14 DAY TRIAL // Without a single doubt, many of us came at least once to believe we’d have far better results in our workouts if we had someone tougher to oversee our progress. Enter military-style bootcamp fitness.
The quest for a stricter personal trainer has led to the appearance and surge in popularity of military bootcamps, which promise to return the best results possible while also ensuring slimmers have lots of fun.
It’s tough love working wonders, if you will. Or, at least that’s how this new type of fitness is being advertised, deliberately deceiving those who enlist for these classes, experts say for the Daily Mail.
The truth is that, for those who already have some experience with strenuous workouts, a military bootcamp may work and may even have the promised results. Still, not many of those go to these classes.
This effectively leaves regular people of varying weight as those who seek help in their fight against the flab or simply just 2 pounds of extra weight.
And what they’re not being told is that they can end up with more or less serious injuries from this type of workout, of “tough love” exercise, experts points out.
“Exercise needs to be done gradually, with proper supervision, otherwise there is a risk of injury. I would never recommend an overweight patient to do one of these military bootcamps,” Dr. Ralph Rogers, consultant in sports medicine at the London Orthopaedic Clinic says.
“When you overload the body, the result is injury – anything from shin splints to back problems – and, in this kind of environment, people make things worse by trying to soldier on,” he adds.
“Neither the psychological aspect of why someone is overweight or the nutritional aspect is addressed by a bootcamp. Even fit people can hurt themselves by being over zealous,” Dr. Rogers explains.
Clearly, he’s not alone in believing this and drawing attention to the dangers of choosing this way of losing weight and / or staying in shape.
“I’ve seen a lot of ex-soldiers with bad backs because the idea of military-style training is to push yourself beyond your limit. This means the likelihood of eventual injury is high. It’s a British thing I think, to assume that exercise must equal pain,” osteopath Paul Raw says for the same publication.