Gravity Fx Fitness

If you want to increase your metabolism and lose fat but have limits to how much time you spend exercising, there are certain activities that you should focus on. First, what are the determining factors in your metabolism?

According to wikipedia, “metabolism is the set of chemical reactions that occur in living organisms in order to maintain life.  These processes allow organisms to grow and reproduce, maintain their structures and respond to their environments.”  Your resting metabolic rate (RMR) makes up 60-70% of your total metabolism.

This is the amount of calories needed to maintain your basic functions while at complete rest.  This is largely determined by your muscle mass (lean muscle tissue), so any fat loss program should include resistance training to build or maintain lean muscle tissue.  About 20-30% of your daily calorie burn comes from your activity levels.  Strength Training or Cardio Training?

Many people have extremely busy lives, with both work and family commitments that limits the amount of time they have to exercise.  Fat loss expert Alwyn Cosgrove has come up with a Hierarchy of Fat Loss to explain the best options if you fall into this situation.

1.  Correct nutrition

2.  See number 1

3.  Activities that burn calories, maintain/build muscle mass and elevate metabolism

4.  Activities that burn calories and elevate metabolism

5.  Activities that burn calories but don’t necessarily maintain muscle or elevate metabolism

Four Factors for Fat loss Training

1.  TIED -

Metabolic resistance training

Strength training

2.  High intensity anaerobic interval training

3.  High intensity aerobic training

4.  Low intensity aerobic training

For a more detailed look at this read Alwyn’s article on the Hierarchy of Fat Loss.  Many of my clients are extremely busy and only have 3 or 4 hours per week to exercise.  So for them to get the biggest bang for their buck, I focus on strength training and/or metabolic conditioning training.

The resistance or strength training focuses on building or maintaining lean muscle tissue with complex exercises – meaning multiple joint movements such as pushing and pulling where several muscles are used with each exercise.  For the lower body this means various squat, lunge and step-up patterns where the large muscles of the leg and hip are working together.

An example of a “big bang” exercise is sled pushing.  Almost every muscle in your body is working to some extent when pushing the Prowler sled.   Not just for football players, it works well for women too, as you can see by the shape of these two.

Metabolic conditioning training uses total body workouts that are more about strength endurance or conditioning, often using timed intervals, such as the TRX Rip trainer and battling ropes class at my studio.

After about 15 minutes of dynamic warmup you then alternate between 30 seconds of work and 30 seconds of rest for 20 minutes.  This is one type of interval training and it compliments the strength training that is done on the other days.  The first 5 minutes doesn’t feel so bad but in the last 10 minutes that 30 second break seems to get shorter.  Heavy breathing and plenty of sweat is par for the course with this type of training.

Alwyn provides plenty of research and real world results in his articles and at his gym Results Fitness in southern California.  How you train for a marathon or strength competition is obviously different than what we are talking about here, but marathoners, triathletes or endurance cyclists not only spend numerous hours preparing for competition but exercise at a higher intensity level in most cases than the average person (hi vs. low intensity aerobic).

So if your goal is losing fat and we know that maintaining or building lean muscle tissue is crucial to your success, than walking at a leisurely pace, while still being good for your health, is not going to be your first exercise option.  At least it shouldn’t be.

You can take leisurely walks to relax, de-stress and catch up with friends or family and do other low intensity activities like mowing the grass, raking leaves, etc. for additional calorie burning, as long as you remember what your primary focus is.  If you only have 20 or 30 minutes to workout you can still get a boost in your metabolism by choosing 3 or 4 exercises and going from one to the other with little rest, choosing an upper body pushing and pulling movement and a squat or lunge pattern.

Now that you know how important muscles are to keeping your metabolism elevated you can better understand how men can sometimes seem to get away with eating whatever they want, at least while they are young, but it will catch up to them some day.  Remember, you can’t out-train a bad diet and nutrition is at the top of the list.

Get moving!

Brian Morgan

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Regardless of your opinion on these, they are going to keep physical therapists busier over the coming years.

There is definitely a positive effect of these various programs – getting people to exercise more intensely.  There is also a negative aspect to this growing phenomena – getting people to exercise more intensely.

Many research studies in the last decade have shown proof that intense exercise, particularly various forms of interval training, cardio strength training, getting more work done in a shorter amount of time, can keep the metabolism elevated for several hours after the workout and burn lots of calories.

Therein lies the rub, with the increased popularity of these programs comes the increased risk of injury, IF simple progressions are not followed.

The key to doing successful resistance training is to LOGICALLY follow a progressive method of increasing resistance – GRADUALLY increase the amount of weight/resistance, the amount of sets and/or repetitions…..

making sure that the individual is prepared for the training for that session.  I recently heard of a woman who had come in to physical therapy for elbow pain.  She had completed 120 pushups in her exercise class.

I’ve seen this woman and she is in incredible shape for a 50 year old.  She can probably run circles around many college age women….but unless she GRADUALLY built up to doing this number of pushups, no matter what kind of shape she is in, she will likely get injured…..and she did.

One of my clients told me of a friend of hers injured her knee recently in an exercise class doing 180’s – this lady is 61 years old and the only 180 exercise I’m familiar with is a 180 degree jump, which can be seen in a popular infomercial promoting a home fat loss program.

I asked my client if her friend is in really good shape and she said she wasn’t.   Many of my 50 something clients have had a past injury or two or three, making jump training something where the risk is not worth the rewards.

You might make the argument that people over 60 lose not just muscle strength and mass with aging, but also have a reduced amount of muscle power which is related to how quickly a muscle can generate force.  How quickly a muscle generates force can make the difference between falling and not falling.

Obviously, falling is not good.  So while I believe that there is always an exception to the rule, I don’t have any of my clients that age doing jump training.  Kettlebell swings are a much better way to generate muscle power without the joint forces and twisting of 180’s.

Last week I was having lunch at a local grocery store when a woman approached a couple sitting at a table near mine.  When one woman said something about boot camp class I tried to listen in without being obvious.

One of the women said something about her knees bothering her and going to physical therapy or needing surgery or something to that effect.  Upon leaving, she told the other woman that she hopes her back starts feeling better?!?

Am I making my point clear yet!!  All of these events happened within a period of ONE WEEK in Iowa.

So yes, while the best benefits happen when you push your body out of its comfort zone, make sure that you are READY for that level of intensity and you GRADUALLY built up to that point.

By the way, having a 430 pound individual run on a treadmill…to the point where he couldn’t keep up and fell on his knee, luckily not injuring it….is NOT a good idea!

Train hard but make sure to train smart, also.

Get moving!

Brian Morgan

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According to one researcher, “excessive sitting is a lethal activity.”

Dr. James Levine at the Mayo Clinic has a strong interest in studying how our bodies burn calories through movement and activity.  He designed special underwear with sensors that measure each and every movement throughout the day, or lack thereof.

In one motion tracking study, obese subjects averaged only 1500 movements daily and spent almost 600 minutes sitting.  In contrast, Dr. Levine has studied Jamaican farm workers who average 5000 daily movements and only sit for 300 minutes daily.

In a recent New York Times article, Dr. Levine had a journalist wear these unique underwear to get a better idea what he was talking about.  Levine had always been curious how some people seemed to avoid gaining weight even though they ate the same amount of food as others.

He found that some people unconsciously move around more than others, even if they didn’t consider this to be exercise.  He came up with the term NEAT to describe this – Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis.  Apparently, thousands of micro-movements spread throughout your day REALLY matter when it comes to keeping your weight under control.

There are many great points made in this article which might impact your health.  One thing they didn’t discuss much is the effect that excessive sitting can have on your posture and the ill effects that poor posture can have over the period of several years.

I personally believe that its almost impossible not to suffer postural problems when spending so much time seated, even if they may take decades to have an effect on someone….making it more and more difficult to move in some cases, compounding the original problem.

I’ll give you two examples from my life – my 71 year old father and 68 year old mother.  Neither has spent much time exercising in their adult lives but my mother is definitely the healthier of the two.  She also does a lot more moving around in her daily activities and I think this is a big reason for the difference between the two.

If you are someone who has an occupation that has you sitting for most of the day I think adding in those little movements, these micro-movements is definitely in order to help you burn more calories and possibly stay healthier.

It will definitely help to stand up and take a short posture break every so often, maybe every 30 minutes or so, even if it’s just walking in place or stretching out for 10 seconds at a time, walking around a little more, if possible.

Get moving!

Brian Morgan

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This article was written by fat loss expert Alwyn Cosgrove of Results Fitness,

I was first introduced to the term self-limiting exercise a few years ago while speaking with Gray Cook (we were teaching together at a Perform Better one-day event).

Gray was talking about the book “Born to Run” By Christopher MacDougall and the barefoot running idea.

Running barefoot is what can be classified as a self-limiting exercise – the body cannot over-stride or heel strike because the immediate feedback – pain – auto-corrects the form of the runner. In fact, it is completely self-limiting as there is no way of creating overuse injuries either – the foot and the joint impacts of running will prevent that as you’ll stop running. You can’t do it incorrectly.

It’s a perfect exercise. However – when we introduced the running shoe with padding – we put a problem in there (And thought we were creating a solution).

The body is now no longer given immediate feedback to adjust or correct running form, and the very nature of the thick sole of the shoe can allow runners to perform far more volume than their muscles and joints can handle. The results – inevitable injuries, as exhibited by many strapped up/knee supported runners you see.

It’s an interesting concept and Gray and I discussed it at length as applied to other forms of exercise.

A self-limiting exercise as defined by Gray “requires mindfulness and an awareness of movement, alignment, balance and control. Self-limiting exercise requires engagement”

My further definition is that a self-limiting exercise provides an automatic yet natural obstacle that prevents you from doing it wrong, or doing an excessive volume. I suppose my first exposure to self-limiting exercise was via martial arts training and in particular sparring – if you don’t protect yourself, you get hit – immediate feedback in the form of a punch on the nose!

With speed and agility training – the CHAOS system as devised by Robert Dos Remedios of open-response is self-limiting – athletes are left behind or fall if their technique or direction change isn’t perfect – very different from closed-response (when you know when you’re going to change direction).

But it also applies to traditional exercise. For example – The Turkish Get-up, inverted rows, bottoms-up kettlebell pressing are all self-limiting. It’s hard to do too many bottoms-up presses, you won’t be able to keep the kettlebell in position. With inverted rows – either the core, or the grip strength limits you. And with Turkish get-ups – you’ll either remain stuck to the floor or have a weight drop on your head!

There are more – jump rope can’t be performed incorrectly or to excess, the battling ropes system, the TRX and the stability ball all have built-in corrections or “abort” mechanisms in their very nature.

As I studied the concept of self-limiting exercise more I started to think of it in terms of fat loss training. In fact, self-limiting exercise may be one of the reasons why our fat loss programs at Results Fitness are so successful.

Self-limiting exercise performed in a circuit is essentially training to technical failure, but without the risk of overuse injury or sloppy form – it’s just impossible to do poor, sloppy reps. Yet the energy demands are through the roof. To train with that absolute level of engagement demands so much metabolically, that it can be exhausting and immediate in terms of fat loss results, yet at the same time, being of a low volume due to the auto-correction mechanisms in place.

Anecdotally, I did a recent workout of Turkish Get-ups. I performed a countdown style workout with 60s rest between sets. 5 reps each side, 4 reps, then 3, 2 and finally a single rep.  The last rep took almost as long as the first set of five. The entire workout, including rest periods, took less than 20 minutes and consisted only of 30 total repetitions. It was mentally and physically tough however -almost exhausting. Despite being low in volume, and short – the metabolic demands were off the charts.

Can self-limiting exercise be the future of fat-limiting exercise? Naturally imposed loads seem to train the weakest links, with a high metabolic cost – naturally!

Alwyn and Rachel Cosgrove own Results Fitness in Southern California, which was recently named on of the top 10 gyms in the country by Men’s Health.  Alwyn regularly speaks on the strength and conditioning/fitness seminar circuit and Rachel is the author of The Female Body Breakthrough.

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When using ropes with my clients, the self-limiting nature of the exercise is very clear.  When the member gets fatigued, the rope patterns get smaller and weaker and will eventually stop all together.  Same with the Xiser mini-stepper.

These tools let you keep the intensity high but keep the stress on the joints very low, which is obviously a good thing.  Moderately high to high intensity workouts like these burn lots of calories and can keep your metabolism elevated for several hours after you have stopped exercising.

This is part of the time-efficient workouts that also increase your coordination and ability to move well, by placing you in standing positions instead of sitting or lying on your back.

Get moving!

Brian Morgan

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Is the typical bodybuilding diet wrong for the average person? Can this practice of eating frequent meals actually encourage you to store fat?

Do you need protein supplements to build muscle and get lean?  In order to optimize your hormones for burning fat and increasing your overall health, I encourage you to listen to this awesome podcast with kettle bell expert Mike Mahler and Dr. Perry Nickleston.

Mahler had a near death experience with severe pneumonia which caused him to search for answers, especially since he thought he was eating right and exercising properly, yet nearly died from a severe infection.

He is a tremendously strong and well built individual, yet he is also a vegan and consumes far less protein than many people recommend.  Another top trainer that is a vegan is coach Jon Hinds of the Monkeybar Gym.

These guys are big yet lean, which is the kind of look that most any drug-free athlete would take in a heartbeat.  Mahler discusses stress reduction and not just managing your stress levels.  He also discusses cortisol and the idea of eating “real foods” and various spices to reduce inflammation in the body.

I’m no expert in diet and nutrition, that’s for sure.  Luckily, I have found people like this to listen to – people who aren’t in some science lab and have never worked out much, but people who are involved in intense workouts – the kind that can elevate your fat burning hormones.

Mahler also addresses detox diets and energy drinks.  If you have heard of the common practice of taking in large amounts of carbohydrates with some protein immediately after your workout, you might think twice.  He recommends waiting half an hour to an hour and not taking in all those carbs, unless you’ve been running a marathon.

In the past I’ve taken various protein drinks and sometimes used creatine monohydrate, also.  While I had some decent muscle size I also was bloated and sometimes gassy, which is not always a good sign.  I’ve seen this in other guys too and sometimes more emphasis is placed on the supplemental items than on eating high quality foods.

I highly recommend that you listen to this informative audio interview which may explain why you aren’t making progress with your exercise program.  Hormone optimization is definitely the way to go for losing weight and being healthy.

Get moving!

Brian Morgan

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A recent study at Truman State had participants doing as many kettlebell swings as possible in 12 minutes, resting when they wanted.

The average heart rate was 86% of maximum for this session.  The researchers concluded that “KB’s provide a useful tool with which coaches may improve the cardiorespiratory fitness of their athletes.”

Kettlebell swings use lots of muscles to complete the lift.  When done with little rest in between, they will get your HR up in a hurry and can definitely give you a cardiovascular training effect.

KB lifters like to promote the fat burning that occurs with their use.  They can be used to increase strength or increase muscle endurance, depending on how you use them.

I have played around with them a little bit but am far from an expert at using them or teaching others how to use them.  Like any other “hot trend” you have people looking to jump on board simply because something is popular.

The first time I used them was at a one day seminar in Atlanta, where I was living at the time.  The instructor was one of the graduates of the first Russian Kettlebell Certification program and there was about 16 or 17 of us out in a large urban park.

Many people were out walking, biking or running and we drew a lot of interested looks, as this was something “new” and different in 2003.  A homeless man in particular was dumbfounded as to what we were doing, lifting these strange looking objects in the park.

While they are much more common today than they were then, there are people that are promoting them without understanding their proper use – when you see an adult using a 4 pound KB, that’s a pretty good indication they don’t know what the objective is.  This is similar to someone lifting pink dumbbells and think that they are “toning” their muscles with high reps, when the amount of resistance is not adequate to challenge the muscles.

If you are looking to get optimal fat burning results in minimal time, then doing cardio resistance training is a great way to get the best of both worlds – building lean muscle tissue at the same time you challenge your cardiovascular system.

Using tools like sandbags, TRX, bands, ropes, and dumbbells with little rest in between exercises is a great way to burn fat and challenge your muscles.  You can get a good cardio effect without doing steady state work on a treadmill or elliptical machine and you might reduce some of the pounding on your joints.

KB’s are a great training tool but you can get great results with other tools, as well.  Using them with poor technique may put you at increased risk for injury, so if you decide to give them a try, make sure your instructor knows what they are doing.

Get moving!

Brian Morgan

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Deandra has taken 4 inches off her waist without doing any crunches or sit-ups.

She has done planks, pushups, exercises with sandbags, bands and the TRX suspension trainer, but very little isolated exercises for the abs.  The best way to describe these workouts is cardio strength training.

In this photo she is doing a pushup with a rotation, where you come up from the bottom and then rotate to one side, do another pushup and rotate to the opposite side.  This isn’t easy for many women to do and it challenges both your upper body strength and stability, as well as your core.

Dee has been training with us since Feb. 20th and made great strides.  She works hard 3 days a week and trys to stay active the rest of the week.  This type of training takes hard work, builds lean muscle tissue and raises your metabolism.

This is a sandbag deadlift with one leg doing most of the work.  Besides the glutes and hamstrings, her obliques (side abs) are working hard as well.  We like to do exercises that work multiple muscles at one time – exercises that force your abs and low back to stay tight while you are moving other muscles and joints.

She knows that its not what the scale says, its how you look and how your clothes fit.  Four inches off your waist is huge, especially for someone who wasn’t that overweight to start with.

Diet is definitely important, there is no doubt about that.  Building lean muscle tissue is key to lasting changes in your metabolism, not to mention strengthening your bones and joints.  Just goes to show that you can shrink your waistline without doing endless crunches or sit-ups.

Get moving!

Brian Morgan

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The short and simple reason is that it can help you lose fat while spending less time exercising!

When you do various movements with the ropes for 20-30 seconds you elevate your heart rate significantly.  It is a very simple way to do interval training, which is great for fat loss.  Many of my clients are breathing heavy at the end of their set, often letting out a big “Whoo” because of the hard effort involved.

When you realize that intense effort and increased oxygen intake are vital to your results, there are many different ways to accomplish this.  I like to do cardio strength training because it is a time efficient method for increasing fitness and fat loss.

I have my clients do various resistance exercises to build lean muscle tissue and rope training accompanies these exercises quite nicely.  This way you can increase your metabolism and burn calories after you have stopped training.

Typically in an aerobics class or during a treadmill session you are working at 60-75% of your max HR, which is low to moderate intensity.  After you are done your metabolism returns to where it was previously, in as little as 10 or 15 minutes.

An elite endurance athlete who works at a higher intensity will have a greater “afterburn effect,” but the average healthclub member usually doesn’t work as intensely.  So when you understand that burning more calories is about intensity, you seek exercises that will really get your heart racing.

Obviously, this is assuming you are healthy, injury free and accustomed to exercise.  There are numerous patterns that can be done with the ropes and variety is important for keeping your body from getting stale, but also your MIND from getting stale.

Let’s face it.  There’s a reason that health clubs have all those TV’s in front of the treadmills and ellipticals – to keep your mind off of all the endless repetition going on.  Ropes on the other hand require you to focus on what you are doing and that is elevating your heart rate.

If you’re a busy person like most of us, than training with ropes and doing resistance training in the same session will allow you to lose weight without spending two hours at the gym.  Sounds like a winner for both me and my clients!

Ropes also allow you to get a cardiovascular effect without the pounding on your joints.

Many people seem to forget that you can get cardio training from doing interval work, where you exercise for 20-30 seconds, rest and then repeat, keeping your HR up in the process.

For example, last Saturday I did my workout after the clients had left.  I decided to get my HR monitor out to see how many calories I would burn.  I used the sandbags, TRX suspension trainer and a barbell, going from an upper body exercise to a lower body movement or opposing upper body movement, keeping my rest periods very short.

I used the ropes a few times to finish off the workout and stopped the monitor at 40 minutes.  In forty minutes I burned 552 calories and had an average HR of 77%, which qualifies as cardio activity, with a peak heart rate of 95%, which is pretty intense!

Now, I obviously am used to this type of training and wouldn’t start someone with that much intensity, but I think you get the point – I definitely got my cardio and strength training done in a single session, leaving my metabolism elevated for several hours afterwards.

I spent the next 20 minutes stretching, cleaning and getting the studio ready for Monday’s clients, while re-starting the HR monitor to see what was going on.  I burned an additional 216 calories, with my heart rate at an average of 68%, still qualifying as cardio.

I think you get the point that intense training can create an “afterburn effect” that is due partly to the increased oxygen consumption.  Heavy breathing is definitely acceptable in your workouts.

Training with ropes is also a great stress reliever – after beating the floor intensely for 20 seconds or more, you tend to forget what you were stressed about.  The alternating upper-cut pattern is also a healthy way to “punch” your particular individual stressor, if you wish.

Besides, with about two thirds of adults being overweight, can it really hurt to take some different approaches?

Get moving!

Brian Morgan

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Is walking a good way to lose fat?

With the warmer weather I have seen many people out walking, enjoying being outdoors and probably trying to shed some Winter accumulation of pounds.

The question is, are these people getting any results or is there something else they should be doing.  Walking is healthy and a nice way to burn some extra calories, but depending on how fit you are, it may qualify more as activity than exercise.

If you are more than 30 pounds over weight or haven’t exercised in several months, walking is a good way to get moving again and you might lose a few pounds in the process.

Start out slowly and gradually build up the amount of time you spend walking.  GRADUALLY placing more demands on your body is one of the fundamentals of progressive exercise – do a little more each time as your body adapts to the stresses.

While walking is simple and easy to do, you have to do a LOT of walking to lose weight and most people can’t keep their weight under control just by walking.  So what you would have to do is gradually increase the intensity – walk faster.

Most people I see are just casually strolling and this doesn’t burn that many calories.  Plus, once you stop walking your metabolism goes right back to where it was in a matter of minutes.  If you want to burn more calories you need to walk fast or go up and down hills.

So once you understand that more intensity is required, it might be more efficient to do something like cardio strength training.  Work your muscles against some resistance while raising your heart rate at the same time – combine cardiovascular exercise and strength training into a single time-efficient workout.

Do this two or three times a week and then do some lighter work on the other days, like walking or bike riding.  These easier movements will help you recover from the more intense workouts, getting some blood flow to the muscles and keeping your joints well lubricated.

Now, you can obviously do some more intense cycling and get a great calorie burn.  I like to do an hour bike ride about once a week in the Summer months.  I pedal fast at times and then back off and pedal moderately, before going fast again, somewhat similar to an indoor spinning class.

Generally speaking, the riders that are pedaling more intensely are fairly lean, compared to some who pedal at a pretty moderate pace.  I frequently see an older guy riding an older style bike with his big belly hanging out.  He pedals pretty slowly and he is still getting some health benefits but he’s not burning a lot of calories.

In societies where walking or biking is the primary or only means of transportation, the overall volume of activity throughout the day or week adds up.  Its rare to see an overweight mail carrier for those who walk to deliver the mail.

Keep this in mind if you can’t or won’t exercise intensely.  It will take a lot of volume (time) to get the weight loss results and you will have to be very strict with your eating.

Several research studies have shown very minimal or moderate fat losses with moderate intensity aerobic exercise, compared to greater fat loss with interval training of a more intense nature.

A leisurely walk can be a great way to unwind or spend quality time with friends or family, but if fat loss is your primary goal, pick up the pace or better yet, do some resistance training to build lean muscle tissue and increase your metabolism, then add in some type of aerobic exercise on your “off” days.

Get moving!

Brian Morgan

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What does science have to say about training for fat loss?

Is aerobic exercise such as running the best way to burn fat?  What does the research have to say?

I think you might be surprised, unless you are a regular reader of my articles or one of my clients.  Here is an interesting article featured on Alwyn Cosgrove’s website on the science behind weight loss and the most efficient methods for achieving it.

The New Science of Fat Loss

Get moving!

Brian Morgan

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