Ask your health and fitness questions here, and get answers that you can actually use. Whether it’s help with motivation, safe and effective exercise programs, or how movement can impact general health, you’ll find common sense info here.

Will side crunches make my waist boxy?

Nope! A “boxy” looking waist will come from shoulders and hips that are similar in width to your waist, not from any specific abdominal exercises.
If you want to create the shape of a smaller waist, focus on building muscle elsewhere, rather than losing size at your waist. Any exercises for your back, shoulders, and glutes will help create an hourglass figure. As an added bonus, an increase in muscle mass will help you keep your body fat percentage lower and improve your general long term health.

One last thing: If you’re worried about your muscles getting too big – don’t! It actually takes a long time to build big muscles. You’ll easily be able to stop when you’re happy with how you look.

Is it safe to read while I’m on a treadmill or an exercise bicycle? Could I fall off if I get distracted?

Lots of people read while they do cardio. It’s unlikely you’d fall off a stationary or spin-style bike, or elliptical machine. You remain in contact with the machine while you’re exercising. You probably won’t fall off a treadmill, either, though this a slightly higher risk option since you may have less contact with the machine and the belt could move you backward.

Personally, I don’t love reading while on a cardio machine, unless you’re aiming for a long, slow workout. Reading will make it more difficult to exercise at anything more than a low to moderate intensity. You’ll be distracted, and the reading posture will disrupt your movement pattern. However, there is a place for a long, slow, easy-ish workout in most programs. If your aim is to work at a 2-3 out of 10 scale for a workout 45 minutes or longer, reading while you’re at it won’t be too disruptive. For everything else, audiobooks are a great option!

Have a health, fitness, motivation, or exercise question of your own? Send it through here.

Love the idea of just turning up to the gym and not needing to think about what you’ll do? Group fitness is for you.

Whether you are looking for strength building, cardio fitness, better balance and flexibility, or almost anything else, gym classes have you covered. You can even find specialised classes like heavy metal yoga or roller-fit if you want to do something super specific.

But if you aren’t sure what you want to do in a class, the array of choices can be daunting. In this episode of the podcast, we’re tapping into Dave’s extensive knowledge of group fitness. He provides a simple, straightforward overview of different class types and formats so you can make a choice that you’re more likely to enjoy.

Have a listen and learn:

• What you can expect from some of the biggest “brands” in group fitness
• What is the difference between choreographed and freestyle classes, and the pros and cons of each
• How different classes focus on different elements of fitness (e.g. strength, cardio, etc.)
• How to get the most out of your class

Saving the best for last… We wrap the episode by talking about a really important point. Doing any class for the first time can be really scary. Some of us (yes, hello, me) are not coordinated and do NOT want to be seen doing it wrong. It’s so normal to feel like this, even if you’re a regular exerciser. Dave walks us through the steps you can easily take to make starting the class way less scary. You might even have fun! 😉

Group fitness really is it’s own world. But like any other sort of exercise, try it once and the second time becomes way easier – mentally and physically! Jump over to the podcast here and find out where group fitness can take you.

Common Sense Fitness, our (relatively) new podcast, is an audio version of this blog. Dave and I have (your hosts) have a driving desire to make exercise easier to start and easier to stick with, so you can get sustainable results. Our podcast takes on popular trends and long-accepted “how to”-s, takes away the hype, and lays out how you can make this information work for you. 

• Want to know if you should do a specific type of workout? We can tell you who it’s good for. 
• Interested in helping your body feel better? We’ll give you some ideas. 
• Not sure how to pick a good gym? We’ve got you covered (and can let you in on a few secrets.)

If you’ve been wondering about anything to do with health, fitness, and wellbeing, send us an email. We love answering questions on the pod – it’s the best way to help people. As they say, if you have a question, chances are many others do to, so you’re doing people a favor. Nothing is too small or silly, so please don’t hesitate! 

The library isn’t extensive – yet. But we add a new show every week, and have some cool topics in the pipeline. And just like this blog, we’re more than happy to answer your questions about health, fitness, and wellbeing. Keen to check out Common Sense Fitness? You can find it here, or wherever you normally get your podcasts. 

About Dave and Erin, your podcast hosts 

Dave is a long-time group fitness instructor, qualified personal trainer, and running coach, as well as an avid runner/gym-er/and exerciser himself. He shares my drive to help people move better and feel better. One of the best things about Dave? He is super-amazing at making workouts fun and helping people enjoy themselves. 

And me? I’m Erin, an exercise physiologist and remedial massage therapist. This combination of work has helped me develop an in-depth understanding of how we move (or why we can’t!). I’ve been working in the industry for over a decade, and really get excited to see people start to feel better! The HealthFit Coaching blog is where I share the written versions of things we talk about on the podcast. If you’re keen to see your questions answered on the blog, contact me here.

Someone asked me what I thought was the best option for a quiet cardio machine. The first thing to mind? Using body weight exercise to make a cardio workout happen. 

Body-weight exercise is an excellent option for home workouts if you are space limited, don’t want a noisy machine in your place, don’t want to spend a lot of money, and would like to tick the box for strength training and cardio exercise in the same session. 

Your own body-weight  is great

Whether you are running or doing pushups, you’ve got one thing going for you: Your own body-weight. Most people don’t think about how much they weigh, at least in terms of resistance. Since we have muscles that are used to holding us upright and moving us around, we don’t have a sense of how heavy our body parts are. But when you are moving, you are moving all your weight around. You have a built-in gym! And many ways to use it.

Body-weight exercise is great for cardio and strength training

One of the reasons we don’t notice the weight of our bodies when we are doing normal daily activities is that our brain is good at minimising movement to conserve energy. This means that your movements will be as small as possible, without limiting what you’re doing. For example, imagine walking around and lifting your knees as high as your waist with every step. It’s unnecessary, not to mention pretty awkward! 

Many body-weight exercises require you to move through a much larger range of movement than you normally would. People often don’t realise that strength is range-specific, meaning that you only develop strength in the ranges of movement that you use. If you aren’t used to big movements – like those that might be required by your workout – they are automatically more challenging. 

To meet this challenge, your muscles have to contract more powerfully, which uses more oxygen. Your heart rate and breathing get faster to move oxygen to the working muscles. You’re all of a sudden in the “cardio training zone”. 

In addition, many of us don’t lift anything close to our body-weight in any strength exercise, so your weight can be a great strength challenge.

Body-weight exercise is easy to modify

If the challenge is too much, don’t worry! Body-weight exercises can be made easier or more challenging even though your weight doesn’t change, so you’re not stuck. Thanks to the magic of physics, you can increase or decrease the amount of work you do by making your movement more vertical or more horizontal. Changing your body position relative to your working muscles makes a big difference. 

For example, let’s look at a push-up. The standard push-up position has you hold your body parallel to the ground. The balls of your feet are the pivot point, and your shoulders and arms are moving the weight of your flat body – your whole height – up and down against gravity. 

But if you change the angle of your body by putting your hands up on a bench or table, you decrease the load by decreasing the length-of-body moving against gravity. The higher you go, the less you work against gravity. (There is a more science-y worded explanation of course. I suspect we are all more interested in the practical side of things.)

You can also change the challenge in other ways. Movement speed can make a huge difference to intensity: Move really slowly, or really quickly, and see how you feel. Don’t forget that controlled movement is key to safe exercise, regardless of speed. You’ll get more from a workout that doesn’t injure you; if you’re injured, you can’t work out again tomorrow. 

What’s the take-home message?

Body-weight exercise is a great option no matter what kind of workout you want. It can provide great cardio benefits, and will help you get strong. You can modify the challenge of the exercise by changing your body position, or changing your movement speed. Move your body, have fun, and see what happens. 

I have a family history of heart disease. I’m currently 42, and as I’m getting older, I’m worried that I’ll end up with heart problems. Right now I don’t have any problems with my heart or blood pressure. My doctor recommended doing aerobic exercise to stay healthy, but I really don’t like cardio. Will lifting weights have a significant impact on my cardiovascular health?

Short answer: Strength training is probably not going to boost your heart health the way you’re hoping. However there is still benefit! Here’s why:

Your body adapts to the demands that you place on it. These demands can take the form of learning a new skill, increasing daily physical activity, or lifting heavy things. In particular, your muscles will get stronger relatively quickly when you start to make them work.

As well as being an very important organ, your heart is a muscle. And just like any other muscle, it will respond to increased stress (i.e. exercise) by getting stronger. In practical terms, this means it becomes more efficient at pumping blood, since it can move more blood with each heartbeat. This is useful since your body needs a minimum amount of blood to circulate every minute in order to keep living; More blood moving per beat means that your heart rate (the number of beats per minute) can decrease without problems.

Overall, there isn’t much research to suggest that strength training creates enough stress to improve heart health. Aerobic exercise – aka “cardio” – remains your gold medal choice for this. Don’t think that time with weights isn’t valuable for your heart though.

Strength training still benefits

There are still some benefits for heart health. They just are a little more indirect.

• The most important molecule in your blood is oxygen. We can live with low levels of everything else, but without oxygen, we’re toast. Any time we move our body, our oxygen needs increase, as it gets used more quickly by your muscles. The more strenuous the movement, the more oxygen you’ll use and need. Strength training will make your muscles stronger (obviously!), and stronger muscles will be less stressed by daily activities. With less physical stress comes lower oxygen demands in everyday life, so your heart can stay in low-stress mode too.

• Research has suggested that the actual structure of your heart will change with strength training. Specifically, the walls will become thicker (but not dangerously so), which allows a stronger “pump” action. Stronger pump means more blood is pumped per beat, and your heart can do less work (fewer beats) to move the same amount of blood through your body. We do know from the research that with regular and long term strength training, your heart rate will decrease, which is an easily observable effect of this.

• Some research has also shown that blood pressure is reduced with regular strength training. It’s important to know that if you already have high blood pressure, you’ll need to modify your strength training program a little to make sure you don’t increase it during a session. Short term increases in blood pressure are common when lifting heavy things.

• It appears that with regular strength training, the heart muscle itself will adapt to use less oxygen, again decreasing your overall demand.

The last word on strength training for heart health

Ultimately strength training doesn’t appear to provide enough stress to create significant positive changes in heart health. You really do need the ongoing challenge of sustained aerobic exercise, namely, a sustained elevated heart rate. This is what improves the majority of the factors that keep the heart healthy in the long run. You aren’t sentenced to running, cycling, or anything other form of cardio though. There are lots of other ways to use strength training exercises to keep your heart healthy, or you could look at some non-traditional types of cardio exercise. You might find it just as enjoyable.

A new year resolution is the pinnacle of goal setting. The glow of the holidays set up a rosy outlook on the new year, and aspirations are lofty. We’re relaxed, in great moods, and so optimistic about the possibilities ahead of us. The sky is the limit! But that’s part of the problem.

Some research suggests that 75-80% of people have given up on their new year resolution by mid-February. In my experience, that sounds about right. In large part, this comes down to two major, immediate factors here that mean many of our resolutions are not set up to succeed. If we can address these, we significantly increase our chances of making those resolutions stick!

Timing is everything

The start of a new year seems like a great time to make changes. New year, new me, right? Realistically, choosing the first of the year probably makes our desired changes a lot harder to stick with. The timing is off!

By the time January 1st roles around, we’ve have a solid three to five weeks of the holiday season and all the festivities that accompany it. That’s a lot of time out of routine, and for many people, that’s time spent indulging in food, drink, and sleep that aren’t normal for us. It’s not really typical of our daily lives. This can lull us into a false sense of “I have plenty of time for new things”, which quickly falls by the wayside as we get back to normal.

What to do instead: Tweak your new year resolution to match your “normal” daily routine. Take into account the time you spend working, commuting, doing chores and providing care for others. And remember to leave some time for hobbies and other things you enjoy. Does your goal, or the steps you need to take to achieve it, need to change in order for it to realistically fit into your days? Maybe you can make it smaller, simpler, or give yourself a longer deadline to achieve it.

(Goal) Size matters

Our culture is all about “go big or go home”. That’s cool, but actually hard to do. Here’s why: Big is overwhelming. It’s sometimes harder than we expect. Sometimes achieving big things is more complex than we realised. Most commonly, we just don’t know where to begin.

That’s not to say big goals are bad goals. In fact, big goals are usually the ones that get us excited. I mean, if you want to lose weight, losing 20kg (or 44 pounds) is way more inspiring than losing one, even though losing one is much more achievable and sustainable.

What to do instead: Break it down. Big goals just need a little extra thought and planning in order to be more easily achieved. There are many ways to break down your big goal into smaller, more achievable pieces. It can be as easy as taking the time you give yourself, and dividing that and your goal into smaller sections. By breaking things down, you get the positives both of something that doesn’t seem too big to accomplish. And you get a lot more “reward buzz”, my term for the feeling you get when you do what you say you’re going to do. Taking action can be as rewarding as the big goal itself.

Tweak ’til it’s right

You don’t have to throw out your new year resolution and start from scratch. Instead, sit down and spend some time considering the above points. If you’re going to keep working away at the goal you set on Jan 1st, it’s worth figuring out what you need to do to achieving it in small pieces, what actions will make those achievements happen, and how they are going to fit into your normal non-holiday life. It’s a different type of exercise, but like any other, very much worth doing!

I’m a guy who is interested in gaining muscle, but my partner wants to lose weight and get fit. She wants to go hiking and I really want to support her! We tried it and both loved it. My question is: can I still gain muscle while hiking once or twice a week? I’ll still be going to the gym and lifting heavy 4-5 days per week. I’m worried that the cardio from the hiking will keep me from adding muscle mass.

Hiking a couple of times a week shouldn’t have a massive impact on your muscle gain. There are a couple of factors here that lead me to this answer.

Strength training while also training for aerobic capacity (cardio fitness) is called concurrent training. (This is a necessity for most sports.) The research says that this may diminish progress in either or both types of training. One popular theory about why this happens describes an “interference” between the adaptations caused by cardio or strength exercises. These very different types of exercise create very different responses in the muscle, some of which may counteract each other.

However, cardio training is Not Guaranteed to diminish strength or muscle mass gains. This interference effect seems to vary a lot depending on the individual as well as the type, duration, frequency, and intensity of training. Some people even see improved responses from concurrent training.

Hiking as concurrent training

The most common interference effect is a decreased strength and muscle gain response with concurrent training – that is, when doing cardio and strength sessions on the same day or same week. Doing more cardio seems to create an “overreaching” response. In other words, taxing the body more can make it harder to A) get the same quality strength workout and B) delay recovery from all workouts. But this doesn’t seem to apply to all cardio across the board. It appears to be most caused by high-volume, high-intensity, or high-frequency cardio workouts.

My guess is your couple-times-a-week hiking isn’t especially high in volume or intensity. I would be more wary of very long hikes, up very steep terrain and/or with a heavy pack, all of which will increase the intensity of the hike. On the other hand, frequency also plays a part. If you have a long or hard hike every so often, it shouldn’t create too much interference. It’s a drop in the bucket, so to speak.

The other thing to keep in mind with concurrent training is that interference is usually body part specific. A big (long, heavy) hike might knock your legs around a little, so you might not have a great leg workout the next day. An upper body day would probably be fine though. You could get around this by planning your strength training days so that you hike after leg days. You might be a little more sore or tired, but it wouldn’t disrupt your muscle gains anywhere near as much.

Another benefit to hiking

There’s some benefit to hiking in this situation as well (other than strengthening your relationship!). Non-paved trails are full of rocks, divets, branches, and other varied surfaces. As you step over and around these, you challenge different ranges of movement. This gives your brain lots of rich information to work with, strengthens your physical resilience (aka decreasing injury risk), and helps you recover from your gym sessions. Plus, getting outside has many psychological benefits. It’s nice to get a break from the indoor world sometimes.

Bottom line, hiking has a pretty low chance of being a serious risk to your muscle mass goals. Be smart about how you structure your training, and get out there with your partner and enjoy the fresh air!

I went for my first run and my head was hurting for the rest of the day. The run wasn’t hard, in fact it was a walk-run alternating between running for a minute and walking for a 90 seconds. Including warming up and and cooling down, it was a 30 minute workout. Do you think my headache could be related to not being hydrated enough?

There are quite a few factors that might be causing a headache after running. Dehydration could definitely be one of them.

Hydration guidelines tell us that men should have a total of around three and a half to four litres a day of fluid intake. Women around two and a half to three litres. (Litres are roughly equivalent to quarts, if you need to do the conversion.) Total fluid intake, by the way, is not just the water you drink. Other drinks and the water content of the food you eat also contribute. This article from the National Institutes of Health provides the water content for selected foods in Table 1.

Temperature, humidity, and sweat rate will impact your hydration status as well. If it’s hot, you’ll sweat more and dehydrate more quickly. Even moreso if it’s hot and humid. And if you sweat a lot, that will also contribute. Take these things into consideration when you’re planning your workout.

Also keep in mind that you can’t drink water and instantly be more hydrated. Don’t let the rate you pee fool you. It takes at minimum several hours to process the water you drink. If you’re running tomorrow, start hydrating now.

Another other thing that might really contribute to a headache after running: Neck and shoulder tension, especially through your upper traps. Running technique is not just about how you move your legs, and running is hard work! When we are doing physically hard work, we often end up with our shoulders up around our ears. Coupled with the fact that most of us hold tension in our shoulders anyway, this could definitely be a contributing factor. Keep your shoulders and arms relaxed as you run, for a better stride and one less headache trigger.

I paddle outrigger canoes three or four times a week as part of a racing club. I’d like to strength train as well, but it leaves me sore for days and I can’t go out on the water. I don’t want to miss time in the boat, so I’m not going to the gym, but I really liked lifting weights in the past. Is there any way I can actually do both? 

When strength training soreness is consistent and limits your other activities, your program is probably too intense. Volume (sets/reps) and weight (load) determine session intensity. Too much of either will overload your body. It’s common to be sore after a session or two when: 

• You’re new to lifting weights,
• You are getting back into weights after a long period away from strength training, or
• When you’re starting a new program, especially if there is a larger “power” component to it. (Power-focused exercises focus on moving heavy weight fast, like the Olympic lifts, or moving your body explosively, like plyometrics.) 

This doesn’t sound quite like you. I would look at adjusting your strength training volume, specifically by decreasing your sets and reps. When you use strength training to support another sport, you can get away with doing less in the gym. But you still want to make your time worthwhile. You’ll get plenty of muscular endurance training from your time on the water. A focus on heavier (but not maximal) strength training in the gym will provide you a better foundation for your sport-specific work.

Assuming no injury history that you work around, I’d probably be looking a a weights program including:

• Dynamic stretching as a warm up. For paddlers, working on improving thoracic extension especially will be very helpful for injury prevention and power in the stroke. 
• Lots of compound lifts (also called multi-joint exercises). These include squats, deadlifts, chin ups, rows, and pushups. Aim for two to three sets of six reps, choosing a weight that you can do for seven reps max, with good form.
• Anti-flexion/extension and anti-rotation exercises like planks or anti-rotation presses (also called a Pallof press). 

The other factor to consider here is that you are potentially under-recovered. Higher-demand exercises like heavy weights, eccentric movements, or power exercises create more muscle damage than endurance or strength-endurance exercises. Damage requires healing, and while we rarely think about it in that context, that is exactly what recovery time is for. Higher exercise demands mean higher recovery demands. You might need more sleep (most important) or more food (usually less of a concern for recreational athletes). You could also pursue more soft tissue support like massage or foam rolling. That said, your consistent soreness makes me think this is not really a recovery issue, it’s a training volume issue. 

Bottom line: Strength training soreness happens, but you shouldn’t be sore every time you lift weights. The benefits you get from a training session like that will be outweighed by your inability to do the things you enjoy. Better to back off the strength training intensity so you can lift, train, and live your life without wincing.