You've decided this is the week. You're going to the gym, you're going hard, and you're going to keep going. Three sessions in you can barely walk down stairs, and by the following Tuesday the whole thing has quietly evaporated. Sound familiar?
I sat down with Hannah Boardman, an accredited exercise physiologist, to talk about exercise for weight loss — and her central message surprised me with how unglamorous it was. The best program isn't the hardest one. It's the one you'll still be doing in three months.
Where Does the Weight Actually Go?
Let's start with the fun one, because almost nobody knows the answer. When you lose fat, where does it go?
You breathe most of it out. Fat gets broken down into carbon dioxide and water, and the carbon dioxide leaves your body every time you exhale. There's more happening biochemically, but that's the honest short version — and I love it, because it quietly dismantles the idea that fat "melts" or gets "sweated out". Your lungs do a great deal of the exporting.
Gradual Progression Beats Going Hard
This is the heart of Hannah's approach, and it's the opposite of how most people start.
With a client new to exercise, she might begin at twice a week. Twice. From there the goal is to build daily movement — steps, standing up from the desk every half hour, the unglamorous stuff — rather than to make the two sessions brutal.
Her reasoning is simple and hard to argue with. A lot of people start, go extremely hard, and fall off the wagon back to square one. The gains from a punishing fortnight are worth very little compared to the gains from eighteen months of consistency. So the first consult isn't about prescribing exercise at all — it's about working out who the person is, what their history with exercise has been, and what they'll realistically keep doing.
Their working rule of thumb for progression is to nudge intensity up by around 10% a week, adjusted to how the person is actually responding. If a movement starts producing joint pain, they taper back. The principle is: progress, but never at the cost of the person returning next week.
Start Where the Person Is, Not Where the Program Is
Hannah gave an example that reframed this for me completely. For a client carrying a lot of weight and struggling to move much at all, she might start with a sit-to-stand — simply standing up out of a chair. No added weight, because that person is already lifting their own body, which is a substantial load.
From there it progresses: sit-to-stand, then a squat without the chair, then added resistance. Each step small enough to be safe, each step genuinely harder than the last.
What I appreciate about this is that it's not a watered-down version of real training. It is real training, scaled correctly. And the knock-on effect is confidence. Hannah mentioned that many clients arrive at the first session frightened — expecting to be flogged by a trainer. Her job early on is reassurance: nothing happens without their consent, and nothing happens that isn't safe for them. That matters practically, because carrying excess weight often comes alongside raised blood pressure, cardiovascular considerations and joint issues. Knowing those are being accounted for is what gets someone through the door a second time.
Resistance and Aerobic Training Both Earn Their Place
Hannah combines the two deliberately, and the reasoning for resistance training goes well beyond appearance.
Building muscle increases glucose uptake — your muscles draw more sugar out of your blood to use as fuel. That's genuinely important in this context, because carrying excess weight raises the risk of type 2 diabetes, which is fundamentally a problem of elevated blood sugar. More muscle gives your body more capacity to manage it.
Aerobic training is anything that lifts your heart rate: walking to begin with, then the bike, the rowing machine, and running later if it suits the person. The bike is often her safest starting point — a controlled movement, kind to the knees, and far less intimidating than a treadmill for someone who's nervous about falling.
A typical session she described: five minutes warming up on the bike, then strength work targeting big muscle groups — a seated row for the back, a sit-to-stand or leg press for the legs — then back to the bike. Breaking the cardio into chunks makes it achievable when fitness is low. As fitness improves, those chunks join up.
How Hard Is Hard Enough?
Here's a tool anyone can use without equipment or an app. After a set, ask yourself: out of ten, how difficult was that? Hannah aims for around a seven — moderate. If you're sitting there, you're roughly where you want to be when starting out.
Then progress by a small increment each week and pay attention to the aftermath. If you're so sore the next day that you can't get through normal life, you overshot. Taper back and climb more gently.
For those who want numbers, her working definitions are high intensity at around 85% of maximum heart rate and moderate at around 75%. The usual way to estimate your maximum is 220 minus your age — treat that as a rough ballpark rather than a personal measurement, because individual variation is considerable. If you want a figure you can actually rely on, that's a conversation for a professional.
And one lovely point of perspective: whether an activity counts as "high intensity" depends entirely on the person. For someone carrying a great deal of weight, walking can genuinely put them at high intensity. The heart rate tells the truth; the activity name doesn't.
Interval Training vs Steady Effort — and Rest
I asked whether one approach wins for weight loss. Hannah had recently read a comparison of high-intensity interval training against moderate-intensity continuous training, and the finding was that neither came out clearly ahead. They were comparable.
Which means the deciding factor is you. She enjoys prescribing intervals to many clients precisely because of the psychology: twenty seconds of hard work, then rest. For plenty of people that's far more motivating than twenty unbroken minutes. For others it's miserable. Both answers are fine.
On high-intensity group fitness classes attended most days of the week — there's nothing inherently wrong with frequent high-intensity work if you're conditioned for it, eating properly, and taking at least one genuine rest day a week. If you've never trained that way before, starting at six days a week will wreck you.
Recovery doesn't have to mean doing nothing. You can go to the gym and pull everything back to roughly half your usual load — still moving, muscles still working, just without the stress. Or walk for half an hour. Or rest completely.
The soreness that shows up two to three days later is delayed-onset muscle soreness, and it's a signal your muscles are still repairing and adapting. If you're sore but keen, a light session is the sensible answer.
Make It Something You'd Choose
Enjoyment isn't a nice-to-have in this picture. It's the mechanism by which the program survives.
Sometimes enjoyment comes from the activity itself. Often it comes from the connection to real life — understanding that the squat is why you can get out of a chair makes the squat feel worth doing. Hannah described a client who hadn't been on a bike in years. Getting her onto a stationary bike at the gym was step one; she's now talking about riding outdoors on a track.
That's the part that gets me. Most people arrive without knowing what their goals actually are. Finding out what matters to them is the real work — and it looks nothing like a number on a scale.
Key Takeaways
- Adherence beats intensity. The program you'll still be doing in six months outperforms the one that breaks you in two weeks.
- Start absurdly small if you need to. Standing up from a chair is legitimate training when it's the right scale for you.
- Combine resistance with aerobic work. Muscle improves how your body handles blood sugar; cardio builds capacity.
- Use the out-of-ten check. Aim for about a seven, then progress in small steps and watch how you recover.
- Take at least one real rest day a week — and remember recovery can be a lighter session, not necessarily nothing.
- Intervals and steady cardio work comparably well, so pick the one you'll actually look forward to.
- Get guidance if you're new, especially with joint issues, blood pressure concerns or any diagnosed condition.
Hannah is a strong advocate for a multidisciplinary approach, and I couldn't agree more — she works on movement and refers clients for nutrition support, because exercise and food together achieve far more than either alone. That's exactly how I work at me&my wellness: food, movement, sleep and stress treated as one system, because that's how your body experiences them.
I'd add one thing of my own, as a clinical nutritionist. When weight loss becomes the only metric, people tend to get harsh with themselves and the whole project becomes something to endure. Watch the things that actually indicate health improving — energy through the day, sleep quality, strength, what you can do now that you couldn't last month, how you feel in your body. Those move earlier than the scales, they're more informative, and they're far better company on a long journey.
Start smaller than you think you should. You can always add. It's much harder to come back from quitting.
This article is general information, not personalised medical or exercise advice. If you have a diagnosed condition, joint problems, high blood pressure or any cardiovascular concern, speak with your doctor or an accredited exercise physiologist before starting or significantly changing a program.
Want to go deeper on this? Book a free 30-minute discovery call with Anthony at meandmywellness.com.au