Are You Obsessed With Exercise?

Obsession is the state of being obsessed with someone, something or a thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on a person’s mind.

Due to the emergence of social media, getting information for the general population, especially exercise and nutrition information, is very easy to access. Unfortunately this can be from many unqualified sources making some information we use potentially harmful and obsessive towards our training. We can really see this when people try to follow the same routine as a fitness influencer/bodybuilder and what they eat in a day, and then spiral out of control as they’re not getting the results they see the influencer gets and then try to over achieve and work even harder or potentially use exercise as a punishment for bad nutritional choices.

Exercise obsession

So what does an exercise obsession look like?

There are many ways to view an exercise obsession, but we will point out the main ones we see with the general population and try to intervene before it happens. As always, there is a fine line between saying something is an obsession or it’s just a habit for a short period of time. What this article is saying is that the below examples are habits over a long period of time for general population people.

Training 2x Per Day

A very common factor among gym goers is, “to get results, I must train 2x per day”. Sometimes training 2x per day can be beneficial as long as you have a exercise professional supervising or providing a specific program for this, but for the general public, you will start to feel the effects of poor recovery and disrupted sleep pretty quickly. What we see as trainers quite often, is someone will either have a session or do an intense class in the morning and then repeat that in the evening and then come back the following morning again and repeat the process. If you look at a 24hr period, that would have been 3x sessions in 24 hrs. How are you supposed to let your body recover? Not only will your recovery and sleep be affected, but these factors will contribute to your overall exercise performance which will significantly decrease.

Training 7 days per week

How do you feel when you have a day off work? Pretty good, right? You must take the same approach to your days off with work with that of your training. Again, as the reasons above, if you’re training 7 days per week, you aren’t giving your body anytime to recover.

Using exercise as a punishment for food choices

Have you ever spent extra time in the gym after eating a meal you perceived as bad or that you have felt guilty for eating? This is super common. The thought process for this is often, “for me to feel better about what I have eaten, I have to burn the extra calories I consumed”. Not a bad thought in all honesty, but this thought process can lead into creating a damaging habit where you will more than likely develop a poor relationship with food and exercise.

Following the same routine as professional bodybuilders and fitness influencers

Sorry to inform you, but to make it in the big leagues of bodybuilding, you’re more than likely going to be on some kind of performance enhancing drug or steroids to help your physique reach that next level. That something that you may have already known, but with social media the more people can know about their favourite bodybuilding idols the better before they start following their routines.

The thing with PED’s and steroids is, it’s the persons choice whether they use them or not, and there shouldn’t be a problem with that, but when they then try to promote “train with me to look like me” is where this becomes a problem. Praying on innocent people that want to transform their bodies by using their bodies to sell someone a dream when they have other substances in their system which helps them reach their body composition goals will cause a whole lot of problems both physically and emotionally for the general population who will constantly be chasing an unattainable dream.

Your mind is in a constant thought of exercise

Pretty simple one. If exercise is constantly interrupting your thoughts and daily lifestyle a lot more than it should, then there can be an exercise obsession there.

Remember, an exercise obsession occurs over time and it could be one or many of the provided examples above (there are usually more than one at a time). Just because someone may train 2x per day for 2 weeks doesn’t mean they’re obsessed with exercise. Always have context to trying to figure out why someone is training the way they are. Exercise is a tool to help us become fitter, stronger, healthier and most importantly, make us feel good.