Biggest Loser trainer Tiffiny Hall pushes for daily exercise

A RECENT study says that a weekend workout is just as good as a week of exercise. The Biggest Loser’s Tiffiny Hall explains why that’s not quite the case.

Biggest Loser personal trainer Tiffiny Hall says daily exercise is crucial. Picture: Tim Hunter.

I’D like to share with you some of the best advice I ever received, “You’re not too busy. You just don’t have your priorities straight.”

A recent study conducted by Loughborough University in the UK, suggests that weekend workouts can benefit health as much as a week of exercise. The study explains that if you cram your exercise into just two days on the weekend, the benefits will be almost equal to those who workout daily.

But I’m here to tell you nothing beats moving your body daily.

Weekend workouts are not enough. You need to be working out every day.

The struggle to juggle is real.

We carry work around on our phones in our pockets, we’re available 24/7, we feel urgency to respond right now, to achieve that thing by yesterday and to compete and share not just in our markets, industries and communities, but through a global social network accessible at the tips of our fingers.

Sure, life has sped up, we work faster, with more people, to a larger audience and it feels more crowded than ever. It can be overwhelming during the working week, I get it.

But that’s exactly why you need to move every single day to not only maintain physical fitness, but to feel emotionally and mentally well to deal with life in 2017.

Did you know we’re sitting an average of 7.7 hours a day from the car to a desk to a car to the couch? Our increased sedentary lifestyle is so dangerous to our health (cue obesity), high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, depression, and mounting everyday malaise, it has been coined “sitting disease”.

Martha Grogan, a Mayo Clinic cardiologist says, “For people who sit most of the day, their risk of heart attack is about the same as smoking.”

It’s time to make a stand!

The benefits of daily exercise outweigh working out once a week. You must exercise daily to control your weight. Binge exercise on weekends can make you hungrier over the weekend so you undo all your hard work at fashionable cafes and with bigger portions. It can even cause a weight loss plateau, not to mention going zero to hero after six days of nothing, could actually put you at risk of injury.

Working out just on the weekends can lead to creating a bigger appetite.

What are some of the benefits?

Daily exercise boosts high-density lipoprotein (HDL), or “good,” cholesterol and decreases unhealthy triglycerides. This jab-cross combo keeps your blood flowing smoothly, which decreases your risk of cardiovascular diseases.

Exercise daily and you also prevent a plethora of health problems including stroke, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, depression, as well as a number of types of cancer and arthritis.

Move daily and you will sleep better, have more energy, boost your metabolism, help your digestion and gut health and flood your body with happy endorphins to boost your mood.

Most importantly, daily exercise can strengthen your willpower to make healthier choices for yourself in regards to your nutrition and self-care all week.

When exercise satisfaction sets in, you will not refuel after a great workout with fast food. A meta-analysis published in 2013 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine looked at several groups of people and found that short bouts of exercise had a significant affect across all age groups in areas of inhibition and interference control aka willpower, or how we like to hashtag it #BOSS.

Trainer on the Biggest Loser Tiffiny Hall says it’s not enough to just exercise on the weekend.

Did you know that daily movement also helps to alleviate stress?

This is because the body switches to ‘fight or flight’ mode when stressed, releasing a brew of chemicals such as adrenaline, cortisol and norepinephrine. These chemicals can flood our systems switching off fat burn, irritating our gut, making us feel lethargic and slowing down our digestion by diverting blood to our muscles.

All those stress-y effects like headaches, chest pain, fatigue, upset stomach, feeling down or overwhelmed can actually lead to damaging behaviours such as overeating, overdrinking, moving even less and smoking.

These behaviours impact our quality of life through suppressing the immune system and affecting our heart, our stomach through irritable bowel syndrome, reproductive organs and lungs.

Daily movement doesn’t have to be categorised as structured exercise sessions, either.

Increasing your step count during the day to combat sitting disease can really improve your health. I like to call it getting in the zone, or getting in the Blue Zone.

Blue Zone is a concept used to describe communities around the world that live longer. There are five blue zones in the world: Sardinia (Italy), Okinawa (Japan), Nicoya (Costa Rica), Icaria (Greece), and Loma Linda (California).

The centenarians in these places are not doing one BodyPump class once a week, but rather just moving naturally every day for 20 minutes or so for long term results.

Just walking, taking stairs, choosing to walk up a hill or incline every now and then to raise your heart rate could help you to live to 100. If we follow in their footsteps, we too could increase our life expectancy as much as eight years.

Here are three ways to increase you daily step count without moving to Sardinia (though that would be nice):

1. If you’re stuck in meetings all day, suggest a Movement Meeting to your boss. A 10 minute MM, walking while you talk, will add 1000 extra steps to your day, an extra 50 calories scorched.

2. Always take the stairs. You burn approximately 0.17 calories for every step you climb, so you burn roughly a calorie and a half for every 10 upward steps. But it’s not just about burning calories, climbing stairs engages your muscles, tones your legs and is great for your co-ordination and balance. Stair climbing requires 9 times more energy than sitting, and burns 7 times more calories than taking the lift. Set yourself the goal of finding a flight of stairs (as steep as you can find) and climb the stairs five times a week. You’ll burn an average of 302 calories (now that’s a free muffin with your morning coffee).

3. Try a standing desk. Set a reminder in your calendar and every two hours perform 20 calf raises, 20 squats, 40 steps walking on the spot.