Weight Loss - The Internet is Filled with Stupid Ideas

As most of you know, I spend a lot of hours reading articles and blogs posted by other fitness minded individuals looking for “new” information or research, something I can use to improve my skills and understanding. Most of my time is spent on the weekends going through blog after blog and article after article looking for something unique. Instead of finding unique articles, I have been finding unique viewpoints on old material. There is value in having a disagreeing viewpoint when it comes to creating traffic, but sometimes, the foundation of disagreement is so stupid it can’t be ignored. Two posts I have seen lately are how a lady “stopped exercising and lost weight” and how “simply cutting carbs results in fat loss”. Total click-bait, but I fell for it and got sucked into the posts and scared for the thousands of people that would read and believe these posts.

Between the magic bullet articles that promote eliminating entire food groups, “detoxing” with lemon vinegar tea coffee bean extract, or “15 fast fat burning foods”, common sense about sustainable weight loss takes the backseat because it isn’t what people want to hear. People don’t want to hear that it isn’t quick or easy. They don’t want to hear that it takes time, effort, and a little bit of common sense. They don’t want to hear that sometimes you can do everything the way your favorite fitness icon does it and fail. Sometimes their lives are so hectic they just need the Disney ending to their struggle with eating, body-image, and fitness. Sadly, Walt didn’t figure out how to make fairy-tale magic happen for us.

This would have been a short post had it not been for the number of posts and messages we receive from similar cases. The lady that stopped exercising and lost weight was like so many people first starting out. She was doing everything right, or so she thought; five hour-long sessions per week, tracking her calories in, and tracking her calories out. Where she went wrong was instead of having weight training and cardio, she was only doing cardio like rowing, walking, etc. She also made the huge mistake of estimating her caloric burn and then eating back those calories. After some time of trying to lose weight this way, she was injured by her dog and unable to be active. Because there was no exercise, there were no calories to eat back and amazingly, she lost weight! This led her to the conclusion that not exercising and eating normally is the way to go instead of performing exercise, building muscle, and still eating in a deficit by not eating back your calories.

Many people forget that building muscle is healthy for our metabolism and believe that a low scale weight is all they need. When we move from active to couch potato, our body will waste muscle, especially when faced with a caloric deficit. Remember, a pound of muscle takes up less space in the body than a pound of fat, so while the scale drops, the tape measure may increase as the body loses muscle but builds up fat. In the evil scenario, we lose precious muscle and reduce our intake, slowing our metabolism. Similar to the “The Biggest Loser Scenario” where contestants lose weight only to regain it years later, losing weight only through reduced intake is likely to result in the regain of fat. When discussing TBL and the downfalls, I’ve had more than a few people misinterpret my objection to mean not eating at a deficit. That is not what I am suggesting at all. I am suggesting having a set number of calories regardless of whether you train or not. I am suggesting a small to moderate deficit caused primarily by activities, specifically resistance exercise. No matter how you cut it, weight loss requires some form of deficit.

Another factor the post brought to light is the concept of “eating back” exercise calories. One popular food / activity tracker in particular encourages you to eat back your exercise calories by giving you a low target and increasing your target intake as you exercise. I find this to be a poorly thought out recommendation for several reasons. Calorie labels / trackers rely on averages. As PN points out in “The Surprising Problem with Calorie Counting - Calories In” it is very hard to reliably say how many calories we are actually consuming. Further, calorie expenditure, even when monitored with a good heart rate monitor has a minimum 10% error. The second part of “The Surprising Problem with Calorie Counting - Calories Out” breaks down just how bad estimates are for predicting how many calories we burn through exercise. Combine the inaccuracy of calories listed on a label with the variance of calories burned and you have the beginning of a recipe for disaster when you attempt to eat back your calories.

Some believe that adjusted macros will create fat loss. Simply adjusting macro intake won’t translate to fat loss or weight loss with few exceptions. Yes, I acknowledge the concept of a recomposition, which is the process of building muscle and losing fat at the same time. No, your body doesn’t turn fat into muscle and no, it isn’t easy. The post proclaiming all that is needed to lose fat is reducing carbohydrate intake is a sad oversimplification. Regardless of how low you get your carbohydrate intake there are other factors:

Total caloric intake and deficit - if there’s no deficit, the body has no need to burn fat stores.

Stress - causes Cortisol release. Cortisol is a factor in the accumulation of visceral fat and sugar cravings.

Sleep - it’s our body’s chance to repair and recover. If you’re not getting enough sleep, you don’t recover, have a tendency to eat more, have impaired glucose control, and are likely to have higher Cortisol levels.

The solution:

Avoid the scale -

Like many others, I recommend limited use of the scale only to track patterns in weight gain or loss. Scales can be highly inaccurate measures and vary up to 10 lbs per day depending on our size. Unless you are severely overweight, there are better measures. If we only watch the scale, we risk losing the right kind of weight for the wrong kind.

Body Composition -

We know it’s possible to be at a “healthy weight” and have a high bodyfat percentage and that it’s possible to be “overweight” and have a low bodyfat percentage. There are hundreds of pictures of people that have gained weight yet become slimmer by building muscle. Even if the goal is to lower your weight, there needs to be a focus on building and maintaining muscle to keep burning calories. The result of losing muscle is a soft physique with less than ideal metabolism.

Hip & Waist Measures -

While body composition is one of the best, tracking changes in hip and waist circumference (two places we all tend to store fat) is a good indicator of our training and diet progress. There is also a high correlation of disease associated with people that have a high waist to hip ratio.

Tracking -

Track what you are eating, not necessarily taking calorie count as being exact, but understanding it is a range. When you find how much you can eat and maintain your weight for a week, decrease your calories by a minimal amount, say 10%. If you aren’t active, add some activity. No fancy gym necessary, but some basic bodyweight work to start.

Use the scale to track for weight changes, knowing that your weight can fluctuate +/- 10 pounds every day depending on your size. I like to keep a running five-day average, which will allow for those daily fluctuations.

Track progress using a variety of tools:  clothing fit, tape measure, progress photos, general feelings throughout the day. If two or more measures are moving in the right direction, you’re making progress, even if the scale isn’t moving.

Patience -

Be patient. Understand that most changes takes several weeks to show up and that good, lasting progress will take time, so if your goal is to be “bikini body” ready in 6 weeks, it may be time to re-think and re-plan.

Be patient through the failures, the slip-ups, and the lack of progress. Each time we don’t move forward is an opportunity to learn and make progress. Each opportunity allows us the chance to figure out to do it better and how to forgive ourselves when we make mistakes.

Hooray! Now what?

You finally did it. You prepped. You dieted. You trained your ass off. It took hours of prep, self-control, thousands of hours of work, and months of your life, but you did it. You finally reached your goal weight and now you come to the amazing question: "What next?" You just put in all that effort and now you have to decide on how to maintain the results.

It seems like a fairly easy concept, right? Finish the bulk or the cut and then just maintain your size, but let's be honest, we screw this up all the time. If we all got it right, the diet industry would be shut down in a matter of years...

Whether you are losing weight or trying to gain, your post-diet is just as important as your diet!

If you just finished your diet:

Coming back from a diet can be tricky because there are so many variations and more possibilities than I can ever address.  Some diets require lowering of calories, others, the elimination of macros, and some changing the time period when you eat. Since the ultimate goal at the end of your diet should be to establish a sustainable eating style that maintains your weight, the important principle must be achieving a maintenance level of eating that matches your level of activity.

The largest of these principles is the SLOW recovery to maintenance. Whether you ate low calorie, low carb, or fasted, the diet effected your body's metabolism and hormones. Depending on how long the diet period lasted could have tremendous impact on how long the road back to maintenance will take.

You may be asking yourself "Why can't I just go back to my regular eating?" Your body seeks homeostasis, with weight, fat levels, etc. Simply, as you reduce calories to lose weight, your body is smart enough to slow metabolism and adjust hormones to maintain the current levels. In short, the gradual recovery will allow your body to recover it's metabolic rate, readjust hormones, balance gut bacteria, and set you up for sustaining the weight you worked so hard to achieve.

So how do we perform a slow recovery? Time for everybody's favorite answer, "It depends."

I was eating at a small deficit, how do I get back to full portions?

The answer is patience. If you were on a low calorie diet, recovering is just a matter of increasing our calories weekly until we reach maintenance. This has become wildly popular under the name of "Reverse Dieting" and can be found in books, websites, and even web software. One of the best books for explaining the concept is Reverse Dieting by Sohee Lee and Layne Norton. Essentially, you increase your calories weekly or bi-weekly with the idea that you will improve your metabolism and hormone profile with little to no weight gain and you will be able to return to your maintenance level calories over a period of weeks. Nobody can give you an exact time-frame, but the longer you dieted, the longer it will take to recover.

I was eating a specialized diet, can I go back to normal?

If you were on a diet like VLC, Atkins, or some other elimination style diet, your re-introduction could come with some nasty side-effects. When you remove a food type, the bacterial composition in your gut changes. With those changes come changes in how we digest and how we absorb the nutrients. Sometimes it's as simple as having a "gassy" feeling, other times it leads to diarrhea, leaky gut, or possibly worse with full out allergic reactions.

On top of the gut health issues, a diet that restricts carbohydrates tends to have an initial loss of weight associated with lost water weight. There's a lot of science behind it, but when you cut carbohydrates from the diet, the initial weight lost is primarily water, so naturally, when you reintroduce carbohydrates, the body will retain some water. A lot of people aren't prepared to see the scale rise and automatically assume it's fat. This is where a little extra time researching your diet is a worth it.

Again, the solution is slowly reintroducing the removed macronutrient WITHOUT creating a large surplus of calories. (Remember, caloric deficit = losing weight, caloric surplus = gaining weight)

What about if I want to change "Eating Styles?"

Sometimes, our diet has us changing from eating three meals a day to a modified eating plan, five meals a day, or possibly intermittent fasting. Although changes like these are typically lasting and are a way of eating for life, some people want to return to their good old three squares a day plan. Essentially nothing changes macro-wise, but you will have to fight through feelings of either being full or starving and possibly a little upset stomach if you've been avoiding morning meals. The best suggestion I have is to continue with the same calories while transitioning back to the three meals per day and then gradually increase calories if needed.

What if I did something radical and possibly stupid to lose weight?

Yup, there are STUPID ways to lose weight that will work in the short term. I do not personally recommend any of them, but people have done things like extended juice fasts, major calorie cuts (like 1/2 their intake cut), or one of the many extremist fad diets. The inherent risk with any of these diets is their effect on our metabolism, our gut bacteria, and our hormone levels. While they may accomplish the short term goal, the consequences could be long term damage, and sometimes the rebound could result in more fat gained than lost.

Of course, people will still do these diets and there needs to be some way to help them recover. Again, I believe "Reverse Dieting" is one of the better options if the extreme diet was run for only a short period (less than two weeks), but the first thing I recommend after a prolonged extreme diet is talking to a physician and allowing them to run blood tests. At the point where hormone levels are outside of the "normal" range, a medical professional will have the safest protocol to attempt to return the hormones to normal. And despite the weight loss, the safest option may be to regain weight and diet back down the right way.

If You Just Finished Your Bulk

This is a far shorter answer. Eat less! Cut the total calories by cutting back on carbs and fats. Again, the key is slowly cutting back each week until you find your maintenance levels. The one macronutrient I recommend keeping high is your protein to keep supporting that new muscle. Unlike after a diet concludes, the conclusion of a bulk allows for a much easier return to maintenance.

The Keys

1. Be Patient
2. Make Slow increases or decreases in calories, radical changes can have bad effects
3. Weigh yourself each week and add or decrease total calories until maintenance
4. Keep protein high to support your muscles
5. If you're doing it right and something isn't right, SEE YOUR DOCTOR.

A little knowledge goes a long way. Now that you've reached your goals, take it slow, recover the metabolism the right way and maintain that body you worked so hard for.

Why Aren't I Losing Weight? 10 Factors You Need to Consider.

Every year, millions of people attempt to tackle weight loss. They find talk of calories, of macros, of IIFYM, Paleo, and IF; hormones with really weird names, and fat burning supplements; training programs, met cons, and infomercials galore. Everybody says how simple it should be and then proceeds to muddy the simplicity with hundreds of “if's” and options. There is no shortage of information telling you everything you've done wrong or why this program is better than the others. And I'm not going to write another step-by-step guide to losing weight, discuss macros, diets, and training programs. There are enough of those out there for you to read. Instead, I'm going to address some of the not-so obvious problems in weight loss.

Without boring you with all the different theories and the soapbox lecture about how weight loss is a process and there is no such thing as a quick-fix, I want to remind you that THERE IS NO QUICK-FIX, no magic pill, no insta-cleanse (that's a whole different post), and a whole lot of ways that work. Each person responds differently and part of the challenge is finding what works for you. The most important part is approaching your weight loss systematically and by making small, sustainable life changes and having patience.

Assuming you've got a solid plan (no magic pills, no drastic calorie cuts or food eliminations) and a training program that matches (some cardio, some weight training), you should see progress happen within a few weeks depending on how much you've got to lose. Remember, the scale isn't always going to show progress, so that's why we advocate taking before pictures from multiple angles along with measuring calves, thighs, hips, waist, chest, biceps, and neck. But what happens when you aren't seeing any of these measures move?

Unfortunately, even with the perfect plan, there are other factors that can effect weight loss, and many of them are either overlooked or never discussed. Instead of looking deeper, the fitness world would have you change programs, cut your calories, use a “cleanse” or buy some new variant of bootcamp DVD paired with a TENS Unit (the electro shock thing).

Some of these factors that effect our weight loss are within our control, and many others are not. Even though we can't have 100% control, when we know what is causing our problem, we can take appropriate steps to minimize their effect.

Possible Factors Effecting Weight Loss:

• The Wrong Mentality – This could be the most difficult weight loss stumbling block of them all. Whether it's overconfident or self-defeating, how we think about our weight loss and our plan can determine our chance of success. When we're too stubborn to listen (I didn't say implement) to other options we're likely to make poor decisions when we stall. When we don't believe in the program we're using, we're likely to cheat on the diet, skip workouts, and commit self-sabotage in small ways. Either way, your success depends on you believing

• Stress – We all face stress every day. Some of us train to relieve stress, some of us play sports, some meditate, and others binge eat. For the most part, we handle the stress fairly well, but when we face more stress than we can handle or we don't recover well enough, bad things happen. Stress causes the body releases the hormone Cortisol. While Cortisol is both normal and necessary, too much of it throws off the body's hormonal balance and can result in a number of medical conditions.
  
  One of the best techniques to battle stress in my experience, is learning to meditate. There are apps on both iOS and Android that can guide you through techniques to relax and relieve stress in as little as 5 minutes each day.

• Working Out Too Much – The old addage goes something like “Eat less, move more.” Unfortunately, in weight loss, more isn't always better. When you work out too much, whether it's endless hours of cardio or weights, the body's reaction may be to hold on to weight. Simply explained, working out causes stress, and stress without proper nutrition and recovery leads to negative changes in the body and potential weight gain.
  
  Many unknowingly out-train their recovery and nutrition, resulting in no progress and a lot of frustration. The solution is truly as simple as it seems; do less. That's not to say do nothing, but if you are training 5-6 days per week and you aren't seeing changes, it may be time to consider reducing your training days to only three days per week.

• Too Little Recovery – There are articles and research to be found all over that explain the importance of recovery and sleep on hormonal regulation, recovery, and weight loss. When the hormones get out of whack (yup, science terms here) weight loss and fat burning slows. Lack of sleep and poor sleep quality leave us tired and potentially reaching for sugary food and drink to give us quick bursts of energy, skipping workouts, and eating the easy, fast food because we're too tired to make healthy meals at home.
  
  One of the tools I use to monitor my sleep is called “sleep bot” for Android. There are a plethora of similar trackers that monitor sleep time and movement and can provide a sleep quality. Many can also create “smart alarms” that wake us up at the right time with the right amount of sleep. Another valuable part of getting restful sleep is playing meditation hypnosis before bed to relieve stress. If monitoring and adjusting your sleep isn't working, it may be time to speak to a doctor about it.

• Inconsistency – We all see it or have experienced it, the on again, off again relationship with good nutrition and working out. But what happens when we start and stop repeatedly? What happens when we only work out once a week instead of the three that we planned on? Weight loss takes consistent efforts, and patience to stay the course.
  
  News Flash – The infomercials provide skewed perceptions about typical weight loss rates. The truth is weight loss and body changes don't happen overnight and sometimes not for weeks. Be patient, make your training and nutrition a priority. Plan it into your day and then take no excuses.

• Medical Conditions – Hypothyroidism, Cushing's Syndrome, PCOS, Syndrome X, Depression, and other Hormonal Changes are all conditions that effect weight loss. Each condition occurs for a different reason and can be an underlying cause on why the weight isn't coming off.
  
  While we can read all about these conditions and symptoms, and self-diagnose, the only true diagnosis and treatment comes with the the assistance of a medical professionals.

• Medications – There are millions of medications on the market and being used by people all over the world. Birth Control, Anti-Depressants, Blood Pressure Meds, and many others can all effect our hormone levels, cause fatigue, fluid retention, or can increase appetite. Like everything else that goes into our body, the medications we take can effect how our body works.
  
  You can research the medications you take, along with their side effects online. If you're concerned about your medications and their effect on weight loss, check with the prescribing doctor.

• Food Sensitivities – There is a difference between a sensitivity and an allergy. A trouble food can be tolerated in small amounts and the bad reaction might be prevented with medications in a food sensitivity. The reason for the reaction is certain elements of the offending food might not be digested and processed optimally, resulting in inflammation. Inflammation is typically followed by a level of insulin resistance and possibly leaky gut.
  
  The obvious solution is to limit the intake of foods that you are sensitive too. Another possible solution is the use of Probiotics to help maintain a healthy gut and aid in digestion. If you suspect food sensitivities could be hindering your weight loss, it is best to seek the assistance of a medical professional.

• Lack of Variety – When we do the same thing or eat the same thing for too long, our body adapts. In 6-8 weeks, the body can become more efficient and at that point, a small change needs to be made to keep progress moving forward.
  
  Evaluate your program every 6-8 weeks. If you are still making progress, there is no need to make a change, but when a program that was working, stalls, it's time to consider a small, calculated change.

• Too Much Variety – On the flip side of not changing enough is the person that changes too much. Whether it's switching from carb backloading to IIFYM to IF or from 5x5 to GVT to PHAT, too much variety prevents us from making progress. There is a huge myth out there that says the body needs to be “confused” to produce results.
  
  Like many have mentioned before, progress requires consistency and a chance for the body to adapt. As the body becomes efficient and adapts, then it is time to make just enough of a change to keep progress going.

As you can see, there are a number of factors that can effect weight loss and while we have control over only a few of them, we can be informed and make educated decisions about how to handle all of them. Once you've got the plan and the program it is important to be patient and consistent. Remember to take pictures, use the tape measurements, and the scale to create a whole picture of your transformation. If things aren't moving, instead of giving up or making drastic changes, consider the many factors above and ask for help from the people that know about and have experience working with weight loss.

How do I get Toned?

An all too familiar question in health and fitness forums and one of the most common goals of people entering the gym for the first time revolves around a single word with a simple meaning; “toned.” While the knowledgeable lifter may know the correct term is “defined”, “toned” is a commonly mis-used term by newer trainees and one that can be easily corrected and then elaborated upon.

Chances are by searching the internet or saying they want to get “toned” they will receive the generic responses including light weight, high reps, lots of cardio, and diet. Experience tells me there is a better way, a faster way, and a way to do more than just look the part. You can actually be strong and be defined at the same time and it all starts with the training program.

Defined bodies have moderately low bodyfat percentages and a substantial percentage of muscle. I won’t explicitly give bodyfat percentages because the number has absolutely nothing to do with the look. Everybody holds and stores fat in different ways, so 15% on one person may look very defined and soft on others. Defined is about what you see, not some number that nobody knows unless you’re boasting.

Dropping fat is the first requirements and without turning this into a 20 page post, fat loss can be accomplished in several ways: diet, metabolic conditioning, cardiovascular training, and strength training. How you lose the fat is up to you, but the fat layer needs to be minimized.

The second requirement is growing muscle. Typically that comes through high volume hypertrophy programs. The most effective method also includes high intensity strength training.

*Intensity is defined as the amount of weight relative to your 1 rep max, it is impossible to do high volume and high intensity at the same time.

I can hear the concern “I don’t want to get big and bulky.” Guess what! Big and bulky is heavily dependent on genetics and most of us aren’t that lucky to instantly turn into a Phil Heath or Dana Lynn Bailey. If you’re a woman, you’re even less likely to experience the massive growth due to Mr. T, Testosterone. Testosterone is the king of all the muscle-building hormones [1]. And most women don’t have as much of it as men.
Besides the years of hard work and unwavering devotion to exercise and diet, developing the kind of muscular physiques you see in the magazines takes hours of training with heavy weights, eating a lot of food, and getting plenty of rest. (And in some cases, heavy supplementation)

Avoiding heavy training because you don’t want to get “too big” is like owning snow clothes and living on the equator.

It just doesn’t make sense.

Most people fail to realize how adding muscle to their frame can change the way they look. Since muscle occupies less space than fat, your proportions will change, typically accentuating the V-Taper. There was an interesting study published several years ago regarding the increase of bodyweight and lowering of bodyfat. [2] Simply, the studied demonstrated an increase of muscle mass and a lowering of bodyfat, which correlates to smaller tape measurements and “definition.”

The study used a group of female tennis players following a planned strength program for nine months. The program involved lifting weights three times a week in an undulating manner, meaning there are heavy (4-6 reps), medium (8-10 reps) and light (12-15 reps) weights.

The result, the women had gained weight – around 2.5 pounds and dropped from an average of 23% to 19% bodyfat. In other words, the layer of fat got thinner and the muscle got bigger.
While you can change your shape with diet or aerobic exercise alone, chances are you cannot create the “toned” muscular look you want without gaining muscle. Strength training gives you control in how you look by allowing you to cut fat and build enough muscle to achieve the look you want.

Sources:
[1] West DW, Phillips SM. (2010). Anabolic processes in human skeletal muscle: restoring the identities of growth hormone and testosterone. The Physician and Sports Medicine, 38, 97-104 [2] Kraemer, W.J., Hakkinen, K., Triplett-Mcbride, N.T., Fry, A.C., Koziris, L.P., Ratamess, N.A., Bauer, J.E., Volek, J.S., McConnell, T., Newton, R.U., Gordon, S.E., Cummings, D., Hauth, J., Pullo F, Lynch JM, Fleck SJ, Mazzetti SA, Knuttgen HG. (2003). Physiological changes with periodized resistance training in women tennis players.Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 35, 157-168

Why Cardio Isn't the Devil

Tis the time of year for everybody to renew their promise to be healthier, lose fat, and get in the best shape of their lives. What this really means will depend upon whom you ask. For most people, losing fat is synonymous with improving their health. By far the most popular goal in health and fitness, many trainers can spout 20 ways to help clients burn fat. As a trainer, our job is to provide the most effective, efficient, and healthy way to achieve the goal without harming the client. Studies have shown the diet combined with exercise will result in the greatest fat loss, but nutrition alone far exceeds exercise alone [1]. I’m not the first, and I’m definitely not going to be the last to tell you, nutrition is king, resistance training is essential, and cardio has gone by the wayside for fat loss…but does it still have a place in our training?

Most people starting on a fat loss journey start out the same, with jogging. Why do they start with jogging? Because it’s easy, requires only shoes and a place to jog.

Let’s take Sal as an example. Sal wants to get fit, so Sal does what so many have done before, started eating better and jogging. Sal is losing weight, feeling better, and then the all-knowing internet disparages jogging as not worth the time and convinces Sal to stop jogging and get into the gym and do resistance training and HIIT despite clear indicators that Steady State will benefit Sal. Since everybody wants the biggest return on their investment, Sal jumps ship and joins the HIIT train and continues to make progress; amazing progress with no more mind-numbing cardio.

Despite LISS having been shown to burn significantly more calories than weight training or High Intensity Interval Training during the activity [2], it still gets a bad rap because it takes considerable time when compared to HIIT. Given the data and numerous studies confirming it, HIIT appears to be nominally more effective than LISS for fat loss when looking only at calories burned training times are equalized. In the 24 hours after training, HIIT Training resulted in burning approximately 100 more calories than LISS over the course of the day [3]. Another study showed HIIT resulted in a 10% increase in calories burned in a 24 hour period compared to LISS, despite having the same caloric burn during the activity [4].

Some will use the “efficiency adaptation” argument, that it will take longer to burn the same number of calories after training in a style for a length of time, but they fail to consider the exact same thing happens with strength training or HIIT training. The solution is a simple one, up the intensity or up the volume. If we’re talking running, that means run faster or run further, nullifying the rationale that “it takes longer to burn the same number of calories.” Despite other claims that LISS will slow metabolism, I have only found research that demonstrates lowered metabolic rates DURING exercise which recovers soon after the conclusion of activity [5,6]. Does this mean it isn’t possible? No, it just means I haven’t found any research that demonstrates ONLY LISS will lower metabolism over time.

The problem I have with eliminating LISS is not in the nominal difference in caloric burn between activities, the amount of time, or the boredom, but in the impact on the heart itself. Because the heart is a muscle, it is subject to hypertrophy, just as any other muscle. I may become very unpopular for this, but LISS has its place in fat loss training and definitely in heart health.  Mike Robertson, MS, CSCS, co-owner of IFAST gym in Indianapolis says “One of the biggest misconceptions about HIIT is that it develops the aerobic system and the anaerobic system equally, but aerobic and anaerobic exercise actually place very different demands on your heart and your muscles.” This is where I believe trainers are doing a disservice to their clients by pushing them to avoid LISS altogether. Several studies have shown the positive effects of training on the heart: lower heart rate, decreased blood pressure, improved cholesterol levels, reduced inflammation of the arteries, etc.

There are two common types of hypertrophy in the heart and both occur in the left ventricle. Eccentric hypertrophy, which is the increase of the diameter of the left ventricle resulting in increased volume. The other versions is concentric hypertrophy, which results in increased wall thickness and decreased volume of the left ventricle through the thickening of the walls. In 2002, The Journal of the American College of Cardiology noted the significant increase on the left ventricle mass compared to sedentary individuals [7]. Further, in a study published by the American Heart Association, both endurance trained and strength trained athletes demonstrated increased LV wall thickness, but strength trained only demonstrated the most [8]. In addition, only the endurance trained athlete demonstrated increased LV diameter [8,10]. While the loss of LV volume may not set off alarms, let’s explore the result of lower LV Volume. By having a lower volume, the person is prone to higher blood pressure and higher resting heart rate. By having a thicker wall and lesser diameter, there is greater chance of “skipped beats” as a result of the ventricle not being full when the heart beats [9,10].

Given that most overweight people already have high blood pressure and increased resting heart rate (in excess of 72 bpm) it is risky to remove LISS from their training protocols and prescribe HIIT as a means to lose weight given the likelihood of extreme spikes in blood pressure and heart rate. In general, LISS cardio will effectively improve heart performance and aerobic conditioning better than HIIT or weight training alone while limiting such spikes. Also, while it is very unlikely, there is the possibility of sudden cardiac death caused by having too high of a heart rate in combination with extremely high blood pressure, which is more likely to occur during bouts of HIIT or max effort weight training. Taking an untrained individual, as most beginners are, and removing the gradual process by which they can lower their heart rate and blood pressure while improving aerobic conditioning through steady state cardio is like blocking off everything above third gear and telling someone to drive on the highway. It may work for a while, but eventually, something is going to blow. Even if weight is lost through other methods, the benefit of LISS cardio on the heart cannot be overlooked.

In the era of instant gratification and the greatest return on investment, fitness is not sacred. We are all looking for the “shortcuts” and the fastest way to get fit, but we have to remember, we should be able to stand before we sprint. The long slow road of LISS may be boring and it may not have the best returns on time, but it will safely get you ready to merge on the highway and keep you in shape to stay there.

Sources:

1. Miller, W., Koceja, D., & Hamilton, E. (1997). A meta-analysis of the past 25 years of weight loss research using diet, exercise or diet plus exercise intervention. International Journal of Obesity, 21, 941-947.
2. Trapp, E.G., Boutcher, S.H. Fat loss following 15 weeks of high-intensity, intermittent cycle ergometer training. Obesity Reviews 341, 2006.
3. Treuth, M.S., et al. Effects of exercise intensity on 24-h energy expenditure and substrate oxidation. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 28(9):1,138-1,143, 1996.
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