The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson

and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

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 adherents 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 synthesis, the

incorporation of protein into muscle fibers, the first signs of muscular hypertrophy,

begins just four hours after you lift

something heavy. If you were to sample some bone marrow after a single bout of resistance

training, you'd notice that you just upregulated production of the cells that heal your endothelial

lining. If you were to hold a stethoscope up to your hamstrings immediately after a sprint session,

you'd hear the pop, pop, pop of new mitochondria being spawned.

But these aren't visible to the naked eye, nor are they accessible to the masses.

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