EFL Blog

In my quest to educate the oft-misinformed public and let the local community know about our services I penned another article for OregonHealthyLife.com.

Just yesterday a colleague asked if I ever felt like giving up on trying to tell people that easy, steady state cardio doesn’t get the job done. And I have to admit that at times I have given up on certain people, preferring to let them see the results my clients get. Others you just know probably are not open to hearing they may have to do some hard work to drop pounds.

It can certainly be frustrating, as the last two gyms I worked at were full of people that were chronically misinformed about what cardio means in terms of metabolism and fat loss. And when there are cardio class teachers constantly espousing how awesome those classes are you can’t really blame people. Until they have been doing it for months and see no results. Then I fire up some rants, much like this one 😉

The subject of exercising for fat loss is wrought with misinformation, and ridiculous claims. Many that come in to Elemental Fitness Lab with the goal of losing weight have tried all sorts of protocols, which obviously haven’t worked or they wouldn’t be talking to me.

In order to clarify what works and what doesn’t we need to look at physiological principles. Keep in mind that we are setting nutrition aside for the moment.

To get the body to change it must be taken out of homeostasis, which means there must be enough consistent demands placed upon it so as to cause adaptation. In other words being concerned only with burning calories is insufficient. We need to consider the role of metabolism.

Have you ever noticed that in general sprinters have lower body fat levels and are more “toned” than distance runners? In part this is because sprinters have more muscle, which results in a higher resting metabolic rate. Calories are utilized to maintain lean tissue, so it is easier to maintain lower body fat levels the more muscle one has.

This is why jogging or other steady state cardio alone doesn’t work very well. Our bodies adapt to such low intensity efforts fairly quickly so that while there may be some initial change, in order to continue seeing results one would have to keep running further each successive week.

Instead we need to look at ways of exercising that creates a higher metabolic demand. Resistance training is the most time and energy efficient way of doing this. What this means is doing a program that gradually and safely increases strength and anaerobic capacity.

Keep in mind that strength does not equal getting bigger. Of the hundreds of people I have trained over the years all that have gotten leaner also got stronger at the same time.  In the next article I’ll discuss the importance of metabolic conditioning for fat loss.

In other news there is a good article on the NYTimes health blog on how much more effective eating low-carb + exercise is than high carb. One of the details that often tends to be downplayed is the fact that if someone is eating fewer carbohydrates they are likely eating more vegetable and protein sources, along with fats.