Overcoming plateau

AnnPT77

imfornd wrote: »

your body becomes "good" at doing things - eventually if you do something long enough your CNS adapts and becomes very efficient at the one thing - in your case it sounds like you are doing similar stuff - your workouts don't deviate much - FIRST eat more - 6 days week of training requires far more nutrition than you are getting - think of a calorie like a car - it delivers nutrition - you cut the calorie you are also cutting the nutrition - eat more perhaps 1800/day. P-140g/day C-140g/day F-80g/day ... try incorporating HIIT twice a week - Change your workouts around aggressively and make you CNS learn to re adapt - it takes a lot of calories doing something you body is not good at

CNS is not what burns material amounts of calories during exercise. Movement of muscle and skeleton and connective tissues is what burns material amounts of calories. Efficiency changes are small factors, at most.

I've done the same workouts obese, fat, and thin. Other than needing to account for a lighter body burning fewer calories, those same workouts keep burning calories just the way they have for 15+ years now, because the non-bodyweight factors that affect calorie burn haven't significantly changed: Modality, duration, intensity, frequency, technical skill (practical efficiency).

Changing up workouts has a benefit in this kind of scenario: It distracts and entertains a person until the scale gets moving again, to the extent that they're actually in a calorie deficit. Other than that, it's a red herring, unless the work (not CNS factors) burn more calories.

AnnPT77

imfornd wrote: »

"CNS is not what burns material amounts of calories during exercise" yes and no - your CNS recruits muscle fiber - the more efficient your CNS becomes the less muscle fiber it needs to recruit to do the same effort. You CNS fires the muscle fiber with better efficiency thus decreasing the need to extra muscle fibers to be recruited lowering over all newton expenditures

For instance you increase mitochondrial density with high rep high volume workout but lower it with high weight low rep workouts - by alternating you workouts your CNS is forced to recruit all 3 types of muscle fibers - you increase calorie burn when the muscle being recruit has not been adapted to the workout being performed - the more you perform that work the less calories need to do the lift in question

If fewer muscle fibers recruited, each recruited fiber is doing more work, to achieve consistent output.

I don't dispute fitness benefits of sensibly varied workout (even though that's not mostly what I do myself ). Fitness adaptations make things feel easier, but don't generally trigger reduced calorie burn. I grant that the adaptation process for strength training - which seems to be your focus of expertise - involves different adaptations than cardio (though cardio is rarely "pure").

OP is doing Beachbody on Demand workouts. While those remain suitably challenging, they will cause some strength adaptations. To the extent that the high rep resistance work burns calories, those calories are mostly from the CV aspect of the exercise, and obviously that for more nearly pure cardio segments. In that type of exercise, calorie burn at the same intensity, duration, frequency, technical skill (this a minor factor for most modalities, related to wasted effort or its lack), and body weight.

AnnPT77

imfornd wrote: »

roughly 2 recruited muscles fibers running at 60% need more energy output that 1 muscle fiber running at 100. you are actually stronger with 1 fiber but lifting more efficiently thus not needing the ATP required for 2

It's still a minor component of calories, especially with the exercise modality in question.

We're never going to convince one another, so I'll leave to other readers to pick their theory, after this post on the subject.

heybales

That research though isn't about changing the modality to keep yourself burning at a higher level, that's about the effect of doing anything over a certain amount causes the body to compensate with burning less at other times, making the net result not as high as one may think.
And that's not even about efficiency of body so much as they say in the article - doing some BMR level functions slower.

So if OP changed workouts but kept relative exercise above a certain level - still not going to burn more.

Now, to the points several have mentioned regarding cardio items - you may start out slightly less efficient in your movement of a new activity, but that doesn't last long, nor is it that much of a difference anyway.

Your typical aerobics class with perhaps some strange movements to the beat of the music may see the best efficiency improvement and lower calorie burn since the beat of the music likely doesn't change.
Throw in losing weight to the equation and it can start really burning less than when someone started.

The strength training examples you provided don't apply to OP's workouts.
Besides, if CNS getting better - add more weight.