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Hello again, I am back with Part Two on the best methods for losing body fat.  If you missed my first installment, you can read it on the Train Boston website in the Blog section.  Now let’s get started.

The storage of fat is the body’s natural response to excessive calories.  In order to lose what we have gained, we must create a deficit where we use more calories than we consume.  Aerobics have always been the default activity for this because it allows you to workout for long periods of time, and thus imposes a greater caloric cost.  Sixty minutes of jogging burns about four times more calories then ten minutes of sprinting.

So why doesn’t it work?

The answer is your metabolism, known more precisely as your Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR). Your RMR is the rate at which your body uses calories to sustain its daily functions, and accounts by far, for the majority of calories expended during the day.  It’s the caloric price tag for keeping you, being you.  The two factors that impact your RMR the most are your body mass index (proportion of lean tissue cells to fat cells) and your physical activities.

The problem with aerobics is that it burns a lot of calories during exercise, but doesn’t do much for keeping your metabolism going once you stop.

One reason has to do with stress hormones released during aerobic exercise called glucocorticoids.  These hormones are catabolic and will prevent you from maintaining muscle tissue.  This is bad news if you’re trying to lose fat because muscle tissue requires your body to expend a lot of calories in its upkeep and therefore up-regulates your RMR.  This is why adding three pounds of muscle can help you to loose four pounds of fat.

Another reason has to do with something called Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption (EPOC).  EPOC measures increases in your RMR brought on by exercise.  The longer and higher you can keep your RMR fired up, the greater the influence you will have on total calories burned each day. Aerobics has little effect on this, and thus has no impact on the most metabolically significant portion of your life, when you are not working out.

Enough talk about what doesn’t work, let’s talk about what does.  I defer to science -

Remember the study where the people on the liquid diets where doing 30-50 minutes of aerobic exercise and lost only one additional pound?  Well, the results of a third group, which performed 30 minutes of weight training in addition to their diet, were also tracked.  The weight training group lost 35% more fat than the diet/aerobics group and 44% more than the diet only group.  Huge difference!  If I were 35% taller than I am right now I’d be seven foot five and playing for Celtics.

Another study compared the effects of aerobic training and weight training on EPOC (metabolic up-regulation).  The study found that subjects performing weight training had heightened metabolic (EPOC) levels for 36-48 hours after their workout.  That’s almost two days of increased fat burning potential while you eat, sleep, go to the mall, and just go about living.

Clearly weight training is a powerful tool for influencing fat loss, but don’t forget about interval training.  Recall the study where sprint intervals were shown to have a nine-fold increase in fat loss over long distance running.  The results of this one study were powerful enough to change how I used a treadmill forever.

These provide us with some powerful weapons in the fight against fat.  In the last installment I cover how to use these instruments in your workouts to rid your body of its extra cushioning forever.

Body fat - a subject every exercising person can relate to.  Myths and misconceptions surrounding the role of exercise in fat loss are abundant, and have led us to do some pretty silly stuff - “Biggest Loser” style last chance workouts, marathon cardio sessions, and spandex biking shorts to name a few.  All hope is not lost though.  Recently some interesting research studies have given new direction to our quest to lower body fat.

There is a lot of ground to cover, so the subject will be split into three Blog posts.  In parts one and two, why logging hundreds of miles on the treadmill or bike is the least effective tool in your fat reducing arsenal.  In part three, we put rubber to the road with workouts and tips that will kick your body into fat burning overdrive.

Let’s get started.

When I talk with people about what they do to reduce body fat, overwhelmingly I hear some variation on this;

“To lose fat I do cardio for at least 30-45 minutes per day in my target heart rate zone. I know you have to go for at least that long, so that your body will use fat for energy.”

Even I have to admit its simplicity instills confidence in its efficiency. I was comforted by its logic for the vast majority of my exercising life.

The truth is that research dating back to the 1990’s (remember them) shows that engaging in long bouts of low intensity activities such as jogging, using an elliptical machine, or riding a bike has only a marginal effect on fat loss.  The data suggests that fat burned during your workouts does not translate to fat lost off of your physique.

Unnerving, but true! It has a lot to do with the proportion of fat you able to burn during exercise, relative to the amount of fat you actually have. You could drain a lake one bucket at a time, but I wouldn’t call it efficient.

Take for example:

A recent study had groups of people start a liquid diet (to control for caloric intake variance) and had them do 30-50 minutes of aerobic exercise three times a week.  At the end of the study the diet only group lost 14.6 pounds of fat.  The diet plus aerobics group lost 15.6 pounds of fat. All that cardio amounted to only one more pound lost.  That’s a lot of extra time and effort to invest for a very small return.

Another study pitted a group of subjects performing aerobic based endurance training exercise against a group performing anaerobic interval training exercise. It turns out the endurance group was able to burn more than TWICE the calories as the interval group during their workouts.  Sound like a victory for aerobics, right?  Not so fast.

When the researchers measured the amount of subcutaneous fat each group lost, the interval group lost NINE times the amount of fat as the endurance group. That is a ridiculous stat.  If burning fat were comparable to yearly income, running and biking would earn you only $50,000, whereas sprinting and lifting would be equivalent to $450,000.

Working longer isn’t working smarter.  In the next installment we explore how science is helping us to turn the corner on the road to better results.