What is an Exercise Non-Responder? Does Exercise Work the Same Way for Everyone?

Have what we've been told about exercise and the way it changes the look of your body been skewed? Today Heather looks at some relatively new data that shows how not every person responds to exercise in the exact same way. While it is certain that exercise has mental and physical health benefits for most of us, there is a certain group that does not respond in an expected way. They are termed "exercise non-responders," and these are people who can follow the same 6-week or 12-week plan as the rest of the group and yet not see the same physical changes or physical benefits as the rest. The numbers of who this applies to are much larger than you would expect in one particular outcome called VO2 max, which is a way to quantify physical fitness.

We rarely hear about this as an actual possibility. Most of the time we're told that if you do the exercises, put in the work, you will get the same results. We believe the ads that say, "If you want a body like this, work out like this." But, what if that's just not true. What if it's not physically possible for some people to re-shape their bodies in the same way as others.

Today Heather wants to free you from the cultural belief that if you do this type of exercise, you will get a body that looks a certain way. Exercise has lots of great benefits, but it's time to lose the shame and frustration around working out hard to get your body to look different. She challenges the paradigm of what we've been taught around exercise and what it will do for us.

Action step: Think about what you've believed and how you've assessed yourself or judged others in the realm of fitness and exercise because their bodies don't (or your body doesn't) look like you believed they should look if they were doing the "right types" of exercises.

Learn more about exercise non-responders and the article Heather looks at here: https://www.acefitness.org/continuing-education/certified/february-2023/8234/could-your-client-be-a-non-responder/

Here's the pubmed study that Heather cites: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6349783/

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