Summer Workouts

Summer Workouts
Putting the meaning back in movement

By Doug Petersen 7/6/09
 
Myths about physical fitness abound. One of the most common—and one that’s
cherished by those of us who work out regularly—is that we continue to
burn fat at a higher rate than normal for several hours after we exercise.
According to the myth of “residual burn,” a single session at the gym or
the track continues to pay off long after you’ve showered and gone back to
the office. The claim is that just like earning rewards for every dollar
you charge to your credit card, you get a certain number of bonus
“fat-burning minutes” for every minute you spend at the gym.
Many of us have embraced the concept of residual burn to justify consuming
far more calories than we should after we exercise, thinking those
calories will go unnoticed by our body.
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a calorie-free lunch, not even
after an aerobics class.
 
BAD NEWS
A recent study published in Exercise and Sports Sciences Review has
shattered the myth of residual burn. Released in mid-April, the study said
we burn a lot less fat after we exercise than we thought. Having compared
people’s fat-burning rate for a 24-hour period after moderate exercise to
their fat-burning rate on days they did not exercise, the study concluded
that exercise does not increase our body’s ability to burn fat after we
step off the exercise bike — at least for the moderate rate of exercise
the participants performed.
The media picked up on the study, translating its jargon-laden conclusions
into catchy sound bites, and soon thereafter I began to hear my clients
question the value of working out at all. Their 60 minutes of effort at
the gym, which used to carry them—calorically-speaking—throughout the day,
was suddenly reduced to a mere hour at the gym. Period. And that
calorie-laden post-workout muffin—the sweet reward for all that sweat?
Well, let’s just say that it has taken on far weightier significance.
One of the major conclusions of the study is that 60 minutes of daily
moderate exercise is no weapon against the type and amount of calories
most Americans consume. A moderate hour-long workout, which might burn 400
calories, hardly makes a dent when we regularly consume 1,700-calorie
lunches at Applebee’s or Olive Garden.. And because we burn far fewer fat
calories from working out than we had previously thought, what (and how
much!) we eat has taken on even more significance than in the past.
As a personal trainer and fitness consultant, I find this news more
refreshing than discouraging. And it’s not because I think it will
encourage people to spend more time, and hence more money, at the gym.
Instead, I hope this bit of data pushes people to stop looking for the
easy way out. Perhaps we will finally realize that gyms, fitness classes,
and personal trainers are not going to single-handedly win the battle of
the bulge in America. And perhaps the fitness industry will stop
over-selling itself and start acting a little more responsibly with regard
to people’s fitness goals and their overall health.
Trust me, I’m not trying to talk myself out of a job. Rather, I believe
that when people get a more realistic picture of what three hours at the
gym each week can do for them, they will be more responsible during the
165 hours of the week they aren’t at the gym.
 
MEANINGFUL MOVEMENT
Fortunately, options abound for getting our bodies to burn fat calories at
a higher rate than normal. One of the easiest ways is to integrate more
meaningful movement into your daily life.
Look for opportunities to replace sedentary “dead” times in your day with
meaningful moving time. Walking or biking to and from work or school is
one of the simplest examples. Sure, it might add a few minutes, even a
half-hour, to your commute, but you will be invigorated once you arrive at
work, with your senses heightened from spending time outside, and you will
save money on fuel. And in addition to reducing your carbon footprint, you
just might reduce your pant size.
Other options? Stop paying someone else to mow your lawn (while speeding
off to a spin class) and do it yourself—with a push mower. Here’s another
one: forgo the dishwasher next time you remodel your kitchen. Studies show
that the simple act of hand-washing and hand-drying your dishes can burn
enough calories to keep off that seemingly unavoidable extra pound or two
we pack on each year. Same goes with “unplugging” other household
activities, such as sweeping (rather than vacuuming), shoveling (rather
than snow blowing), and hanging up clothes to dry (rather than throwing
them in the dryer). Even the oh-so-domestic act of actually preparing a
meal from scratch incorporates more movement into your life than opening
up a box or jar and pressing “Start” on the microwave. Add up enough of
these meaningful movement opportunities, and you’ve got yourself a simple,
not to mention very satisfying, solution to keeping the weight off.
When it comes to integrating more movement into your life, the important
thing is to make sure the movement has meaning beyond just burning
calories. This kind of movement -- that is so wholly integrated into what
we do that we don’t think of it as “exercise” -- has suffered the most in
the past few decades, as advances in technology have leached the movement
from our meaningful activities. Trust me: once you get used to doing these
things, you won’t even notice that you’ve added all that movement back
into your life.  

HIGH INTENSITY
And what about your time at the gym? If, after watching what—and how
much—you eat and incorporating more movement into your daily life, you
still want to put in some time at the gym, you might as well get the most
bang for your exercise buck by doing High Intensity Interval Training
(HIIT), the type of exercise I lead at Rock Bottom Gym.
HIIT maximizes what you get from every moment you give. In a typical
session, participants in small groups of three-to-eight people are taken
from shorts bouts of intense strength training to five to 10 minutes of
cardiovascular training on a treadmill, bike, elliptical trainer, or
even using jump ropes.
Every session has a theme, and we attempt to safely raise participants’
heart rates to as high as 90 to 95 percent of their maximum, eight to 10
times each session, typically for no longer than 30 seconds. 
In a typical session of HIIT training, an individual should expect to burn
30-40 percent more calories in less time than a traditional workout.  I
caution you though -- it is more painful and certainly can put extreme
stress on your body; consequently this type of exercise for the more
de-conditioned among us should be cleared by a physician and/or
cardiologist.
This sort of workout results in what trainers call “muscle confusion.” The
idea is to push so hard that your body reacts by becoming more capable of
processing oxygen and/or lifting weight. 
Increased muscle and cardiorepiratory health are a result of powerful
messages being relayed back and forth from the muscle (including the
heart) to the brain. The muscle says: “ouch -- let’s not let that happen
again brain,” and the brain responds by saying: “Got it! I’ll send some
workers in while you sleep and build some more muscle to prevent that from
happening next time.”
The problem, however, is that this communication only happens in response
to fairly intense conditions imposed on the body. 
High intensity exercise anecdotally gives us incredible athletes, but,
more often than not, great athletes also have great diets. So can you! I
encourage you to view your time at the gym as the “icing on the cake” of
your health regimen. It’s up to you to take a long, hard look at your life
and make a serious effort to integrate movement into it wherever and
whenever possible. So go on: Seize the reins of that amazing body of yours
and get moving.

Doug Petersen is a personal trainer and co-owner of the Rock Bottom Gym at
Building 50 in TC.


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