What’s up my friends, welcome to my blog. If you’re new here, I’m Jules! I talk a lot about health tips and tricks, fitness, and food – my love language <3 If you like this post please subscribe to my email list or find me on TikTok (@juleseastswell).
If you found this blog you might have been googling something like “top fitness mistakes” or “what not to do when starting a fitness journey”. In that case, you’re already ahead of the curve. There is so much conflicting information out there about what we should do when it comes to fitness… I’ve personally waded through all of the BS first-hand. I want to touch a bit more on my fitness journey and all off the mistakes I made along the way… and trust me, there were MANY!! Buckle up, because we’re about to dive deep.
So… what gives me the right?
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a former college cross country and track athlete, and I really had to find how fitness fit into my life outside of running post-grad. I have a very balanced fitness routine these days, and I find that it adds to my life rather than consumes it as it has in the past. However, this was NOT the case at the start. I’m running through the biggest mistakes I made when I started my personal fitness journey beyond sports and so you can avoid my missteps.
Let’s break it down.
1) Over-exercising
Overexercising can be common in people who go from not exercising at all to trying too aggressively to get in shape or lose weight. I know when I first started workout out on my own, I got a little overexcited and went “balls to the wall” for lack of a better term.
The CDC recommends a minimum amount of exercise as being 150 minutes (or 2.5 hours) of moderate-intensity physical exercise per week plus muscle-strengthening activities two days per week, but there is no recommended upper limit. That’s because the point of overtraining is different for everyone. For example, a marathon runner can exercise a lot more than the average person without causing harm.
Some signs of overexercising include:
1. Poor recovery the day after a workout
2. Fatigue
3. Increased resting heart rate
4. Inability to perform at your typical level
5. Mood swings and irritability
6. Trouble sleeping
7. More frequent colds and illnesses
8. Overuse injuries
And that’s just naming a few! In my case, after I ended my running career, I took some extended time off and didn’t work out at all (I was burned out from running). However, when I finally decided I wanted to lose weight, I only knew how to operate at an athlete level. I also had a very restrictive mentality that we’ll talk about in a bit, but I went HARD in the gym. I would follow up hours of cardio with high intensity interval training (HIIT) and I didn’t feel like a workout counted unless I was dripping in sweat and exhausted. Anyone remember the BBG era? (I may be dating myself) This ultimately led to burn out in a couple months and I developed long-term health issues as a result.
2) Skipping Recovery
This leads into my next point, which is not prioritizing recovery. Exercise stresses your body, and it causes damage to your muscles in the form of micro-tears. These micro-tears are what actually help build muscles – but our bodies need time to recover to grow stronger. While we recover, this damage is repaired and we’ll be able to perform our workouts at a higher level next time.
Rest days also allow our bodies to replenish our energy stores. Glycogen is a form of energy stored in our muscles. Exercise depletes these glycogen levels, which leads to muscle fatigue. When we give our bodies time to recover by incorporating rest days, we help reduce our muscle fatigue and prepare our muscles for the next exercise.
What I had to learn is that, when it comes to exercise, more isn’t always more. I used to beat myself up when I would miss a workout when I was first starting on my own journey, but I didn’t realize that these rest days were actually critical for muscle building and for my overall performance. This ultimately led to muscle plateau, and I constantly felt weak in my workouts and wasn’t actually growing my muscles and changing my body composition.
3) Deprioritizing Sleep
Hand in hand with recovery is sleep. When I started my fitness journey, I was getting between 4-6 hours of sleep because I was working crazy hours from 8am until midnight, waking up at 5am to go to the gym, then partying on the weekends. Something always has to give, and for me that was sacrificing sleep. Similarly to rest days, sleep gives your body time to recover, conserve energy, and repair and build muscles worked during exercise. When we get enough good quality sleep, the body produced growth hormone. When we’re kids this helps us grow, as adults, this helps us build lean muscle and repair from hard workouts. It’s recommended that we get 7-9 hours of sleep per night, and most people are falling short of this.
4) over-Restricting
I go into depth on this in one of my recent Youtube videos where I talk about how I developed an eating disorder throughout my fitness journey, ultimately stemming from over-restricting what I was eating. I now eat intuitively and listen to my body.
When I was embarking on my personal fitness journey, I didn’t have a ton of information beyond the basic food table on how I should be eating to help my body flourish. I had no idea what I was doing to be frank. I knew that I wanted to lean out, so I started cutting out entire food groups from my diet. I completely cut out carbs and almost all fats, so my diet was essentially plain lean meets and vegetables. And protein bars… LOTS of protein bars.
Keep in mind I’m also working out intensely 2 hours per day. The immediate result was rapid weight loss followed closely by rapid weight gain 3 times what I had lost. This was probably the worst mistake I made in my fitness journey.
Over-restricting can actually slow your metabolism, it can cause fatigue and nutrient deficiencies, it can reduce fertility – I lost my period, it can lower your immunity, and it can mess up your gut amongst many many other things. I also adopted an “all or nothing” approach at this point in time that put me on a crazy binging and restricting cycle for years. It took me a long time to recover, but now I don’t have any food restrictions. Instead, I focus on what I can add to my diet rather than subtract from it.
If you’re starting your fitness journey and don’t know where to start with nutrition, try adding in things like vegetables and fruit. This will ultimately help you shift your diet because you’ll inherently start eating less of the other stuff. But I don’t recommended cutting out anything completely longterm. I LOVE ICE CREAM!!
5) Lacking Consistency
Let’s talk about consistency vs. intensity. Intensity is define as the degree of effort you put into your diet, workout, or life in general, where as consistency is defined as the degree to which an activity (workout, healthy eating, etc.) is performed on a regular and consistent basis.
A common mistake people make is having either a couple intense workout sessions and week and then wondering why they’re not seeing results, or what I did, which is trying to make every workout as intense as possible, which ultimately leads to burn out or stopping all together. This is where consistency can become the champion. I actually learned this from the book Atomic Habits – It’s best to start with a routine that is easy, practical, and enjoyable, and slowly add intensity over time once it has already become a habit.
When I first got back into workout out recently, I started going to the gym for easy workouts every day. This could be walking on the treadmill or just abs for 20 minutes. Then, slowly over time, I increased the intensity of these workouts because working out became a part of my everyday life. The worst thing that can happen to your fitness is just quitting. Therefore, it’s best to choose a routine that you can stick to and build over time rather than starting with the most intense diet and exercise routine that you can’t maintain. Over time, you can build a sustainable and consistent exercise program that grows in intensity. This is what I have found to be the best option for sustained fitness and muscle growth.
6) Skipping Strength Training
Let’s talk about cardio vs. strength training. First I’ll caveat, if you love running, just do it. Finding exercise that you enjoy and can stick to is the number one priority. However, if you have particular exercise goals like building strength, muscle growth, fat loss, or longevity, strength training can be a great option.
Cardio is an exercise that increases your heart rate and challenges both your cardiovascular and respiratory systems. You can think of this as running, biking, swimming, jump roping, or similar. Strength training uses resistance to build muscle, strength, and endurance. You can think of this as lifting weights, doing exercises with resistance bands, pilates, pushups, squats, yoga.
As a runner by trade, I was the cardio queen for 15 years of my life. However, when I started working out on my own, I really wanted to lose some fat and become toned. As I mentioned previously, I ultimately ended up doing crazy amounts of cardio and restricting, and I still didn’t end up with the body I wanted. Cardio burns calories while you’re performing the exercise. Strength training, on the other hand, burns calories while you’re doing the exercise, throughout the day afterwards, and helps you build muscle. This ultimately increases your basal metabolic rate (BRM), or the rate at which the body uses energy while at rest to keep vital functions going such as breathing and keeping warm, or the rate at which your body uses calories.
So if your goal is to increase your calorie threshold or tone-up, strength training is a great way to achieve this. I personally prioritize strength training, but I still love to incorporate some cardio through walking or the stair stepper because it gives me endorphins and makes me happy!
7) Repeating the same workouts (over and over again)
Diving a bit deeper into exercise routines, I want to talk about workout repetition and why it’s important to keep switching up your workouts. While consistency in workouts is important, it’s also important to ensure that we’re not performing the same exact workouts over and over again.
When you perform the same exercise constantly, your body gets use to this exercise and it becomes very efficient. As a result of this adaption, you end up burning fewer calories even when you’re doing the same amount of exercise. A way to combat this is to challenge your body with new exercises that you’re not used to. This can help you combat any fitness plateaus. Additionally, switching up your exercises helps prevent overuse injuries, build new muscles, and prevent boredom. While I work the same muscle groups every week, I switch up the exercises I’m doing because I would be incredibly bored otherwise. One week I might focus on squats while the next week I prioritize dead lifts.
8) Relying on the scale
The last bit that I will leave you with is something it took me way to long to wrap my head around… the scale isn’t a reliable indicator of overall fitness. You read that right. As our bodies change and we build muscle, our body composition is constantly shifting. As we build muscle we might actually become HEAVIER! To prove this point, I have photographs of myself at the same weight but different body compositions, and I look completely different! Instead I like to rely on how I feel, how my clothes fit, and how much I can lift to measure my health. I can’t remember the last time I stepped on a scale, and I no longer feel like a slave to a number.
Starting a your fitness journey can be tough, but with the right tips and tricks you can reach your goals in no time! Follow along for more either here or on my tiktok @juleseatswell 🙂