It’s time for a change.  I don’t mean to be a hard-ass with this post but it’s something that must be said.

I started in the fitness industry at a young age, seventeen to be exact, and over time I’ve done hundreds upon hundreds of fitness consultations.  I started with a larger commercial gym where as a trainer you had to “sell” your services to new and current members of the gym.

With these bigger companies they usually have a quota that you have to hit or meet.  Although they kept me accountable for my actions and made me motivated to seek out new clients, they also made me do something that I didn’t really like.

Be fake.

During the sales process the director had coached me and told me to really comfort the client and everything they did in terms of physical activity and exercise was amazing, even if it was walking for five minutes.

So when I had a consultation and I asked the person, “Are you doing any physical exercises right now?”, They would usually respond with “oh yeah!  I walk everywhere!”

“Oh that’s fantastic!” I would say, because that’s what I was told to say.  But in reality it wasn’t “fantastic” (from my point of view).  It was crap and by me telling this person that five minutes of walking was fantastic, it didn’t do them any good and I was not helping them at all.  

Don’t get me wrong I’m all for people getting their butts off and doing something if they’re used to doing nothing, but honestly, if you truly want to make a difference in your health you need to do more than 5 friggin’ minutes of walking.

This brings me to the point of this post, which is the difference between “Physical Activity” and “Physical Exercise”.

Physical activity is doing things such as taking the stairs rather than the escalators, or engaging in a hobby like gardening.  Things that are “work” and gets you moving minimally can be considered physical activity.

Physical exercise on the other hand, is where you’re going to see much more improvements in your health and fitness.  This is where you bump up the intensity so it becomes harder and difficult for your body to sustain that specific activity for a long time.

This is a little hard recommendation to make because many women reading this are at different fitness levels.  And for some, physical activity might be their physical exercise and that’s fine.  But what you want to ingrain into your mind is that doing physical activity is great but it’s totally different from doing physical exercise.  And physical exercise is where your body will benefit the most if you want to see drastic change in your body.

So starting today what I want you to do is a make a shift in your thinking and actions into doing physical exercise rather than just physical activity.  When you make this switch you’ll find that your fitness and health results will just explode and hopefully it will allow you to reach your goals a lot faster.

Questions?  Comments? Agree?  Disagree?  Post em’ below I’d love to hear what you have to say about this.