The Easiest Exercise With the Most Benefits
5 Reasons Hardcore Lifters Should Do It
by Dr John Rusin | 11/24/16
Walking. It can improve recovery, performance, and body composition, yet many lifters avoid it because it’s not “hardcore” enough. Too bad for them. Here’s a walking plan that every lifter should add to his or her weekly program.
First, Know Your Heart Rate
Schedule a 25-60 minute walk 3-5 times a week. Plan it as intentionally as your bench day. Try to keep your heart rate in a low intensity zone, anywhere from 100-120 beats per minute. Don’t worry about using a heart rate monitor, just do this:
- Take your pulse at your wrist and count the beats for 6 seconds.
- Take the number of beats, multiply it by 10 and there you go, you have a relative heart rate.
Keep it constant for the entire duration of the walk. Try inclining a treadmill 3-10% to achieve that heart rate if needed. And don’t hold on to the rails.
5 Reasons to Program Walks
Here are five reasons why walking complements your work day, your training, and your physique goals.
1 – Fat Loss
There’s been a lot of talk about the “fat-burning zone” over the last decade, but anytime you can maximize caloric output while minimizing orthopedic, systemic, and mental stress, that’s going to be a sustainable winner for fat loss.
Think of stress as an investment. You have an ideal allotment of it that you can invest in the physical and aesthetic changes you want. Your goal should be to invest most of that into meaningful training, not haphazard hyper-intense cardio and repeat death-runs on the football field.
Sure, sprinkling in high intensity training is a great way to maximize performance and hormonal response. But it ought to be used judiciously. Consider the slower, more sustainable low-intensity movement as a moneymaker for fat loss. There’s not a lot of stress you have to invest in it to get a lot out.
One of the most influential bodybuilders of our time, Dorian Yates used walking as a secondary cardio in the preparation for many of his Mr. Olympia titles. He was, and still is, jacked and conditioned to the brink of physical perfection. And he used long duration walking to spark fat loss.
2 – Recovery & Regeneration
Since walking is low intensity and low impact, it can speed up recovery while mitigating stress in the joints and central nervous system.
During the active coordinated gait cycle, musculature of the legs, arms, and core become engaged in a reciprocal pattern in an on-and-off nature. This pattern taps into the oblique slings of the body made up of the glutes, core, lats, and pecs, in conjunction with agonist/antagonist contractions of the extremities in order to move the body forward smoothly.
These synergistic muscle actions place pressure through the lymphatic and venous systems in order to push excess fluid that’s accumulated through local stress back into central circulation. From there, excess fluid will be excreted centrally. Managing local and systemic inflammation is the name of the game in recovery, and walking is the simplest way to do it.
3 – Building An Aerobic Base
Most lifters hate long duration cardio. When left with a choice of moving iron or riding the exercise bike, you can understand why many feel this way.
But sometimes we just have to do the stuff we don’t want to do. The key here is making sure that we place a strong emphasis on big ticket items like strength training and conditioning while getting in the bare minimum cardiovascular work we need to develop a good base function.
Adding walking to your day will develop that base, help you recover quicker between working sets in the gym, and may even improve some of those “minor” vitals (blood pressure, resting heart rate and respiratory rate) associated with your lifespan.
4 – Pain Alleviation
Walking can actually be a powerful pain reliever. It can activate key stabilizers of the spine, improve functionality within the prime movers of the body, and trigger recovery and blood flow to tissues that need activity, especially if you’re broken down and hurt.
Chronic lower back pain is common. And people have been looking for ways to ease their pain without much success over the past twenty years. I’d venture to say that we’re now collectively in a lower back pain epidemic.
The key muscular players in chronic lower back pain are the quadratus lumborum and the norotious psoas (muscles located on the back and front sides of the spine). These are deep stabilizers responsible for integrating the lumbar spine with the pelvis and hip complex. These two synergistic muscles are prime stabilizers, and really act as somatosensory organs as well as mechanical movers and stabilizers.
As lower back pain is initiated for whatever reason, the deep stabilizers are usually thrown into a heightened state, either becoming functionally tight or not activating to the point of smooth and sequenced function.
Through research and real-world study with athletes, walking has been shown to be a functional remedy for these two muscle groups. During the gait cycle, the psoas and QL from opposite sides of the body interact and function together in order for you to walk normally. Your body will find a way to coordinate this movement, keep you upright, and moving.
Improving your gait, finding optimal heel strikes, foot patterns, and keying in on the quality is the way we get you to tap into the vast benefits that walking provides for getting rid of that nagging lower back pain.
5 – Cognitive Function & Performance
One advantage of walking is cognitive enhancement and wellness. Increased blood flow isn’t just siphoned to the active musculature involved in the movement, it’s also shuttled to the brain. Increased cerebral blood flow also cuts the risk of vascular and degenerative diseases, but it also boosts creativity and the mental “flow” state. Some of the most innovative minds the world has ever known, such as Einstein, Da Vinci, and a host of influential thinkers, went for walks.
You may be thinking that the reason you lift is to gain mental clarity and refreshment, but who couldn’t use more of this? Walking is the key to tapping into your mental muscle while sparing your body the stress of overtraining.
Even short bouts of 10-15 minutes at a time daily can ignite creative juices and stimulate deep thought processes throughout the day. And there’s also the added benefit of not sitting for eight hours, letting your posture melt into your chair, then trying to go perform at a high level later on.
- Published in Health
Tip: Cardio Doesn’t Work
Let’s help put Jillian Michaels and others of her ilk out of work by pointing out a painful truth about cardio.
by TC Luoma | 11/09/19
Burn Twice as Much Fat?
News of a recent study popped up on a lot of my news apps and each of them featured some variation of the following headline:
“Men exercising before breakfast burn twice the fat and have ‘profound changes’ on health, says study.”
This piqued my interest because, like most people, I’m a sucker for anything that promises twice of something, be it twice as much money, twice as much whoopie, twice as many Arby’s Big Beef and Cheddar sandwiches, or in this case, twice as much fat burning.
Besides, the study seemed to confirm what many in the fitness biz still believe, that pre-breakfast cardio burns a lot more fat than cardio done some other time, but as I read on, my hope turned to ashes.
Oh, the obese men in the study who exercised before their cornflakes and toast breakfast (no lie) actually did burn twice as much fat as those who exercised after, but “the pre-breakfast exercise routine did not translate into more weight loss.”
Hel-lo? It didn’t translate into more weight loss? Isn’t that the whole point? Apparently, this double amount of fat burning, while it apparently happened, could seemingly be measured only by a yet-to-be-invented, incredibly sensitive bathroom scale, one capable of weighing zeptograms, which are a billion, trillion times lighter than a gram.
Congratulations fat bastards in the study, your fasted cardio resulted in the loss of several zeptograms!
Sheesh.
Anyhow, back to square one. Fasted cardio doesn’t work. But let’s take it a step further. As far as fat loss in general, cardio is itself a hugely inefficient and dumb fat-loss method, regardless of what ex-gulag commandant Jillian Michaels says. You’d be far better off taking a different approach.
A Barge Full of Naked Ladies
Let’s say one day you get all inspired to find out whether you actually have abs underneath all that flab or if they’re just apocryphal, like the Yeti or the final book in the Game of Thrones series.
Heroically, you decide to add another 20 minutes of treadmill work onto the end of your weight workouts. You’re in pretty good cardiovascular shape, so you run at a pace of 6 miles per hour. And, because you’re so determined, you do this six days a week.
Assuming you didn’t miss a day, didn’t eat any additional calories during that period, and were able to fight off the increased hunger from doing all that additional work, you’d supposedly burn approximately 5,500 calories in a month’s time (229 calories burned in 20 minutes multiplied by 24 days).
Using the traditional “3500 calories equals a pound of fat” rule, you’d have lost a little over a pound and half of fat. If you continued on the same route for six months, you’d presumably lose about 9.5 pounds of body fat.
Not bad! Unfortunately, it doesn’t work quite that way.
The “3500 calories equals a lost pound of fat” rule only applies for the first few weeks of a diet or weight-loss plan. A mathematician by the name of Kevin Hall, PhD., figured out that over the course of a year, people only lose about half of what’s predicted using the outdated 3500 calorie rule.
In effect, the real number of calories you need to lose to rid yourself of a pound of fat is about 7,000. That’s because the old 3500-calorie rule fails to take into consideration that the body pivots and adapts in a number of ways to minimize or even erase the effects of reduced caloric intake. It also doesn’t account for gender, or the fact that the metabolic rate drops as body weight decreases.
Therefore, at the end of those six months of running to nowhere, you’d likely have lost closer to 5.5 pounds instead of the 10 or so predicted by the old 3500-calorie rule.
My Point is This…
Using cardio as a pathway to abs or hunkiness in general is a lousy, inefficient way to do it. Granted, cardio can burn a lot of calories, but it would require doing crap like you see in the CrossFit Games, or swimming across the English Channel while towing a barge full of naked ladies cheering you on, and both on a daily or at least regular basis.
If you have the drive to actually pull any of that off – while not losing a substantial amount of muscle along the way – you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.
I know that accepting this inconvenient truth could theoretically put thousands of inept personal trainers out of work, but it’s better to face reality. The only legitimate, sustainable way to lose substantial amounts of body fat is through plain old calorie restriction.
Simpler and More Effective
Consider this: If, instead of doing 20 minutes of hard cardio, you decided to have just one tablespoon of olive oil on your vegetables instead of the three you normally dump on them, you’d have avoided close to 240 calories, which is more than what you’d burn on the treadmill in 20 minutes.
If you substituted the cup of raisins you throw in your morning oatmeal with a cup of raspberries, you’d have saved yourself from over 400 calories, which would take over 40 minutes of running to burn.
Maybe you have a couple of fancy IPA beers after dinner. Calorically, they’re the equivalent of a Big Mac. If you just swapped them out for a single, ordinary, mass-produced TV commercial beer, you’d again have accomplished the same thing as doing 20 minutes of hard cardio on the treadmill.
The aforementioned examples of simplistic substitutions obviously isn’t meant to be a very encompassing list, but just an attempt to maybe get you to agree that the amount of calories lost or saved by simple dietary manipulations is a lot more effective than doing cardio.
But if making substitutions every day requires too much thought, do the Velocity Diet for month, or just go “zero” or low carb for a few days or weeks (not that I think there’s any special magic in avoiding carbs; it’s just an easy way to cut out calories); anything except doing the treadmill every day or flailing around like a damn fool with the battling ropes or NordicTrack St. Vitus’ dance elliptical emulator.
Cardio Mea Culpa
I’m gonna ‘fess up. I do cardio. Regularly. But I do it for my ticker and to build work capacity, not to lose fat. I get lean by 1), trying to build muscle so that my metabolism increases and my body burns more calories just by existing, and 2) by saying no thanks to seconds at dinner.
Cardio can help, of course, as can fat-burning supplements or supplements that increase nutrient partitioning or insulin sensitivity, but simple calorie restriction has to be part of that.
Source
- R M Edinburgh, H E Bradley, N-F Abdullah, S L Robinson, O J Chrzanowski-Smith, J -P Walhin, S Joanisse, K N Manolopoulos, A Philp, A Hengist, A Chabowski, F M Brodsky, F Koumanov, J A Betts, D Thompson, G A Wallis, J T Gonzalez. “Lipid metabolism links nutrient-exercise timing to insulin sensitivity in men classified as overweight or obese.” The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, 2019; DOI: 10.1210/clinem/dgz104.
- Published in Health
Tip: 4 Rules to Make Any Eating Strategy Work
Here’s why all of us need to be a little more open-minded when it comes to eating for muscle gains and performance.
by John Berardi, PhD | 12/12/19
Are You Diet Fluid?
I’m a “dietary agnostic.” Or, if I were to use more current social parlance, you could call it “diet fluid.” In other words, I don’t believe any one type of eating is inherently better – from a health perspective – than another.
Further, as a student of human physiology and biochemistry, I know that our bodies are wonderfully plastic. Give the body hard strength training and our muscles, connective tissues, and bones adapt. Give the body meditation and mindfulness practices and our brains adapt.
Similarly, people can quickly adapt to high fat or high carb, all meat or no meat, as long as whatever style they choose is executed intelligently.
I’ve also spent 30 years as a coach. In coaching, you have to put your own biases aside. I call this “client-centered coaching” and it focuses on questions like: Who is my client? What do they want? How can I help them get it? This instead of foisting “my way” onto them.
So, if a client wants to go carnivore… great! But let’s make sure they do it right to avoid the inherent problems associated with cutting out all plant-based foods (i.e. certain nutrient deficiencies, lack of fiber, eating too few calories, struggling in the gym, etc).
If they want to keto… cool! Just let’s make sure they do it better than the average person who does keto, so they avoid the inherent problems associated with cutting out carbs (similar to the problems above).
If they want to vegan… awesome too! But it’s important to make sure they do it thoughtfully to avoid the problems with eating only plant-based foods (different nutrient deficiencies, risk of low protein intake, risk of too few calories, etc).
Heck, even a “balanced, mixed diet” comes with its own set of concerns that have to be navigated and strategized around. As I always say to clients, it doesn’t matter how you want to eat, I can help you do it better, in a healthy way, that increases your probability of reaching your goals.
So, when it comes to muscle building and performance, any of these diets can work as long as you:
1. Train appropriately for your goals.
Easier said than done since there’s a lot of misinformation out there about how to train for your goals. Plus it’s difficult to force your body to adapt to a training stimulus after the newbie gains are gone. This takes a mix of correctly-designed programs, hard training, and appropriate recovery.
2. Eat enough food.
No matter what your macro split is, or what diet du jour you’ve decided to follow, you need enough calories to support hard training and muscle growth. When you eliminate entire food groups it’s an added challenge to get all the calories you need. So, if you’ve decided to eliminate animal foods (or plant foods, or carbs, or whatever) you have to be more diligent about making sure you’re eating enough of everything else.
3. Eat enough protein.
If you train hard, with adaptation in mind, there’s no getting around the fact that you have to get enough dietary protein.
Again, eliminating animal foods makes this more challenging, but not impossible. As with calories, you just have to be more diligent. You might even need to write things down and track them over time to ensure you’re not fooling yourself.
4. Adjust your training based on your diet.
In some cases, if you’ve decided to follow a specific diet that restricts certain nutrients – or that requires you to fast for extended periods – you may have to adjust your training to accommodate this. This could mean lowering volume and/or intensity because of your dietary selection. Or, in some cases, increasing it.
- Published in Health