Three Tips to Solve Obesity
Americans are some of the fattest people in the world with 33 percent considered obese and 68 percent classified as overweight, but obesity is a problem in many industrialized countries. The UK, Australia, Mexico, and New Zealand all have obesity rates over 20 percent.In the U.S., a quick snapshot of obesity trends show that women are slightly more likely to be obese than men, and 33 percent of children are classified as overweight before they reach the age of 5. People living below the poverty level are more likely to be obese than those above it, and people of color are more likely to be obese than Caucasians.
Why Are They Fat?
You Can’t Out-Train A Bad Diet
1) Aerobic exercise is not the ideal exercise mode for fat loss because it doesn’t increase muscle mass and does not raise metabolism significantly. The common policy solutions promoted by government health organizations to perform aerobic training will not solve the obesity epidemic.
3) Strength training is well known to improve the body’s sensitivity to insulin. Making the body more sensitive to insulin improves energy use, enhancing the metabolism.
Tip #1: Avoid A Calorie Approach to Fat Loss
Avoid the calorie approach to fat loss in favor of a lifestyle in which you eat a diet with a macronutrient profile that improves hormone and chemical transmitter response in the body so that you achieve optimal body composition. By eating more protein and fewer carbs you will increase metabolism, elevate hormone levels that keep your appetite in check, and help you feel physically and mentally sharp. There’s research to prove this, which I’ll get to below, but let’s get the calorie issue out of the way first.
Tip #2: Eat A High-Protein, Low-Carb Diet
Tip #3: Eat Smart Fats and Protein for Better Body Composition and Health
Obesity Statistics by Country. Nation Master. Retrieved 21 May 2012.
Vary the tempo of your lifts for maximum fat burning and strength results.
Vary the tempo of your lifts to lose fat and get more powerful. Manipulating tempo is an easy way to modify the amount of time your muscles spend under a load, making it one of the best tools to help you break through plateaus and drop a few pounds of fat.
A fascinating new study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research shows how varying tempo and load will produce very diverse physiological results. This study compared the effect of performing the upright seated bench press on power, work output, exercise time, energy burned, and excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC) using the following four protocols performed to failure:
• Muscular endurance, 55 percent 1RM with a 4141 tempo
• Fast Force endurance, 55 percent 1RM with an explosive tempo
• Maximum Strength, 85 percent 1RM with an explosive tempo
• Hypertrophy, 70 percent 1RM with a 2121 tempo
(Here is a quick description of tempos :
The first and third are the amount of time it takes you to perform the eccentric and concentric portions of the exercise, respectively. The second and fourth are the number of seconds you are advised to pause after. So 2010 requires a 2 second eccentric portion (lowering the weight), no pause at the bottom, a one second concentric portion and no pause at the top.
the ‘X’ implies you perform the action as fast as possible with good form. You typically see this on the concentric (raising the weight) portion of an exercise. )
Results showed that the Fast Force protocol resulted in the greatest power output, followed by the Maximum Strength protocol—a finding that is not surprising since those exercise trials were performed explosively and the others used a controlled, deliberate tempo. Maximum possible velocity and loads in the 30 to 60 percent of the 1RM range will always produce greater output than restricted lifting speed or heavy loads. Still, the fact that the Maximum Strength trial produced the second greatest power output also supports the inclusion of heavy load training for power—it’s not that one tempo is always best, but that you must vary tempo to achieve optimal results.
The Fast Force protocol also resulted in much greater work to be performed than all other protocols. The Maximum Strength protocol was second in work output, but this protocol took the shortest amount of time to complete (only 30 seconds) compared to the Muscular Endurance, which was longest in 105 seconds. The Fast Force and Hypertrophy trials both took about 64 seconds.
Considering that energy is related to the ability to perform work, it can be concluded that the Fast Force protocol requires the highest energy cost, or for practical purposes, it results in the greatest calorie burn. However, the Maximum Strength protocol provides the greatest energy burn for the amount of time spent lifting, again highlighting the value of tempo variation.
One interesting point made by the researchers is that in the Hypertrophy protocol, the amount of work performed was similar to that of the Maximum Strength trial, but the Hypertrophy protocol took much longer to complete, indicating that building muscle is a result of longer exercise duration and the subsequent physiological and metabolic responses produced, rather than mechanical work.
The last thing you should be aware of is that all the tempo protocols produced similar EPOC, which refers to the amount of calories burned following the workout due to an elevated metabolism. Although EPOC was similar, you would achieve best fat loss and body composition by using similar time under tension as with the Fast Force and Maximum Strength protocols since these used the most energy during training, and EPOC can be maximized with higher loads or greater work.
Reference
Buitago, S., Wirtz, N., et al. Mechanical Load and Physiological Responses of Four Different Resistance Training Methods in Bench Press Exercise. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2012. Published Ahead of Print.
Why the Calorie Approach to Weight Loss Doesn’t Work
Restricting calories to lose weight over the long term is more detrimental to your metabolism because it will turn your body into a hormone-induced hunger machine. A study in the New England Journal of Medicinefound that after putting overweight individuals on a ten-week calorie-restricted diet of 550 calories a day, they experienced elevated levels of the hormones ghrelin, which stimulates hunger, and gastric inhibitory polypeptide, which promotes fat storage. Leptin, a hormone that suppresses hunger and boosts fat burning, was profoundly reduced after the ten-week diet and stayed that way for the duration of the one-year study.Take note that after the ten-week diet, participants lost 30 pounds, but due to the way they had severely altered their metabolic hormone responses to food by restricting calories, they regained an average of 15 pounds in the next year.
The Thermic Effect of Food: Calories Are Stupid
A number of mainstream media outlets incorrectly (or stupidly) took the results of a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association proclaiming, “It’s the calories, stupid” that dictate body composition and weight gain. A close look at the study clarifies the misinterpretation and tells us exactly the opposite: it’s primarily the macronutrient content of the food you eat that dictates body composition, but if you overeat every day, then you will get fat.
The study compared the effect of overeating on body composition and fat gain from diets with three different protein contents. The thermic effect of the different diets was also measured, which is the amount of calories required to break down food, synthesize enzymes, and perform metabolic processes.
Participants ate either 5, 15, or 25 percent of their diet from protein with a whopping extra 954 calories a day for eight weeks. All the diets consisted of well over 3,000 calories a day and the macronutrient content was as follows:
All three groups gained the same amount of fat from the overeating—about 3.5 kg. The normal- and high-protein diet groups actually gained 0.2 kgs less than the low-protein group, but this was not statistically significant. What was most interesting was that the low-protein diet group gained the least total body weight because along with the 3.5 kg of fat gain, they lost almost a kilogram of muscle mass. The lack of amino acid building blocks in the diet put them into a severely catabolic, fat-storing state.In comparison, the normal-protein diet group gained 2.9 kg of muscle mass and the high-protein diet group gained 3.4 kg of muscle. Therefore, along with the nearly 3.5 kg of fat they gained, the normal- and high-protein diets did produce more weight gain. But, from a body composition viewpoint, the normal- and high-protein diets were better even though participants gained more total weight than the low-protein group because their percentage of body fat went down.
Most significant, this study shows the extreme variation in the amount of calories burned on a daily basis from eating different proportions of macronutrients. The resting metabolic rate (RMR) is the amount of calories burned at rest during the day, and it’s highly influenced by dietary makeup and the thermic effect of food. The group that ate the low-protein diet experienced a 2 percent drop in their metabolic rate, meaning they burned less calories each day just from eating a low-protein diet.In contrast, the normal- and high-protein diets increased RMR by 11 percent in response to the higher protein intake. This meant that by eating more protein, more of the energy consumed was turned into lean mass, and only about 50 percent of the energy consumed was turned into fat. Researchers estimate that more than 90 percent of the energy consumed in the low-protein group was turned into fat.
Whole and Processed Calories Aren’t the Same Either
A second study shows that the RMR and the thermic effect of eating whole foods is much higher than if you ate the exact same amount of calories from processed foods. This study compared the effect of a whole foods meal with a processed foods meal that contained equal calories and equal macronutrient content.
The thermic effect of the whole food meal was almost double that of the processed food meal. Participants burned 50 percent more calories after eating whole foods! Equally significant is that the participants who ate the processed food meal had their metabolic rates drop below their average RMR during the fourth hour after eating, while the whole food meal group never fell below the RMR. Also the duration of elevated energy expenditure from digestion in the whole food meal group lasted an hour longer than the processed food group.
Still Not Convinced? Check Out What Happened to the Pima Indians
The Pima Indians, natives of Arizona, provide a classic example of how body composition is affected by much more than just the amount of calories ingested each day. The Pima Indians have genotypically evolved eating a low number of calories, primarily from fish, small game, and foods they gathered. As early as 1901, a new “obesity epidemic” was evident among the Pima.
Local scientists who lived in the region were stumped as to why this indigenous group that had previously been “tall and sinewy” were now plagued by widespread obesity. More recent analysis has shown that shortly after the Pima came in contact with white settlers and adopted their foods—both foods that they began to grow such as corn, beans, potatoes, and processed foods like sugar, bread, and eventually soda—obesity became very common as did type 2 diabetes.
Analysis of changes in the Pima diet shows that the Pima were not overeating or ingesting more calories than previously when they adopted the “white man’s” diet of sugar, bread, starchy foods, eggs, and beef rather than fish and small game. Nor was their caloric intake greater than the amount of energy they burned on a daily basis. Rather, the Pima were eating the wrong type of calories for their genotype and it was causing a hormonal response that led to fat gain and diabetes.
For optimal body composition, the solution to any remaining confusion about how to adopt a diet for fat loss is to understand the following:
Running’s Overuse Injuries: Time for a little PREHAB!!
Preventing overuse injuries is more about what you do when you’re not running. The crucial time right before and after your run are key times to take care of your body. But most runners ignore this time and only run.
They’re missing a HUGE opportunity to stay healthy, run more, and reach more of their goals. Consistency is the key to success in running, so injury prevention and consistent training should be a focus of your training.
I used to skip these two crucial windows…
Ten or so years ago – the “dark days” of my running when I was always hurt – I would come back from work, change into my running gear, and I would go for an evening run. Whether it was a workout or easy run, I had the same routine. Work, run, and then eat dinner.
When the run was over, I’d change into dry clothes, get some water, and start cooking. After an hour I was ready to eat and sat in the living room around the coffee table. After too much TV, I went to bed and averaged about 6.5 – 7 hours per night.
And that was it. Do you see the problems with this routine?
If not, let me present eight simple “little things” that you can do before or after your run to keep you healthy.
But first, what’s a running overuse injury?
Overuse Injuries are Trauma
Running injuries are too common among most runners. A few studies have put the annual injury rate as high as 75% – meaning three out of every four runners will get hurt every year and need to take significant time off to heal.
That’s just crazy.
Running injuries are quite simply the result of cumulative trauma to your muscles, tendons, ligaments, or joints. Running puts a lot of stress on your body! Especially if your technique is poor. Take a look at our events on our facebook page to see when our next running club meeting is, here we learn technique through skills and drills to prefect the best running pose
Injuries happen when the cumulative trauma you’re inflicting on your legs exceeds the rate at which you can recover from that damage. So prioritizing recovery is crucial to not only get faster (your body “absorbs” the training when you rest), but to prevent injuries.
The stress-adaptation graph below illustrates how your body reacts to training. There’s an initial training stimulus (like a workout), a dip in fitness when you feel fatigued and sore, but after you rest enough your body rebounds and BOOM! You’re in better shape than when you started.
We see here that stress is a good thing. Don’t be afraid of the words “cumulative trauma” because it’s why we train!
Alex Hutchinson recently wrote in a great column in Outside Magazine:
In our obsession with minimizing exercise damage, we may have lost sight of the reason we exercise in the first place: to force our bodies to adapt and get stronger.
Once we know that some exercise damage is a good thing, running becomes the careful management of that damage. Run long and hard enough to force as much adaptation as possible while recovering as much as you need to stay healthy.
Fortunately, there are specific ways to not only help you get faster, but manage the damage from running. Say goodbye to running overuse injuries.
Self-massage: learn to love it
Muscle soreness and tightness after a long run or workout are common (and of course, desirable). Sometimes it can be helpful for some self-massage – or a professional massage if you can afford one – to help speed the recovery process.
The fancy term is “myofascial release” and it simply means massage. It can help loosen tight muscles, promote healing blood circulation, and break up scar tissue and soft tissue adhesions. If you have any trigger points in your legs (especially tight and tender to the touch), massage can help release that tight spot.
You can perform self-massage on yourself before you run as part of your warm-up. Just make sure you keep the pressure lighter than usual so you don’t make yourself sore. After you run, you can be a little more aggressive.
Get flexible (but not by stretching)
I don’t support static stretching before or after running – it’s just not effective. Sure, some static stretching after you run doesn’t hurt, but recent studies show that it does nothing for injury prevention. And if you think static stretching before or after your run will prevent muscle soreness – think again.
A better way to promote more functional flexibility is with dynamic stretches. These are simple movements you can do both before and after you run to prepare your body for running, improve your range of motion, warm-up, or increase flexibility.
Not sure where to start? Then call us on 01202 671783 or like our facebook page at www.facebook.com/rebornpt and we’ll ping you our dynamic warmup sheets.
Fuel up after you run
After a long run or hard workout your body craves nutrients and fuel. There’s a window of about 30 minutes when your body is very receptive to the carbs, protein, and nutrients in your post-workout meal. Make sure you either plan ahead and have something ready to eat or have easily prepared, like energy bars, protein supplements, or a shake.
My favorite post-run fuel is a banana and a protein shake. I’ll eat this immediately after I finish my workout and then have a full meal about an hour later. If you’re pressed for time, make the protein shake in advance and you can take this recovery meal with you.
During marathon or other hard training, it’s crucial to give your body what it needs after those tough long runs and lengthy workouts. I’m a proponent of eating a significant amount of protein as a distance runner – that’s what helps repair muscle damage.
Get strong in your living room
Many runners think they need a fancy home gym or an expensive monthly membership to get the benefits of strength workouts. That can’t be further from the truth. You can get strong in your living room with a relatively quick workout.
Focus on the basic exercises and you’ll see real results:
- Planks
- Side planks
- Push ups
- Pull ups
- Chin ups
- Bridges
- Lunges
Chill out!
Sometimes you just need some quick recovery. That’s where an ice bath or a targeted ice massage (with an ice cup) comes in. Cooling your muscles helps fight inflammation and can speed recovery by reducing how sore you feel. But as we learned earlier, being sore is a good thing so only use ice baths when you’re really sore.
Some of the research on icing is contradictory and doesn’t show a conclusive physiological advantage. Even so, it’s still a common practice among elite runners and I’m a supporter of icing as an effective way to recover from hard workouts through my own personal experiences.
The best way to schedule your ice baths is to use them after an easy run to focus on complete recovery. You can also ice after a particularly hard workout or long run. While you may inhibit some adaptations gained through the workout itself, if you think you ran too much or too hard then it’s worth it.
For the most part, only elite athletes should worry about the tiny percent of fitness they’re losing from an ice bath. Icing has more benefits than drawbacks for “normal” runners like you and me.
Compress your pain away
I’m a massive believer in the technology, even though it does make me look a little silly!!! Compression socks claim to enhance recovery by increasing blood flow to your feet and lower legs. While you’re running this is a non-starter – your legs are getting as much blood as they possibly can anyways. But at rest, they can help a lot.
Recent research has shown that compression socks increase lactic-acid and heart rate recovery after high-intensity running. Coupled with my personal experience that they work very well (wear them to bed!), then I’m comfortable recommending them to other runners.
The best times to use compression gear is after a tough workout or race when you know you’ll need extra help recovering. They can help boost your lower leg blood flow when normally the blood might pool in your extremities – like during periods of prolonged sitting at work or travel.
The other great time to use compression garments is right before a race. They can help your legs feel better after a day of wearing compression socks so you’re ready to race at your best.
Eat a good diet
Whether you’re a paleo runner, vegetarian marathoner, or a proud “regular diet” omnivore like myself, a good eating plan can be hugely beneficial to your recovery and performance. Put a focus on real food like vegetables, fruit, high-quality meat, fish, nuts, and a small amount of whole grains (don’t go crazy with the whole grains, I’ll be covering carb loading soon, and whether you should or shouldnt).
I have a very simple philosophy when it comes to the perfect runner’s diet and it aligns almost perfectly with Michael Pollan’s famous quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto: eat food, mostly plants, not too much. Keep it simple and don’t worry so much about your food choices. As long as you’re eating real food you’ll be fine.
Get more sleep
Sleep is a runner’s best friend – prioritize it! Have you ever went to bed hours later than you originally intended because you watched a movie you’ve already seen six times? We’ve all done it and then regretted it the next morning when our alarm goes off.
Your body repairs itself when you sleep. It rebuilds your muscles, builds more mitochondria in response to all the training you’ve been doing, and adapts to your running workload. If you don’t rest then you don’t adapt.
And if you don’t adapt, you don’t become a better runner. Do yourself a favor and get the 8+ hours that your body craves.