing you do to stay young and healthy for your kids, perform better in sports, or stand out in a crowd and look sexy.

Whatever your motivation, every long-term exercise habit requires your brain to be engaged and as much a part of the exercise strategy as your body.

That’s it.

Now let’s compare these four elements to what

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Exercising any other way is at best inefficient and at worst doomed to fail. In short, it would be just plan...dumb.

most people do for exercise:• An hour walking on the treadmill while watching TV• Meandering around a weight room randomly lifting weights,

chatting with friends, with long gaps in between each exercise• Walking the dog around the neighborhood • Playing a round of golf• Fitness DVD

None of these typical activities fully meet the four criteria for exercise success. Are they better than sacking out on the couch? Sure. Do they provide health benefits? Yes. But remember Einstein’s warning: Don’t expect by continuing to do the same things over and over, doing those things that haven’t worked “yet,” you will see results and successfully transform your body.

So there you have it: The four principles of smart training. An exercise regimen with any prayer of getting you to your exercise goals must absolutely have these four elements. Exercising any other way is at best inefficient and at worst doomed to fail. In short, it would be just plain dumb.

How to create your own body-transforming Smart Training Plan

Every Smartraining Plan is broken into two main exercise modalities, Strength Training and Cardiovascular Training. And it’s all about quality over quantity.

For strength training, the clear quality over quantity winner is Circuit Strength Training.

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In circuit strength training you move through a "circuit" of resistance exercises, alternating muscle groups with little rest between, so your heart rate stays elevated.

Circuit training strength regimens have the ability to burn nearly as many calories per workout as their straight cardio counterparts, plus they build strength and improve aerobic fitness by 7 to 15%. That increase in strength equates to lean muscle tissue. Lean muscle is a calorie burning machine. When you have a higher percentage of lean muscle in your body, your metabolic rate is higher. As a result, you burn more calories all the time, not just during exercise.

For cardiovascular training, our philosophy of “quality over quantity” is supported by countless scientific studies on the effects of HIIT training. HIIT stands for High Intensity Interval Training.

Don’t be intimidated by the term, “High Intensity Interval Training.” This isn’t stuff that only Lance Armstrong can do. Everyone’s personal “high intensity” is different, based on your specific fitness level. That’s the key, customizing it to your level and ability, pushing just enough to maximize results, but never so far to be unsafe or unenjoyable.

A good Smartraining program combines custom 30-minute circuit strength training sessions with custom 15-minute high intensity cardio interval training sessions, three times per week, with plenty of rest and recovery time in between. That’s it. In fact, that’s all you can do at our company’s Koko FitClub’s, because that’s all you need to do to get results.

You can develop your own high intensity interval cardio and circuit strength training programs after a little research gleaned from the many books and articles written on the subject.

Truth is, planning and managing a Smartraining program on your own takes a lot of up front research, planning and ongoing record keeping. Many personal trainers will do this for you but at a substantial cost.

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A good Smartraining program combines custom 30-minute circuit strength training sessions with custom 15-minute high intensity cardio interval training sessions, three times per week, with plenty of rest and recovery time in between.

At Koko, we do this automatically for our members using our own patented Smartraining technology which guides each member through their very own custom Smartraining workout each day. You can see how Koko works and see if we have a location near you on our website www.kokofitclub.com.

If you are not fortunate enough yet to have a Koko FitClub nearby, and you have the time and desire to manage your own Smartraining plan, do it. It’s certainly not as easy or efficient as our Koko system, but it will still work for you. In

fact, it’s how we started doing Smartraining ourselves before we invented Koko!

“Is 30 minutes of strength training and 15 minutes of cardio really enough?”

We have heard this question many times over the course my 25 years in the fitness industry, and the answer is always the same: absolutely YES! Quality beats quantity when it comes to exercise.

This may come as a surprise to you. Many folks have been led to believe that “real” exercise means spending hours in the gym each day or burning lots of time on the road or treadmill.

This is true only if you’re a professional athlete or a competitive body builder. For these people, a typical workout is two hours a day (or more), six-plus days per week. They’re lifting heavy weights, focusing on just one or two body parts each day, or putting miles and miles of roadwork in each day.

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Some people try this approach when they are in their teens or twenties and it works for them. They have the bodies to handle that workload, and more importantly, they have the time to dedicate to it.

But for everyone else--people over 25, people with busy work schedules and family priorities everyday--working out like a professional athlete makes no sense. It’s simply unrealistic and too inefficient, given the demands on your time.

A workout has to adapt to your lifestyle, otherwise you’ll stop doing it, or run the risk of burnout, boredom and injury. The truth is, many people’s “regular” workouts may actually be holding them back from achieving their fitness goals, despite all their best intentions.

That’s why our focus has always been to create exercise programs that give our clients and Koko members the maximum results, safely, in the minimum amount of time. That’s what Koko Smartraining is all about. Optimum results in the minimum time. It’s exercise that people can actually fit into their daily lives.

Koko tailors your workout for you so you make the best gains possible for the time you spend at the gym. Koko strength training is different from traditional weightlifting. It’s “circuit-based” training.

Rather than working one muscle at a time and resting between sets, circuit training aims to work multiple muscle groups on every exercise and it

eliminates the “resting phase” by having you work opposing muscle groups during that time. It’s highly efficient and very effective, but it requires a lot of pre-planning and tracking.

Fortunately, with Koko all that planning and tracking is done for you automatically with our proprietary Smartraining software. It’s made even more time-efficient by incorporating it all into one exercise machine; the Koko Smartrainer.

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Each 30-minute Koko workout is precisely choreographed to manipulate the variables of proper pace, proper exercise order, and proper workload (weights and reps) and it all adapts daily to your progress. The result you get is the full benefits of a traditional 60 or 90 minute workout in just 30 minutes.

What’s more, it’s all customized specifically to your individual strength level, adapting each day to your progress to increase effectiveness and eliminate boredom.

There’s another benefit too. Countless research studies have demonstrated that this type of circuit training even provides

aerobic benefits to exercisers that traditional strength training regimens do not. That means more calories burned during each workout.

Personally we see the difference Koko Smartraining makes every day. A few years back when Koko’s chief fitness officer Michael Wood, CSCS was at Tufts Research Center on Aging, one of the premier research facilities on exercise in the world, he helped conduct comprehensive studies on the impact of various exercise methods on different populations.

At Tufts, they viewed an 8% - 10% strength gain in eight weeks from participants as “effective.” A 10% - 15% gain was considered “outstanding.”

At Koko, our members achieve an average 19% strength gain in their first eight-week program! That number increases to 25% after two programs and 33% after three!

The numbers say it all. Koko works. And in just 30- minutes, three times per week; it works into our members’ busy lives as well.

Come in to Koko today to experience all these benefits for yourself.

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