In Related News: 3/24/10

Study: Women need to work out an hour every day to fend off flab as they age - San Jose Mercury News

This article ran in the San Jose Mercury News today, and while I agree that consistent exercise is important, I am actually not totally in favor of what the article is saying. Basically what it says is if you do some sort of moderate activity (hiking, biking, jogging, yoga, etc.) for an hour a day you can maintain weight. That is fine if A) you are happy with your weight and B) if you have 7 hours a week to dedicate to exercise, but that is rarely a reality! Now if you have read this blog before, you will know that I am fully an advocate for healthy lifestyles and integrating movement into everyday life, but that is only a piece of the whole picture. Before exercise comes diet.

The first thing they state in this article is that 60 minutes a day is needed if women do not want to change their diet. Unfortunately, diet is the MOST important part if you want to have a healthy lifestyle. I would rather someone worked out 2 hours a week and ate right than work out 7+ hours a week and kept eating the way most Americans do. Now, ongoing moderate exercise (especially when social) has many positive mental effects which is why I am all for doing a little bit every day and building it into your life. However, if you want your body to perform at its best and you are overweight, then this is not going to cut it.

The one thing I did like about this article was actually before I even opened the link. There was an alternate link to a poll asking what people would have to give up to have time for exercise. This was a great question because it is one of the most important steps toward reaching any fitness goals (or any life goals for that matter) that you set for yourself. Many people fail to achieve their fitness goals simply because they did not have a clear idea of what it would take to succeed. They know they need to start eating right and exercising, but after the first week, they begin to realize that their life gets in the way. Before setting up a program, it is important to think first about the obstacles and then choosing how to work around them. If you do not have the time to cook your own meals, how are you going to make time? If you need to work out, what are you going to have to give up to make that happen? These are important questions to answer before you start, or at least to be aware of.

In summary, do try to be consistent but 7+ hours a week is probably going to be hard. Focus on diet first and integrating movement into your life (using the stairs, parking far away from work, take 5-10 minute work breaks to walk and stretch) and save your time at the gym for weight training that will actually produce results. Good luck and as always, happy fitness.

Colin

Is Aerobic Training a Waste of Time?

For many years, aerobic training was considered the staple of any exercise program, especially if weight loss was the goal. Aerobic training usually means running, though other activates can also be aerobic (biking or swimming). Aerobic just means that you are using oxygen to maintain your activity for a long period of time, so these types of activates are also known as endurance training.

There are many reasons people engage in aerobic activity, and if you just love running, by all means keep going. But for those of you that only do it because you have heard that it is healthy, it’s time to start thinking about alternatives. For both cardiovascular health and body composition (percent body fat), aerobic training is at best a slow way to get there. At worst, it is a total waste of time! This goes more for body fat, though when you consider how many hours people put into endurance training, even the cardiovascular benefits begin looking a little weak.

The problem is that there has never really been any data to back up the fat loss benefits of aerobic training. In a study looking at two groups of obese women, the researchers found that adding 45 minutes of aerobic training 5 days a week for 12 weeks had NO EFFECT over dieting alone. That is 4.5 hour a week of running that did nothing!

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9738131

Even in a study looking at a six month period where the participants were running for 50 minutes, 5 times per week, the results came out poorly. After over 100 hours of exercise, there was no additional effect on weight or body fat levels. I would not be happy if I put that much time into something that resulting is such little progress.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17200169

So what when wrong? Why were people so sure that this is the way fat loss occurs?

It all comes from the myth of the fat burning zone. It’s not so much a myth as it is a misguided understanding of fat loss. The fat burning zone is the zone in which your body is using fat as its main source of energy. The way the body works is to utilize fat more at lower intensities and utilize carbs more at higher intensities. So the logic runs that if you are burning a high percentage from fat, then you will be able to burn more fat calories overall! There are two flaws in this argument. First, by this logic, sitting on your couch would actually burn the most fat because you are at rest! The problem is that you are not burning very many calories total, so the percentage doesn’t matter. The second, and more important factor is that this only takes into account what happens during the workout. There is no recognition of the recovery period after exercise. If you were only look at what happens in the body during a workout you would notice similar levels of fat burned for a given amount of exercise, regardless of intensity. The missing factor in all of this is what happens in the 48 hours after you leave the gym.
Your body is always looking to restore equilibrium, and the further your push it away from your resting state, the harder it has to work to get back. So when you have a long slow training session, you may burn some calories during the workout, but your body doesn’t have to work very hard to restore itself after. The more intense the workout, the more work you body has to recover.

In a study comparing a 20-week endurance training program with a 15-week high intensity interval training program, the researchers found that the endurance group burned over 28000 calories while the interval group only burned around 13500 calories. Despite burning only half the calories, the interval training group actually showed a NINE TIMES greater reduction in subcutaneous fat (this is important because this is the fat that lies under the skin and can give the dimpled cellulite look).

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8028502

The truth is, exercise is not about what happens at the gym, but it is what your body does in response to that exercise during the recovery period. So start thinking about how you can push yourself at the gym to make sure your body will be in need of rest. I don’t recommend going to the gym and killing yourself, you need to build up. So start incorporating weight training and interval training into your routine and see the difference it makes. If time is limited, weight training is always better due to the large requirements it places on your muscles. Interval training is a good supplement to weight training but should not replace it. Good luck and start hitting those weights!

If you want to know more, check out the other “weight loss” tags where I have written further on training and dieting to help you lose weight.

Colin

Training with Injury or Disability

My personal training career actually started in a physical therapy setting. Since then, I have learned a tremendous amount about the human body, health and fitness, and wanted to relate it back to my past experiences.

Movement is truly the expression of life and without it our bodies can quickly fall into a state of dysfunction, depression, and sickness. The body is made to move, and move a lot, so the first thing to understand is that the more you move, the better. This can be any movement, from swimming to stretching to working on machines to using a handrail to help take a few steps. When we move, our muscles are required to contract, which requires our nervous system to wake up and our brain to start transmitting messages. Our blood begins to flow and our heart rate elevates, increasing the oxygen usage in the body. All of this means that toxins are more readily removed, nutrients are delivered to our cells and our brain, and our nervous system is forced to figure out how to coordinate our movement, creating energy and adaptation within the body. This process is what the body thrives on! No matter what our limitation, movement is the answer.

Obviously injury and disability are different topics, but they both deal with limitations, so I wanted to talk about them in the same piece. With injury, the focus is to let the area heal while still engaging the rest of the body, and as soon as possible, to restore movement to the injury area. Let’s take a leg injury for example. It would be important to do whatever necessary to reduce inflammation and support healing, but during the rest and recovery period, training the healthy leg will be key. There is energy, neuromuscular connections and strength that will transfer over from the training of the healthy leg, and as mentioned before, the increased blood flow from any activity will help keep the time of recovery to a minimum. I would also like to add that it is always important to determine why there was an injury in the first place, because often, injury is more a result of poor movement patterns or asymmetries in the body than a blunt force or random occurrence. This will be important to discuss with a physical therapist or trainer, but you want to make sure that you are not cleared as recovered just because there is no more pain.

When it comes to training with disabilities, there are two goals to keep in mind. First we must work around the disability and then we must try to work through it. While those with disabilities may never fully gain movement, there has been promising work done by Emilie Conrad who has used her philosophy of continuum movement in working with spinal cord injury patients. The patients can have little to no movement at all, but by working slowly and consistently, she helps them gain back some of their movement by focusing on the smallest of movement and working up from there. So in terms of working around the disability, this would involve doing whatever movements your body will allow. If you’re recovering from a stroke and your left leg and arm do not work, use your right side to actively engage in as much movement as possible. For working through the disability, it is all about working every day to develop movement. I remember working with a stroke patient that could barely walk, but we used parallel bars so that he could balance himself with his right side and then work every day to keep his left side active. We would work on the small movements, but over time, those movements got bigger. It was slow, but that is what the body needs.

For those of you with injuries or disabilities, I hope that you have a good support system and knowledgeable therapists to give you the guidance you need. If you are interested in more specifically what you should do for exercise, please check out my other posts on exercise and modify them to your situation. There are obviously many different situations that people are in, but in the end, movement is always a good thing. Good luck and keep moving!

Colin

The Key to Longevity

When looking at the various aspects of the health and fitness industry, one topic that they can all really be linked to is longevity: living a long, but more importantly, health and happy life. This article and video have uncovered some of the most basic need that humans have. While we may all know innately that these things are good for us, it is interesting to see them all together and looked at as a group. I hope you all can take something from the video, I think it ties in nicely with my last post, expanding on what it really means to be healthy and happy. Enjoy!

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/26/buettner.long.life/index.html?hpt=Sbin

Only One Body

I received an e-mail this morning from one of the top strength coaches in the industry, Mike Boyle. He sent this out to all the members of his website, strengthcoach.com, and I thought it was a wonderful analogy to help people start thinking in a different way about their health and fitness. Here is a copy of the e-mail, I hope you take as much from this as I did.

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Imagine you are sixteen years old and your parents give you your first car. They also give you simple instructions. There is one small hitch, you only get one car, you can never get another. Never. No trade-ins, no trade-ups. Nothing

Ask yourself how would you maintain that car? My guess is you would be meticulous. Frequent oil changes, proper fuel, etc. Now imagine if your parents also told you that none of the replacement parts for this car would ever work as well as the original parts. Not only that, the replacement parts would be expensive to install and cause you to have decreased use of your car for the rest of the cars useful life? In other words, the car would continue to run but, not at the same speed and with the efficiency you were used to.

Wow, now would we ever put a lot of time and effort into maintenance if that were the case.

After reading the above example, ask yourself another question. Why is the human body different? Why do we act as if we don’t care about the one body we were given. Same deal. You only get one body. No returns or trade-ins. Sure, we can replace parts but boy it’s a lot of work and it hurts. Besides, the stuff they put in never works as well as the original “factory” parts. The replacement knee or hip doesn’t give you the same feel and performance as the original part.

Think about it. One body. You determine the mileage? You set the maintenance plan?

No refunds, no warranties, no do-overs?

How about this perspective? One of my clients is a very successful businessman. He often is asked to speak to various groups. One thing he tells every group is that you are going to spend time and money on your health. The truth is the process can be a proactive one or a reactive one. Money spent on your health can take the form of a personal trainer, massage therapist and a gym membership or, it can be money spent on cardiologists, anesthesiologists, and plastic surgeons. Either way, you will spend money.

Same goes for time. You can go to the gym or, to the doctor’s office. It’s up to you. Either way, you will spend time. Some people say things like “I hate to work out”. Try sitting in the emergency room for a few hours and then get back to me. Working out may not seem so bad. Much like a car, a little preventative maintenance can go a long way. However, in so many ways the body is better than a car. With some good hard work you can turn back the odometer on the body. I wrote an article a while back (Strength Training- The Fountain of Youth) that discussed a study done by McMaster University which showed that muscle tissue of older subjects actually changed at the cellular level and looked more like the younger control subjects after strength training.

Do me a favor, spend some time on preventative maintenance, it beats the heck out of the alternative. Just remember, you will spend both time and money.

Mike Boyle