Gravity Fx Fitness

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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Do you want to lose weight and keep it off long-term? Than going on a diet and not exercising is a BAD idea.

Today at my studio is “cardio Monday,” with total body exercises designed to keep your HR up and elevate your metabolism.  I was talking to my client Deandra after the session and she wasn’t fully aware of the connection between muscle and metabolism.

When you go on a diet and lose 15 pounds without exercising, some of that lost weight will be fat, some will be water weight and some will be lean muscle tissue.

This is not a good idea because you will likely put that weight back on over the course of a year, BUT….. you won’t put back the lean muscle tissue.

notice how lean and muscle tissue goes together?

Say you do this yo-yo dieting for 10 years or more, as some people do, and you may have lost 10-15 pounds of lean muscle tissue.

This has two effects:

1 – the loss of muscle tissue means a slower metabolism.

2 – you lost muscle tissue and replaced it with fat, so now you have a less appealing shape than you used to.

Muscle is more dense than fat, taking up less space. So instead of losing weight you should be concentrating on losing fat – there is a difference!

Meaning, don’t worry so much about the scale and instead, try to lose inches and see if your clothes start to fit a little looser.  This is what most people should be worried about.  Having lean muscle tissue is healthy, while having too much fat is not.

Trying to keep weight off long term without exercise is a losing battle for most everyone.  So you should be exercising but also make sure to do some resistance training to keep your metabolism elevated after you are done exercising.

Get moving!

Brian Morgan

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One of my clients has already dropped her holiday weight gain. Like a lot of people she put on 6 or 7 pounds while celebrating and just enjoying some things that are typical of the season.

Unlike most people however, she has already lost that weight by going back to eating properly and exercising.  She didn’t take a break from exercising during that time and that probably helped keep the weight gain minimal.

This brings up a couple of important points – to lose weight you have to change your eating habits AND you also need to exercise.  It also shows that exercise alone isn’t the answer….you also have to eat right – specifically, cut out the processed “foods” and limit your liquid calories.

If you have a weakness for sweets than don’t keep them in the house – eliminate the temptation.  Try to eat some fruits instead.  They have far fewer calories generally and the fiber helps to slow the sugar spike that comes from sodas and cookies, candies, etc.

Some almonds and a piece of fruit might be a nice snack.  Almonds have some protein, fiber and healthy fats which can help slow down the absorption time, giving you a more gradual energy release.

The cardio strength intervals we do at the studio helps this client get her workout in less time.  She isn’t spending six to ten hours a week exercising, leaving her more time to spend with family and friends.  This time efficient program should probably make it easier to keep exercising over the long haul.

She is eating “clean” for a couple weeks and then you can go back to “cheating” on the weekend.  This doesn’t mean you can eat anything and everything for two days, but you can enjoy yourself a little and not feel deprived, making it easier to stick to.

There’s no reason you can’t take a vacation, enjoy yourself a little and then go right back to eating right and exercising, getting right back to your previous weight.

Something I sometimes do is a short term fast.  I stop eating after my evening meal and then go about 24 hours without eating – resuming normal eating at dinner time the next evening.  This decreases the number of calories you consume in a week and can be done once or twice a week.

Get moving!

Brian Morgan

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A balanced fat loss program should have three components for success – leave out one of the 3 “legs” of the stool and you might not see progress.

1.   You need an effective exercise program.

2.  Proper eating habits are essential to losing weight.

3.  Change your mind set – without the proper social and emotional support you will have a difficult time reaching your goals.  This is the component that causes many people to give up after a month or two of going to the gym or starting a diet.  Its crucial for both losing weight and more importantly, keeping it off.

If you’re familiar with my articles you know that I don’t do things the traditional way and advocate total body resistance exercises and interval-type cardio.  Workouts that last 30-40 minutes are the “norm” in my studio and I like to get your heart rate up while challenging your muscles.

I’ve borrowed my approach from other trainers who help busy people get results in the shortest time possible.  Results Fitness in southern California has been voted one of the top 10 gyms in the country by Men’s Health.   They don’t have their clients do any steady state cardio and don’t have their clients exercise while sitting down.

Follow this link to see how they manage to get consistent results in minimal time.

Get moving!

Brian Morgan

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Should you change your workout routine to meet the “official” guidelines or does it really matter that much?

It depends – what are your goals?  Are you looking to be healthy or do you want to lose weight, too?

The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) and the American Heart Association made some changes when they published their 2007 physical activity guidelines.  This is their current recommendations for healthy adults under 65:

• Moderately intense cardio – 30 minutes, 5 days a week ( working at a 6 on a 1-10 scale and breaking a sweat).
• OR       vigorously intense cardio for 20 minutes, 3 days a week.
• AND    2 days a week of strength (resistance) training.

They further recommend that to lose weight or maintain weight loss, 60-90 minutes may be necessary.  I’ll address this point later.  They also point out that short bursts of activity in 10 minute sessions are equal to 30 minutes of continuous exercise (I agree wholeheartedly with this).

• You should mix up the high and moderate intensity activity.  Again, I give a big thumbs up to this one.  This keeps you mentally and physically “fresh.”
• Schedule your workout times into your week.  For most people this is also very important.
• You don’t have to go to the gym – couldn’t agree more.  Most everything done at my studio can be done at home, if desired.  It may take a lot of personal “drive” and discipline, however.
• Workout with family or friends to stay motivated and have social accountability.  I added in the accountability factor, since this is a missing ingredient in many weight loss programs and why many people give up on their goals.  If you have kids, you definitely want to make sure they are active and develop healthy habits.

They made sure that muscle strengthening is part of their recommendations and I can’t agree strongly enough.  Besides being a big key to fat loss, it maintains joint health and mobility, making your daily tasks easier.

I also agree with the short bursts of activity.  You don’t need to spend hours on the treadmill to get results.  If healthy, up the intensity of your workouts and you just might lose that weight that won’t go away.  I don’t think you need to exercise for 90 minutes to achieve fat loss.

If short on time like most of us, turn up the intensity for increased fat burning after your workout is over.   If you read last week’s article on low intensity biking, you will remember that their metabolism went back to normal as soon as they stopped pedaling.

You want to choose a workout that keeps burning calories after you have stopped exercising.  This requires more intensity – like interval training.  Instead of separating your cardio and strength training, combine them into a shorter workout – one that turns up the fat burning flame.

Multi-joint exercises (multiple muscles) are the way to go.  Tools like the TRX, sandbags, resistance bands, and bodyweight exercises get the job done in minimal time.

Three days a week of resistance training will get better results if your primary goal is weight loss.  I also like to do joint mobility movements to recover from the more intense exercise and to make my everyday movements more efficient.

Get moving!

Brian Morgan

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I’ve lost 20 pounds in the last 6 months and playing basketball recently has kept it off while exercising just a few hours here and there.

I’ve been playing once a week for the last 7 weeks against guys who are mostly 10-20 years younger.  Our team is made up of men in their forties with one guy in his early fifties and two young bucks of 30 and 25.

I lost the weight prior to starting this league but have kept it off without spending much time doing anything else.  Basketball is a stop and go sport, mixing in periods of higher and lower intensity.

This stop and go nature really generates a lot of body heat, sweat, and greatly increases your oxygen consumption – causing you to suck in extra air at times, which is why us old guys need an occasional “sub” to come in for us.

Two twenty minute halves is plenty of action and our heart rates and metabolism stay elevated for a while afterwards, burning additional calories.  I was in pretty decent shape previously, but hadn’t done specific training for playing hoops, since I didn’t know I was going to play.

One of the things I have done is to do jump rope training between games to prepare for the jumping impact of the games.  I’ll do about 20-30 seconds on and then rest for the same amount of time.  This is for 5-7 minutes and then back to more interval training, keeping my heart rate up with different agility and strength training.

Besides being a time efficient way to workout, these interval workouts prepare you for the stop and go nature of basketball.  One of my personal training clients recently talked about doing step aerobics classes twenty years ago.

“I didn’t lose any weight but it was fun.”  Many people adapt to steady pace activity very quickly and don’t end up losing much, if any weight.  Not long ago, this same client walked on a treadmill 5 days a week for four months and only lost 6 pounds – not the greatest return for her “investment.”

She’s since lost close to 20 pounds by doing shorter bursts of exercise and eliminating processed foods from her diet.

The amount of sweat we produce in these games is a pretty good indication of large amounts of calories burned.  The guy who is 52 remarked about how you can’t get the same kind of breathlessness from doing typical workouts on a treadmill.

This guy is a former college wrestling coach, so he knows a little about training…. and is in pretty decent shape, too.  The take home point is that long periods of exercise aren’t always necessary and sometimes can be counter-productive if you don’t get the weight loss you want and decide to give up because you get frustrated with a lack of progress.

At the same time, if you haven’t done much exercise in a while, start out easy and gradually increase your intensity and/or decrease the amount of rest between exercises as you become more fit.

Train to play the sport and don’t play the sport to get in shape.  Don’t forget to do your strength training to help protect your joints and flexibility/mobility work is also strongly advised.

Get Moving!

Brian Morgan

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To burn fat you need to turn up the heat – dial up the intensity of your workouts!  One of my clients has lost 14 pounds in a month, while spending less time exercising.

Previously, she was walking on a treadmill 5 days a week and 4 months later had lost only 6 pounds.  She’s made more progress by making dietary changes and doing burst-type training.

She is still walking, but now she alternates her pace, going back and forth with periods of higher intensity walking – kinda similar to how your car burns more gas during stop and go driving in the city.

She is doing similar exercise in the studio with dumbbells.  Multi-joint movements that involve multiple muscles to burn more calories, alternating between two exercises with little rest in between.

This causes you to release more of your body’s fat burning hormones naturally.  This gets your metabolism elevated without spending hours exercising.  She can feel the warmth in her muscles as she sweats more, helping the body get rid of toxins that can build up.

I showed her a routine that she can do at home with dumbbells and bodyweight when she isn’t working with me in person.  Its great to get results while exercising less.

Research studies have shown that walking on a treadmill without doing any resistance training doesn’t always lead to much weight loss.  If you’re like most people and short on time, interval strength training and interval cardio are the way to go.

Yeah, triathletes and marathoners are usually pretty lean, but they often spend 10 hours or more per week on their training.  Unless you are training for competition, there are more efficient ways to stay in shape.

Yesterday, I did some interval cardio using the Ropes Gone Wild training ropes.  I did 15 minutes of various diagonal, circular and vertical patterns (beatdowns) with the ropes, elevating my heart rate in a short amount of time, going into oxygen debt.

I had my HR monitor on to see what my body was doing and also to see how many calories I burned.  In the 15 minutes I burned 230 calories according to the monitor, which isn’t all that much…..until you read the rest of the story.

I turned the monitor back on as I did some kettlebell presses, before packing it in for the night, leaving the HR monitor running.  An hour and a half later I stopped it and looked at how many calories I burned.

It said 490 calories in that hour and a half after the interval rope training, for a total of 720 overall!  Got your attention now?!  Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that the number is a little high.  Knock off 100 calories and that’s still a LOT of calories burned in less than half an hour of exercise.

The point should be clear – intense exercise keeps your metabolism elevated after you have stopped exercising.  So if short on time, turn up the flame to burn more total fat.  Its fine to mix in longer walks, bike rides or runs with your interval resistance training.  By the way, the monitor is a Polar F6.

If you’re looking for a simple program you can do at home, you might check out Turbulence Training.

Get moving!

Brian Morgan

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In losing 13 pounds and keeping it off for 3 months after stopping the diet, I have learned a couple important things -

there are two phases of eating to lose weight – eating less and getting used to it, and eating better.  Meaning, getting rid of the “junk” that you put in your mouth.

Amazingly, I’m actually used to eating less than I used to.  Naturally, this adds to weight loss when you add in a good exercise program.  But its not just about eating less, its about eating better!

This is a work in progress for me.  For the record, I don’t claim to be a fat loss expert, I just play one on the internet.  All joking aside, I read numerous articles and blogs by people who ARE experts on losing weight and improving your appearance and also attend my share of seminars.

Now that I’m used to eating less, the next step is about improving the quality of food that I eat.  Avoiding or at least minimizing sugar, avoiding processed foods and getting more fiber and good fats into my diet.

I did the Warp Speed Fat Loss program for a month and lost 13 pounds.  Not too shabby considering I didn’t follow the program perfectly.  More importantly, I’ve kept it off after 3 months.  I’m not following the low fat diet anymore, but I am doing my best to eat quality foods more often than I used to.

I’ve also altered the exercise program, as well and think that the slight changes have kept my body guessing.  I’m still doing most of the same exercises, just changing the sets and reps and rest periods – kind of a modified density training workout.

While I’m exercising with decent intensity and little rest, which is key to getting better results in less time, my overall time spent exercising isn’t that much.  I’m convinced you don’t need to spend 90 minutes or more to get results if the intensity is there.

Cleaning up my diet even further is the second phase and the key to getting your bodyfat levels even lower and “uncovering” your six pack abs.  Getting rid of the junk in your diet is also key to eliminating or reducing the environmental toxins that keep you fat and unhealthy.

Why not live to be 100 if your body and mind are both working the way you want them to?  Seems to be working for Jack LaLanne, who turns 95 this Fall!

My body currently looks just like it did at 27, even though I’m in my mid 40’s.  Not bad, but I think I just might be able to improve on that.  Change your mind to change your life.

You might find my previous article Confessions of a Sugar Addict interesting.

Get moving!

Brian Morgan

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I recently switched my workouts to density training to add some lean muscle tissue while losing fat.  This is a little different than “bulking” phases that bodybuilders sometimes use.

In my previous article, I talked about how density training involves getting more work done in a set amount of time.  Most people can increase the weight or reps they do for a limited amount of time.

To get further results you have to make changes in your routine.  EDT has you seeing how many total reps you can achieve in a time period, usually 15 minutes.  Next time you would try to do more reps for the same weight and exercise.

This is a very time efficient way of training and gets great results.  It allows you to delay fatigue and get more work done (total reps) which can simultaneously build muscle and burn a lot of calories.

For example, Saturday I did sandbag squats with 135 pounds.  Holding a large sandbag across the front of your shoulders is a great challenge for your abs and low back, besides the lower body work being done.

I haven’t been doing this exercise recently and am using the density method to strengthen my body with this challenging exercise.  Saturday I did 18 reps in 15 minutes.  The idea is to increase the total number of reps in the next workout and the workouts to follow.

By not going all out on each set, I delay fatigue and am able to do more total reps this way.  By increasing the amount of work with every workout, my body is forced to make changes – increased strength, lean muscle tissue and increased calorie burn (weight loss).

Usually you would switch back and forth between two opposing exercises, but this exercise strongly challenges not just your lower body but your core, as well.

I noticed some soreness in my abs yesterday even though I didn’t do any direct exercises for them – compound exercises (multi-joint) are the way to go if you want a time-efficient workout.

Get moving!

Brian

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I’m succeeding in my goal to lose fat by adopting healthier habits.  They say that it takes 21 days to make a habit and they’re right!

I’ve lost some belly fat and reduced my craving for carbs in the process.  In fact, I’ve gotten used to eating smaller portions without feeling that I’m being deprived.

Not that I’ve been perfect….I think that progress, not perfection is the key to getting results that last.  You can lose weight on any diet but can you keep it off long-term?

For most of the population, the answer is a resounding NO!!  Why?  Because the “diet” can’t be done for long and then you go back to your old habits, often re-gaining all the weight – and then some.

I haven’t been perfect on this program I’ve been following (Warp Speed Fat Loss), but I definitely made some sacrifices that required some mental toughness.

What made it easier is knowing that I only have to follow it for a month.  Then I can change things up a little, but in that month I have made some habits……or rather, broke some unhealthy habits that were keeping me heavier than necessary.

For me, reducing the amount of carbs I eat and sugar in particular.  I’ve been weak in that regard and eat too much sugar due to stress and partly because of convenience.

The exercise part is no problem.  I love it and consider it more training than anything else.  But I’m also a busy person, like you, and don’t have several hours to work out anytime I want….

which is another bonus to my current program.  I’ve had a couple of “treats” here and there, but overall have been very disciplined with my eating and that mental discipline will carry over to other aspects of my life.

I look and feel better, too.  Its amazing what eating healthier can do for that.  My mind is much more focused, also.

If you’re someone who’s had trouble sticking to a plan, then you are probably lacking in social support.  This is an often overlooked key to losing weight – having someone hold you accountable and support your actions.

If this is the case, go over to our free forum and I’ll try to help out as best as I can.  I’ll also offer some training suggestions.

Get moving!

Brian

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