Aspiring Spirit

If you’re like most people, you are interested in formulating an exercise system that will help you remain in shape and lose weight. It may surprise you to discover that scientific studies usually show that only two core varieties of exercise are successful — which suggests that you can’t just do any kind of exercise to become trim.

Because so many people have trouble dealing with exercise motivation, selecting the most efficient varieties of exercise is crucial, due to the fact that the less time it takes you to exercise - and the less time you waste on inefficient exercise - the more likely it is that you will be persistent with exercising and therefore achieve your personal weight and strength goals.

The first kind of exercise that has been consistently demonstrated to help people lose the pounds and get healthful is progressive resistance. Briefly, progressive resistance is one kind of strength training. How it works is that it is progressively ramping up the amount of weight that you lift, the number of sets, and number of reps performed. Therefore, your muscles cannot be strained or damaged - instead, they slowly and steadily strengthen without any setbacks.

Our second kind of exercise that has been scientifically studied is cardio training. This name is given to any kind of exercise that results in the heart beating at 60 - 85 percent of its maximum. Some examples of cardiovascular training might consist of jogging, jumping rope, aerobics, or running on a treadmill, among other types of exercise, but the choice is up to you.

Although progressive resistance and cardiovascular training alone have been determined to be very efficient types of exercise, scientists now know that combining them is the best bet for being successful. If you combine both progressive resistance and cardiovascular training, you will improve the strength of your muscles and develop general endurance. According to a recent scientific study, exercisers who did both cardiovascular and progressive resistance during a two month time period lost 45 percent more weight than those doing cardio training or progressive resistance alone.

Just as crucial as the kind of exercise you decide on is, the way in which you exercise is also critical. It probably will be unsurprising that being consistent is the ideal. Exercising inconsistently may put strain on your muscles and will probably not assist you to increase strength and endurance. Nor will it improve your overall health. According to most experts, the best regime is to exercise for 40 minutes to an hour three, four, or five times every week.

It is unfortunate that for a large percentage of people, getting sufficient exercise is not as simple as attending the health club 3-5 times every week or listening to what researchers say. For this subset of people, exercise motivation is the major problem - this group of people simply doesn’t have the motivation to go to the gym. In fact, they may dread any and all exercise, which can get to the point of severe anxiety.

Nobody knows what percent of the population deals with problems with exercise motivation, but experts say that up to 20 to 40 percent of people claim that they “hate” or “dread” exercise. An even larger group of people may have less severe problems with exercise motivation, finding that although it is relatively simple to dedicate themselves to an exercise regime for a short period of time, motivation eventually degrades, leaving them back where they started - out of shape and heavy.

If you are a person who struggles to deal with exercise motivation, fortunately, there are some easy strategies to overcome the struggle. In a recent scientific study, volunteers who wanted to start an exercise program were given a brief educational program that helped them decide on the best varieties of exercise, were matched with a therapist who specialized in exercise motivation, and were given a brief hypnosis course. After 6 months, they were asked to evaluate their progress. It turns out that over 85 percent of the participants had persisted with an exercise program throughout the entire 6 months. Even better, they generally lost an average of 15 more pounds than people who were not given hypnotherapy.

If you are interested in the results of this study, it might be good to look into locating a motivational therapist, habit control therapist, or therapist who specializes in hypnotherapy. These types of therapists are specially trained in helping people to overcome anxieties, build exercise motivation, and reinforce the development of good habits. Another option for exercise motivation is self-hypnosis - which is a simple and inexpensive discipline that can help people harness their own innate abilities to be motivated.

Hypnosis therapy and self-hypnosis are risk-free methods to increase motivation that have been proven to offer success in the case of the motivation to exercise. Hypnosis works by the use of hypnotic relaxation to enhance the powers of the unconscious mind to influence the modification of behavior and the formation of habits. Hypnotherapy is an excellent choice for the exercise adverse due to the fact that it is able to help increase the drive to get healthful and lose weight simply and effectively.

Alan B. Densky, CH specializes in all aspects of weight loss hypnosis CD, including self motivation CDs since 1978. Visit his Neuro-VISION hypnotherapy website and benefit from Free hypnosis newsletters, videos, and articles.

- Alan B. Densky, CH