ARE YOU ONE OF THOSE GYM PEOPLE?

When it comes to exercise, most people are “all or nothing” types. It’s either five days per week in the gym, or eating snacks in front of a screen each day.And how’s that going for us? Well, for the gym rats it’s going great. The problem is, they’re only about 5% of the population. What are the options for the other 95% of us? The truth is that there’s a new paradigm of health and fitness emerging—gradually!—from the obsolete twentieth century “more is better” model that only works for 5% of the population. The new paradigm works for the vast majority of the population because it answers the question, “What is the minimum time commitment and inconvenience required to stimulate my body to produce the adaptive responses I desire from exercise?”

THE STATUS QUO

If you’ve been looking around like I have for the past few years, you’ll notice a few things about the public in general these days:

• We’re fatter than we’ve ever been
• We are less physically fit than we’ve ever been
• We have more diseases of lifestyle than ever before
• We spend more to treat obesity than ever before
• Our children are fatter than they’ve ever been
• We actually spend more time on formal exercise than ever before
• We actually spend more money in the fitness industry than ever before
• For the first time in modern history, our lifespan is declining

As I mentioned, some of the only people who are able to avoid these fates are those who have made the gym—and the weight room in particular—a large part of their lifestyles. Which, even in the face of billions of dollars per year, decades-long fitness industry advertising campaign, has only been able to compel about 5% of the population to get on board. By any measure, the “fitness industry” has been a failure. When people are surveyed, they identify the following “barriers to entry” that keep them from adding gym attendance to their lifestyles:

• Time Commitment
• Inconvenience
• Lack of Desired Results
• Intimidation and Not Wanting To Look Foolish
• High Risk of Injury or Track Record of Repeated Gym Injuries In The Past

THE 80/20 SOLUTION TO THE OLD PARADIGM PROBLEM

There is a principle in philosophy called The Pareto Principle. The Pareto Principle states that for many outcomes, roughly eighty percent of the outputs come from about twenty percent of the inputs. Other names for this principle are the 80/20 Rule, the Law of the Vital Few, or the Principle of Factor Sparsity. The Pareto Principle is seen in action when it is observed that eighty percent of the sales are produced by twenty percent of the salesmen, eighty percent of the land is owned by twenty percent of the citizens, or eighty percent of crimes are committed by twenty percent of criminals. In general, this can be stated as, “Eighty percent of the benefit of your actions are produced by just twenty percent of all the things you’re doing.” If you continue on with more of the less-productive actions when you don’t need to, you will simply waste resources and produce frustration as additional benefit fails to materialize.

ADAPTIVE RESISTANCE™ TO THE RESCUE

So what is the 80/20 solution to the problems we’ve listed above? Well, ARX is. If you asked people, “What’s the least you could do to improve your body?” they might reasonably respond, “well, I guess I could walk around the block each day.” At just ten minutes per walk, that’s roughly seventy minutes per week. That’s nice and all, but how about fifteen minutes per week? The stimulus that adaptive resistance™ delivers to your body is so potent that a concentrated, focused, fifteen-minute workout can stimulate the following adaptive responses:

• Increased muscle size and strength
• Increased bone density
• Enhanced metabolic flexibility
• Enhanced cardiovascular capacity
• Optimized hormones
• Altered epigenetic expression

In fact, any medical/therapeutic benefit possible from strength training can be stimulated by a once-weekly ARX workout. If you want to maximize your aesthetics or body composition you may benefit from a second weekly workout and some fancier, higher-volume protocols, but for the majority of the public who currently do no serious resistance exercise a once-weekly ARX routine can be literally life-changing.

WELCOME TO THE NEW PARADIGM

Let’s say you start doing your ARX workouts once per week. Fast forward six months and research indicates that you will more than likely have more than doubled your strength and work capacity in all of your major muscle groups while gaining muscle and losing fat. And that’s the average, typical result. Imagine having that kind of assurance when you walked into the weight room. Hell, most people would actually be willing to spend three to five hours in a weight room every week if they felt like it was a sure thing they’d double their strength in six months. But in the new paradigm led by ARX, this doubling of strength occurs as a result of a total exercise time commitment of about an hour per month, plus the driving time there and back each week. Gym rats, Type A folks, bodybuilders: yes, we know you’ll use it more often—and you should in order to produce your desired results. For the other 95% of the population, just think about it. Once or twice per week, for fifteen minutes at a time, with great focus and effort.C’mon. It’s literally the least you can do.