New Research: Aerobic Exercise May Make You A Fat STORING Machine

New research suggests that doing exercise in your “fat burning zone” will actually reduce the amount of fat that your body burns for the rest of that day.  A new study in the Journal of Applied Physiology had participants do 1 hour of cycling at 55% of their aerobic capacity only to find that “24 h fat balance was significantly more positive on [the exercise day] compared to [the non-exercise day].”

Local fitness expert Josef Brandenburg says, “this is what I’ve been telling my clients for years – aerobic exercise makes you fatter.”  Brandenburg hypothesizes that the body responds to exercise based on the type of fuel it uses.

In high intensity exercise like sprinting and weight lifting the primary fuel is carbohydrate.  Your body responds to carb-dependent exercise by making it easier for your body to replace those carbs (increasing your insulin sensitivity), and increasing your capacity to store carbohydrates (called glycogen).

With low-intensity, aerobic exercise – like that done in the study and during most people’s workouts – the primary fuel is fat.  Brandenburg thinks that burning fat as the primary fuel during exercise is the signal to your body to become better at storing fat, hence the results of the study.

He says your body responds by doing the opposite.  At the end of a resistance workout you are smaller and weaker than when you started it, but your body responds by doing the opposite – building you up in preparation for the next time it is stressed.

“Research in the International Journal of Sports Nutrition shows that resistance training shifts your body to burn more fat for the 24 hours after your workout unlike with aerobics.  I think that since body-fat is fundamentally regulated by the hormone insulin, the intense, carb-dependent exercise like resistance training makes you burn fat all day long because it reduces your insulin levels and improves your carbohydrate metabolism,” says Brandenburg.

To check out the study for yourself, click here.

For free info about what to do with this click here

Josef Brandenburg is 2010, Washington, DC  Personal Trainer of the Year Nominee for both Personal Fitness Professional Magazine and The Washington, DC Fitness Association, and author of “The Body You Want”. He shows normal people with hectic lives and average genetics how to create the bodies they want in the time they actually have. To find out more about the 7-Day Free Trial click here. You can also pick up a FREE copy of his brand new CD – “Why Eat Less and Exercise More is The Worst Advice Ever” here..

Getting buzzed while getting buff: How to drink without ruining your progress

Over the past few years I have noticed something profound – most people like to drink.  (Well, it is profound to me since I think alcohol tastes like cat pee.  I was very young when I got my first cat.)  Even when people have hired me to help them drop a ton of body fat quickly they still really want to be able to drink.

Since I pride myself on being able to help normal people (vs. bodybuilders) get results in the real world I decided to figure this one out.  (By figure it out, I mean steal ideas from my clients.)

After observing client behavior and measuring client results over the past few years I’ve come up with these 3 simple rules that make everyone happy:

#1.  Beer makes you fat: Beer and fruity drinks like margaritas and daiquiris kill all progress, and can often reverse a week of hard work in the gym and kitchen.  The short explanation is that your body fat is fundamentally regulated by the hormone insulin.  And your insulin levels are fundamentally regulated by the quantity and quality of carbs in your diet.

In fruity drinks and beer the quantity is huge and the quality is horrible.  Drinking beer seems to be like drinking bread – it can actually help you gain fat while losing muscle.  The worst of both worlds.

Solution:  read tip #2, switch to light beer or something like Michelob Ultra, or use a sugar-free mixer like Crystal Light, seltzer or diet soda.

#2.  Hard liquor and wine are fine: Within reason (around 6 drinks per week) hard liquor and wine don’t seem to slow people down very much at all.  It seems like it’s the carbs in the drinks (tip #1), not the alcohol itself that is the big villain.

#3.  Get buzzed, not hammered: This should be common sense right?  If you get really drunk on a regular basis your progress will suffer if not disappear.  This is always worse if done with beer or fruity drinks.

Josef Brandenburg is Washington, DC’s top personal trainer for busy people. He shows normal people with hectic lives and average genetics how to create the bodies they want in the time they actually have. To find out more about the 7-Day Free Trial click here. You can also pick up a copy of his brand new CD – “Why Eat Less and Exercise More is The Worst Advice Ever” here.

Why Does Interval Training Really Work?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you should be pretty well aware that aerobic exercise is next to worthless for fat-loss.  You can put a woman on an 18month marathon training program and she won’t lose a pound! (1)  (If that sounds weird to you, then please read my piece from last week as the Washington, DC Weight Loss Examiner.)

While the most important part of a fat-loss exercise program is the metabolic resistance training, there isn’t a very good consensus on WHY metabolic resistance training and interval training work so well for fat-loss.

I used to think that it was because of this thing called EPOC – excess postexercise oxygen consumption, or the metabolic boost (elevation) that you get after intense exercise.  But, it turns out that EPOC probably isn’t big enough to account for the amount of fat-loss, and fat-loss doesn’t really work that way (calories in vs. calories out).

I have a new theory of why it works that I am reprinting here from my Monday post as the DC Weight Loss Examiner:

Interval training only consumes your stored carbs for fuel.  Body-fat is fundamentally regulated by the hormone insulin.  More insulin = more body fat and vice versa.  When you deplete your muscles carbohydrate stores (glycogen) you improve your sensitivity to insulin.  The more sensitive you are to insulin the less insulin you need to make to handle the same amount of food and/or carbohydrates.  The increased sensitivity to insulin is temporary, but if you do high intensity exercise like interval and resistance training you will appear to be someone with better insulin sensitivity (have less body-fat). (2-5)

That is the primary way that I think interval training creates superior fat-loss.

The secondary way is that intense exercise releases stuff called catecholamines.  These are chemicals like epinephrine and norepinephrine that stimulate the release of fat from your fat cells to be burned off.  The calories consumed by the workout are probably irrelevant.

I could be totally wrong, but that doesn’t matter.  it still works far better, in far less time and is more fun.

For more free info on how to do intervals click here.

Josef Brandenburg is Washington, DC’s top personal trainer for busy people. He shows normal people with hectic lives and average genetics how to create the bodies they want in the time they actually have. To find out more about the 7-Day Free Trial click here. You can also pick up a copy of his brand new CD – “Why Eat Less and Exercise More is The Worst Advice Ever” here.

References:

1. Janssen, G. M., et al.  Food intake and body composition in novice athletes during a training period to run a marathon. International journal of sports medicine, May 1989; 10(1 suppl.):s17-21
2. Joslin. Elliot. Et al. Joslin’s Diabetes Mellitus. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. 13th edition, 1994
3. Nussey, Stephen. et al. Endocrinology: An Integrated Approach. Informa HealthCare, 1st edition, 2001
4. Kronenberg MD, Henry M. et al. Williams Textbook of Endocrinology. Saunders. 11th edition, 2008
5. Lehninger, Albert. Et al. Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry. W. H. Freeman. 5th edition. 2008