Level Up Fitness

I had a client ask me recently why I push for an hour of cardio 2-3x/week as opposed to more days of cardio that add up to the same total.  After all, an hour of the stuff can feel like an eternity thanks to boredom and/or fatigue.

The short answer is fat metabolism.  In most cases, the reason a client is doing cardiovascular exercise is to burn fat.  It is important to be training at an intensity (usually monitored via heart rate) that is conducive to the utilization of fat as an energy source BUT, even with that variable dialed in, DURATION is a critical detail.

From minute 0-20, guess how much fat your body is mobilizing to fuel your activity......The answer is none!  Until right around the 20-minute-mark, your muscles' activity is fueled exclusively by glucose (sugar) stored within the muscles themselves.  Right around that threshold (20 minutes) your body first starts utilizing its fat reserves as a source of fuel. 

So why not stop at 20 or 30 minutes?  Well, that threshold isn't a switch that just turns off one pathway in favor of another.  At 30 minutes in, you have only been in fat-burning mode for 10 minutes and the percentage of calories burned in the form of fat is still WAAAAY lower than the percentage of calories burned in the form of glucose.  BUT as you carry on past that point, the balance begins to shift; The percentage of fat calories burned continues to increase and the percentage of sugar calories burned begins to decrease. 

At about 45 minutes into your cardio routine, your activity is predominantly fueled by the body's fat reserves.  It is also at about this point that the body begins to release endorphins, the body's own natural feel-good hormones.  Once you hit that point, you've usually pushed past the wall and another 15 minutes is relatively easy.  If not, be persistent and you will start to notice this.  Anyway, back to endorphins: They help create an association between doing something healthy and feeling good.

60 minutes of cardio is, in my opinion, the best tradeoff between workload, calories (especially fat) burned, and the natural mechanisms that promote the forming of beneficial habits.

 We'll call this week 8. 

132 lbs.; 4.1% bodyfat.....

So, according to this reading, I added about a pound of muscle and stayed about the same in terms of fat.  I actually weighed myself on the same scale a few hours before, before some activity and when I was better hydrated.  I weighed 5 or 6 lbs. more then. 

These pictures and statistics illustrate an important point

The scale is a fickle thing.  Body composition is hard to track precisely too.  These measurements are good for tracking broad trends but, as you can see, their function is limited.  I could say I gained 1 lb. in 3.5 weeks or I could say I gained 7 lbs....This is why it is always a good idea to take pictures.  The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. 

My gut tells me I'm making progress and I am making performance gains but without photographic verification, the numbers might have gotten me a little bit discouraged.

So I'll chalk that up to a win!  Go me!   

On that note, please enjoy this picture of me looking like a goober.
Can you tell I am not into having my picture taken?  :) 

I have some negative space to fill here so I suppose I'll take the opportunity to wax philosophical for a moment:

I think it's good to consider where we're headed because we all get where we're going bye-and-bye....Whether it's the destination we've chosen or the one somebody (or some random collection of events/circumstances/habits) has chosen for us.
  
Once you've got that whole mess sorted out, it's just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. :)      

It is so often that I either hear somebody criticizing somebody else in their general vicinity, speaking harshly of themselves, or both.  Even if these kinds of words are directed solely outward, I find that it reveals a lot about the insecurities of the speaker him/herself.

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle" ~ Plato

We all show up here with our own baggage to sort through.   I've found that the more willing I am to let others slide when it comes to things that tend to rub me the wrong way, the easier it is to not take myself too seriously.  Give yourself (and others) the permission to just be and to accept yourself unconditionally, faults and all, and suddenly you are able to look at yourself honestly.




"Forgiveness is the act of admitting that we are like other people." ~ Christina Baldwin

To somebody who has never been in that space, I suppose that kind of introspection might seem pretty insignificant.  Nothing could be further from the truth, in my opinion.  Everybody knows what it's like to have ups and downs.  A lot of times the sucky things that we experience seem to have no rhyme or reason behind them.  Most of the things that happen to us though, are actually happening because of habits and mental tendencies that we've had so long we don't ever think to question them.

"All that we are is the result of all that we have thought" ~ Gautama Buddha

When we stop being afraid to really examine ourselves and we set aside a little time to do so regularly, we start noticing, "Hey, this thing I'm always doing doesn't really seem to make sense." or, "This just doesn't seem to be working out well for me anymore."  In this way a lot of useless old junk that we've been dragging around for no good reason just gets dropped.  It can become a rapid evolution of a person's consciousness. 

Cultivating this type of attitude and awareness is beneficial in every area of a person's life.  I bring it up here because the majority of the barriers to physical fitness and overall well-being that people encounter are these types of habitual patterns that have outlived their usefulness but are still being acted out.

Break down those barriers.  Level up!

One of the things that a trainer often has to do is to reframe the way a client thinks about things.  One client, a pretty trim-looking young woman, might come to me and say, "I want to 'tone up my abs."  The next, an overweight man or woman, might come up to me and say, "I want to lose about 50 lbs."  A 3rd, a skinny guy with a little bit of a spare tire, might come up to me and say, "I wanna get RIPPED!!!!"

SO.  As their trainer, what am I going to do?  If you answered, "3 totally different things!"  Well you're right and you're wrong.  Let me lay it out for you like this:


All 3 clients have come to me for what, in their minds, are 3 completely different reasons and they're going to be looking at different things when it comes to gauging their success.  When you think about what they're asking for on a really fundamental level, though, you begin to see that they're all asking for basically the same thing.  They all want more muscle and less fat.

"No!  My arms are already big enough!", I can already hear someone out there say.

That may be true but you know what I'm not afraid of?  My female client turning into Arnold Schwarzenneger.  Most women just don't have the right hormones in the right proportions to put on a huge amount of muscle.  Hell!  Even Schwarzenegger didn't before the steroids!  When you see a woman who looks, "Too buff", odds are she worked really hard to get that way because that's what she wanted to look like.

Look right and you can see what 5 lbs. adipose tissue (fat) 
looks like compared to 5 lbs. muscle tissue.

 So, as a personal trainer, I don't get excited about a person's weight alone.  You could be gaining weight but losing fat and getting smaller.  Again, look at the picture and you'll see why.  On the other hand, I am really keen to analyze a client's body composition periodically.  I love saying, "OK, you've lost 'x' amount of fat and gained 'y' amount of muscle!"

How about the skinny chick who wants to tone up but isn't trying to lose weight?  If your muscles need to be tightened up, there's both subcutaneous fat surrounding those muscles, but under the skin, and there's also fat interspersed throughout the body of the muscle.  Same thing.  Make the muscle bigger and the fat smaller and you'll still end up smaller.

Once in a great while....Wait for it....I'm WRONG!  Yep, you heard right! LOL 

But don't lose heart!  If your genetic makeup dictates that you just put on muscle to a greater extent than you would like, we simply dial that part of the workout back a little and wait for them bad boys to shrink a little while we focus on something else.

"OK, OK, we get it," you say.  "Shrink the fat stuff and grow more of the dense stuff.  But how do we do that?"

To that I say, "Weights and cardio!"

 Actually, you don't necessarily need weights, per se, but you do need to work every major muscle group to exhaustion.  By 'exhaustion' I don't mean until you feel like quitting, I mean contract that muscle through a full range of motion until muscular failure occurs.  As you progress, you can increase the number of sets you do of each exercise.  You should work all your major muscle groups at least once/week.  2 or 3x/week is a good figure to shoot for.

The key to burning fat is to work out at a low intensity for a long duration.  So, get a heart rate monitor, find your target heart zone and work out at that intensity for more than 20 minutes.  This formula will estimate your target heart zone accurately enough for our purposes:


Min. HR = [(220 - Age) - Resting Heart Rate] * .65 - RHR  |  Max HR = [(220 - Age) -RHR] * .75 - RHR  |  Min - Max = Target Heart Zone


Most people like to get on cardio equipment at the gym to do this but, if that's not your style, you can do anything that gets your heart rate up into your target heart zone and keeps it there.  "How long?" you ask?  The short answer (from me) is 45-60 minutes.  Do that twice a week, eat right, and you'll lose fat.

Obviously, this is pretty generic advice (I'm not tackling diet because that's another blog unto itself and really needs to be addressed on an individual basis).  The guy who's trying to bulk up is going to be doing way more intense weight training than the other two clients.  He'll probably be eating a lot more calories as well.  The overweight individual is going to need to watch his/her caloric intake pretty closely, learn strategies for eating differently, and spend more time doing cardio than the other two clients.  The young woman who is already pretty close to her goal won't really have to exert as much effort as the other two.

So what's the take-away message?  Sculpting.  Lift weights, do cardio and be happy.  Your body is an amazingly sophisticated instrument that possesses an innate intelligence.  Give it these two basic forms of stimuli along with moderate portions of wholesome food and it will look good in ways that you hadn't even thought to ask for it to look, you will feel good in ways it hadn't occurred to you that you could, and it will serve you well for the duration of your life.

Insurance companies tend to address things from a reactive standpoint rather than a preventative one.  Be that as it may, it isn't entirely unprecedented for insurance providers to cover the cost of personal training.  When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense that they would want to do this, especially for policy holders who are obese and/or are suffering from diabetes or some form of cardiovascular disease.  A properly executed fitness program reverses the disease process in all of these disorders, keeping you feeling healthy and happy while saving your insurance provider a small fortune in prescription medications and medical/surgical bills. 

It's true that your provider may not cover this expense but the only way to know is to ask.  If yours doesn't happen to be one of the providers that sees the merit in taking a proactive approach to health and wellness, it wouldn't hurt to speak up about it.  It's definitely true that it is the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.  The world would definitely be a much better place if everybody that wanted expert, personalized fitness advice and supervision could actually get it.  Also, competent personal trainers are typically very genuinely interested in helping people, are expertly equipped to do so  and, as such, deserve to earn a good living.  If people start demanding the ability to have their health issues addressed in the most effective way, by learning to become healthy, service providers will eventually have to step up to the plate and cater to their customers' demands in order to stay competitive.  So don't be shy about asking questions and making it known what you want. 

So what can you expect to see here?  I am officially going to set my next milestone at 151 lbs. and 4% bodyfat with weight taking precedence for now as I am focusing on gaining mass.  I am going to go very light on the cardio and see where that takes me.  When I get at a weight/size that I am happy with, I will hit the cardio hard if I need to in order to lean out....but I've got a long way to go.  I will probably go up to at least 165 lbs. and I might even get as high as 175.