One of my ForestFit clients was asking me the other day why even though she had trained for a marathon, she had not lost any weight, or more importantly not seen any significant change in shape. This throws up a whole discussion on the effectiveness of aerobic type workouts, and what your overall goal is. Once again I’ll try not to bore you with the science of this but hope to clarify what happens to the body when you are training for an endurance event like a marathon.
Your body is more clever than you, it does everything in its power to survive despite its owners best efforts :o)
If you starve yourself, your body does everything to economize, holding on to all energy, and breaking down all substances that use fuel too much.
When you run a little your body burns fuel of which you have a limited amount.
If you run for a long time your body will burn all its immediately available fuel as well as some of the stuff that is reserve.
If you keep eating into your reserves your body will start to go into that economy mode as if you where starving yourself, breaking down substance that uses fuel(muscle), and start trying to store more of the fuel that goes into your reserves(fat).
Prolonged training of this nature over a period of 6 months, whilst great for burning calories whilst doing the training, causes massive damage to your metabolism, breaking down all that muscle, thats why elite marathon runners are all skin and bones and really low levels of muscle mass.
As a side thought, it is very common to see retired elite marathon runners, cyclists etc pile on huge amounts body fat when they stop their doing the huge number of kilometers training each week.
For the ordinary guy and gal on the street training for a marathon may be a great goal, and something that I am happy that people do. BUT, and this is a BIG BUT! Unless you are training to go and do the Olympic marathon, I would certainly advise you to do other styles of training that promote fat loss and boost your metabolism, otherwise you will be disappointed.
Last Friday, i did a talk with a fantastic group of people, (thanks to Tower Training for the invite!)
One of the questions/comments from the group related to how inefficient the human body is. You see the body utilises around 60% of the fuel(food) we take in to keep it functioning, and that is before we start moving and exercising!
60% is an awful lot of the energy we consume, when we are doing NOTHING!
As a fitness professional, the aim for me is create bodies that are even more INefficient! I want to make your body work harder and consume more energy to keep itself functioning on a day to day basis, whilst you are doing NOTHING.
Going back to the car analogy from last week, if you had a Renault Espace and ferrari sitting with the engines running but not moving, the ferrari would consume more fuel… Because it is a ferrari it has a sleek, sexy body, however the Renault Espace is fat and frumpy.
If you create a bigger engine for your body, you will develop a sleeker, sexier body, as you will strip away the fat. This bigger engine I am talking about is more muscle in the body which will in turn burn more calories to survive even when you are sat doing nothing! Creating larger muscle is easy, just using your muscles with short bouts of efforts to fatigue them will create larger muscle fibers.
This means resistance workouts, utilising your body weight and at times external weights too.
If you are not doing these exercises already, add them in from today and start creating a ferrari body and not a Renault Espace one!
Leg and Butt Exercise Video
20.03.08Another new video this week, this time a super exercise that really utilises the potential metabolism boosting muscles in your butt and legs.
This is not a beginner exercise, your legs will burn when you do this exercise…. don’t say I didn’t warn you!
More videos to come next week…
Skinny Fat People
20.03.08Have you noticed there are lots of “skinny” fat about, those folk who look skinny but are in actual fact “fat”, sadly skinny fat people are just as likely to have problems with cardio vascular diseases as a “large” fat person.
A skinny fat person is someone who is constantly dieting, heavily restricting their calories, keeping the “weight” off, but always seems to be a little soft and quite fragile. Their BMI (body mass index) would be happy reading for a normal health professional, but a layer fat over a minimal frame and muscle structure means that they are not as healthy as the BMI figures suggest.
Unfortunately I see this quite often in teenage girls up into the mid-twenties, where they fight tooth and nail with rabbit food diets and hour upon hour of slow steady state aerobic workouts.
The problem is that their precious metabolism is completely shot, vitamin and mineral intake is extremely low, colds, flus and all sorts of nasty illnesses are ever present, and structurally they are more likely to have bone density issues and joint problems later on in life.
Psychologically this group of people are the hardest people to break through when trying to assure them a “sensible” nutritional plan where calories are NOT restricted and a program of exercise to boost the metabolism, will give them the body shape they crave with much less effort and a much improved lifestyle.
A body with a lower percentage of fat and a higher percentage of muscle tissue means your body is
- structurally more healthy
- less likely to have cardio vascular illness (type 2 diabetes, heart disease etc…)
- and looks great too!
Things a skinny fat person can start doing today:
- Eat 5-6 small but sensible meals a day with high quality proteins and unprocessed carbs and sensible less of fat content
- STOP doing aerobic style training and start a program of resistance/ body weight exercise.
- Learn to accept calories are NOT a bad thing, we should be using them to our advantage!
