Why I'm not a fan of work-along workouts 🙅🏻‍♀️

I hope your week is going well!

The pandemic saw the rise of a lot of "fitness influencers" because they posted daily live videos that promised to “burn fat” or were described as an “Ab blast” or “glute builder”.

The reason I didn’t do them myself (defo wasn’t because I was too lazy!) was because there was a slight implication that you could get abs or an arse like them if you did these short, intense workouts.

But the collection of muscles in your “abs” and the collection of muscles in your “glutes” are like any other muscle in your body and need hypertrophy training to grow.

You can guarantee that if you are seeing a lean physique with muscle, they didn’t get it from doing workouts at home with light weights.

Are we all chasing body composition goals?

I hope not!

But a lot of women are. My passion has been around helping women make informed choices.

There are so many great reasons to work out at home - for your mental health, for your physical health, for enjoyment, for convenience.

I’m not saying you can’t build muscle and lose body fat doing work-along workouts, it’s just not the most efficient way.

I have loads of home workouts available for those that need it in The Furnace, but even those are not work-along videos because each person will have different weights and abilities and doing the same weight/reps/timing as somebody else will mean that somebody is not working to the best of their ability.

The way I see it, if your goal is to create a lean physique:

Hypertrophy training > Work-along workouts > Nothing

(‘>’ means greater than, for those that have been out of school a long time, like myself!)

Everyone will have a different lifestyle, and preferences. Some people hate the gym or don’t have time, and want to do a home workout. This is completely fine, as long as they have the knowledge that body composition results will be a bit slower (but there are other benefits).

Now - saying that, I had to give the people what they want, and some people really do want the motivation of somebody calling out what to do and when. So we have Hazel doing a live workout every Saturday. This is a bonus of The Furnace and is alongside the training plan that is given to you.

The goal of this workout is just to have fun and start the weekend on a high.

This is probably a good point to say that if you’d like to join us and start this weekend on a high, you can join The Furnace now.

Feel free to reply with any questions about the program!

Thanks for reading,

Siobhan “Not a fan of jumping around the living room” O’Hagan