How Long Does It Take for Fitness Benefits to Show?
A big reason most people never stick to a serious exercise routine is that the benefits most people are interested in take a while to appear. Fat loss, muscle gain, boosts to strength, speed, and stamina—these physical manifestations of training adherence can take weeks and even months to show. That’s plenty of time for folks to give up, convinced exercise is just not for them. I get it. I do. But that’s not a valid excuse for not exercising. You know it’s important, you know what the benefits are, and I’m not going to sugarcoat things: training is not optional. So while we can’t really change when the benefits appear, we can change our expectations of the benefits, making them more realistic and limiting our disappointment when they fail to show in our preferred timing. So when can we expect some benefits from our hard work? Some benefits “show” immediately as long as you have the right tools to test them. If you were to take a muscle biopsy, you’d see that muscle protein synthes