EFL Blog

Nutrition has been on my mind a lot this past couple of weeks in part due to a talk by Dr. John Berardi of Precision Nutrition last month and also noting the food behaviors of those clients losing fat and those that aren’t. But that topic will take a bit of a backseat while I flesh out some interesting discussions and put them into readable form.

The change of topic is also due to something the ever brilliant Gray Cook said in an enjoyable blog post:

In summary, the best trainers, teachers, coaches and clinicians I know are fundamentally weakness managers. They identify a fundamental limiting factor and manage it!

Whether it is doing a movement screen, strength testing, flexibility test, or reviewing a food log managing a person’s weak areas are exactly what trainers should be doing. Having clients do exercises they enjoy and and do well or entertaining them with circus trick “functional” exercises is what many do, but look at the (lack of) results in their clients and all questions are answered.

For most people looking to lose weight and just feel better managing nutritional habits and mitigating life stress is the number one limiting factor. Strength coach Joel Jamieson expounds in this audio interview on the topic of managing stress in the training of elite athletes and regular Joe and Janes with lives probably even more stressful than a pro athlete. Well worth a listen.

Most of us have such busy lives that getting at least 6 hours of good sleep per night and eating regular meals with 1 vegetable is enough of a challenge that trying to put more on the plate, so to speak, is more than can be managed effectively.

When it comes to exercise for most of us again, simpler is better. You should not be doing the exercise program LeBron James does, or any pro athlete for that matter. Nor should you do the program celebrity X said they did in the latest Women’s Health. And don’t listen to people on the internet claiming some guy did this or that. What matters is figuring out, or have a professional figure out for you what will work best for YOU.

And as I said our lives our stressful enough that simple, fundamental exercises will almost always be best. When it comes to fat loss a combination of strength and metabolic exercises seem to provide the most bang for the buck.

Robert Dos Remedios coaching at the Elemental Fitness Clinic

This week an article I wrote is up on OregonHealthyLife.com on this topic.

Way back in June my last article on fat loss addressed the topic of why having more muscle is helpful in dropping fat. And while many of you have probably heard that before, today’s topic is one that at first glance appears counter-intuitive.

There is a saying among fitness professionals that the best exercise program for you is the one you are currently not doing. What we mean is doing movements that you are not used to will be harder, and therefore likely result in greater stimulus to your muscles and result in increased caloric expenditure.

This is why those 60 minute cardio classes stop working after a few weeks. Your body adapts pretty quickly to whatever it is that you do if you do it enough. It’s also why most people tend to gain weight when training for a marathon or triathlon, and why the stereotype of the overweight aerobics instructor exists. The human body is highly adaptive to repeated stresses and will accommodate a high volume of endurance exercise with limited body composition changes.

When training someone specifically for fat loss I will have them do exercise patterns that are fundamental, but also movements which may be unfamiliar. In a few weeks time the person will inevitably get better and stronger at doing that particular movement, so we modify the exercise, or change the exercise altogether to avoid the effect of diminishing returns and keep the results coming.

Keep in mind however that for someone looking to improve sport performance the goal should be to maximize movement efficiency. Runners need to perfect their mechanics and become as smooth as possible. In doing so however that person would like see fewer body composition improvements. Running burns calories, sure, but the more you run the better your body gets at it and the less calories you will burn given the same intensity and duration.

Combining the idea of “inefficiency” into resistance training, which as noted in previous articles is superior to endurance training for fat loss, the use of what we call “metabolic circuits” is highly effective. What this means is putting 2 up to sometimes 5 exercises together in a circuit where the goal is to do a little more work than the previous time, or use a little more weight than last time.

The effect of doing slightly more over a period of a few weeks results in you getting stronger, and by using proper and safe technique also moving better. The trick is of course that by the end of the month those exercises probably no longer work quite as well because you are now more efficient at them and it is time to switch exercises.

Another benefit of this type of metabolic training is improvements in conditioning. Our members often come back reporting of having crushed their best 5KM run time or their favorite tough hike is now considerably easier. Not a benefit while the primary goal is losing fat and feeling better!

I’ll be back to talk nutrition next time.