Blog

By: Dr. Payton Busker, PT, DPT

Hi y'all! Welcome to the Evlo Fitness blog.

My name is Dr. Payton and I’ll be bringing you a new blog each week spanning topics from why our thoughts and words matter as it relates to fitness to how to better recruit your glutes. For those of you who don’t know me, I am a Doctor of Physical Therapy, fitness professional, and Evlo’s new Head of Content.

Here at Evlo, we are all about building our bodies up, not tearing them down.

Because of this, we find ourselves in a unique space within the fitness industry. So much of the messaging within the fitness industry reads as follows:
 

• No pain, no gain
• If you could just burn more calories in your workouts, you could lose that extra 5 pounds
• If an exercise hurts, that probably means that your body needs it!

At least one or multiple of these probably sounds familiar to you if you’ve been a member of any sort of group fitness or had a personal trainer in the last 20 years....

Exercise is a stress to the body. It is disrupting the equilibrium of your body, which your body interprets as stress. This means exercise will spike cortisol.

Chronically elevated cortisol will result in problems in your body, as I discussed earlier. However, studies show that regular exercise can improve your stress response, even though it acutely spikes cortisol acutely or right away. 

So the answer is not to stop exercising all together. The answer is to figure out how to dose exercise so that your body responds favorably. 

A common thing I've been told from my Evlo members is that they work out less frequently and intensely with my program, and yet they see more desirable changes in their bodies. 

This change happens partly because of the exercise selection we are choosing - we are intentionally choosing exercises that load the muscles in the most effective ways with minimal joint stress. That results in better muscle adaptation with less painful joints. But it...

As we discussed in the podcast a few weeks ago, everyone wants to be able to spend less time working out and still see great results. 

And while many fitness enthusiasts may believe that we need to be killing ourselves with our workouts, the amount of time you spend working out has very little to do with the results you will see. 

What is more important is what you are doing with your time. 

Time Well Spent 

If you are strategic in selecting effective movements in your workout, you don’t need to spend longer than 45 minutes at the gym, and oftentimes, longer than 30 minutes. 

Rather, the reason people aren’t seeing the results they want, even after working hard for an hour, is because they are overloading joints and underloading muscles. 

Many individuals are choosing exercises that are only part-way effective for creating change in their muscles, which means they have to spend more time doing more...