There’s a hyperbolic fervor to most fitness copy that we’ve gotten used to over the years. It’s fuelled by a one-two punch of desire and urgency. Many people continually work through a cycle of slow degeneration and quick-fix. And the longer the period of degeneration, the greater the urgency seems to be to fix it all ASAP.

When you think about fitness as a longer-term process — something that really deserves your respect and attention — dramatic copy starts to seem a little ludicrous.

Get an Ivy League law degree in just three weeks!
5 minutes a day to happy, well-adjusted children!
Climb to the top of the corporate ladder by using this mind-blowing font in your e-mails!

Let’s remove the sense of urgency for a moment. Instead of worrying about what you’re going to be looking like tomorrow or next week, let’s pretend that you are a lot more concerned with how you’re going to look or function a year from now.

The good citizens of Toronto (and beyond) do periodically turn up at Bang Fitness with a very urgent short-term goal.In these situations, we throw as much as we can at them without breaking them. However, most people come to us with a longer timeline in mind. This changes things for us.

I’m going to go ahead and use the term Advanced Fat-loss. You can toss that into whatever fitness copy seems appropriate. For our purposes, though, it refers to exercise protocols that beginners simply can’t hack. When you see the word advanced preceding a university course title you already understand that foundational courses aren’t just a polite suggestion — they’re an actual necessity for you to keep up. It requires you to habitually — and easily — perform calculations or connections to a substantial amount of previous material not even covered in the course.

Our foundational courses are based in movement quality and lifestyle habits. They are very challenging and require a surprising amount of brain work on top of a highly-challenging amount of body work. However,these programs tend to lack that feeling of desperate urgency that so many other things exploit. That’s because living in permanent freak-out mode is actually counterproductive to getting lean and powerful.

We also know from experience that making profound life changes tends to work in one of two basic ways:

A) High-demand change (i.e. many changes at once for a short period)
B) Low-demand change (i.e. easy, gradual changes for a long period)

Trying to combine both isn’t necessarily a recipe for disaster but it’s very seldom a recipe for success in the long-term.

Absolutely crushing people with exercise doesn’t make much sense if they’re going to chase their workout down with a pint of ice cream. Not does it make sense if it significantly increases their injury risk.

What does make sense? Laying down foundations in an orderly consistent fashion to minimize people dropping out out of the process. This means challenging without overwhelming. It means addressing the long-term without neglecting the short term (or vice-versa). It means progressively and intelligently bringing people up to an advanced level where they can can enjoy increasingly superior results for the same amount of work (or less). Advanced fat-loss doesn’t work for beginners because it’s rooted in a high level of automatic AKA unconscious proficiency. Advanced fat-loss is what we’re after whenever we take the long view of fitness.

Get lean in just 12 months!
It may not have the same oomph as the advertising come-ons at the beginning of this post. However it means a whole lot more because it may prevent you from sorting through an all new list of dramatic promises in a year’s time.

Geoff Girvitz