Exercise and Weight/Fat Loss Pt 1&2 by Lyle Mc Donald
Method_One
Posts: 58 Member
Here's another article from Lyle McDonald. He has a great site (www.bodyrecomposition.com) and it's defiantly worth spending some time checking it out.
The article is interesting for a few reasons:
1) There can be an overstated impact of cardio work on weight loss. It's often used as a free pass to over consume, a problem which is compounded by the overestimation of intensity and total calories burned.
2) There is typically IMO too much value placed on cardio work and little if any value placed on resistance training. At the least there should be a balance and at best the focus should be on structured and enjoyable resistance training with an eye to energetic and varied cardio sessions. Note: you should not be killing yourself every workout or dreading the gym. If you are fix it up and make it "fun"...
Now I am a firm believer that, assuming the weight carried does not impact your health or limit your quality of life, a stronger fitter person with a little extra weight is superior to a fat out of shape person that happens to be 10lbs less fat than before. So weight and cardio training should be a major contributor to your health and wellness plan (also including diet, stress reduction, rest, etc...) but not the main driver of your weight loss, that's the job for your diet.
With that said if we're arguing thermodynamics calories consumed for exercise will obviously impact the bottom energy balance line. Just like with errors in self reporting of diets the same is true with exercise so a little underestimation of time and intensity maybe needed.
"Exercise and Weight/Fat Loss: Part 1
I think it was last year some time that Time magazine ran an article to the effect of “Exercise will make you fit but it won’t make you thin.” I remember someone asking me about this (it might have been my mom) and I wasn’t really sure what the issue was; I had written back in my first book The Ketogenic Diet about some of the realities of exercise and fat loss. Most of my other books have at least dealt with the issue to some degree.
I suppose the issue isn’t really one of the realities of exercise and fat/weight loss but rather how the message was misinterpreted. Many have held up exercise as some sort of panacea for all things, health, fitness and of course what everyone is really interested in: losing weight/fat and I suspect the message got a bit garbled as it so often does: people figured that they could do a bit of easy exercise and the pounds would just melt right off.
The realities, unfortunately, are often quite a bit different and in this series of articles (which I’ll hopefully keep to a mere two parts), I want to look at the possible ways that exercise might impact on one’s overall body recomposition goals. You’ll notice that I used the word ways plural in that sentence; while most focus on the direct role of exercise on fat loss (via direct calorie and/or fat burning) it turns out that there are more ways than just that for exercise to impact on things.
For the most part, I’m going to sort of cluster all exercise in one big grouping for the sake of simplicity. Clearly resistance training and aerobic training aren’t the same and have differential effects; when needed I’ll make distinctions between them. It’s important to realize that most research on exercise and fat loss have used obese individuals (researchers by and large not being interested in lean folks trying to get leaner) and that has potentially other impacts on a lot of this. Again, as needed, I’ll make note of this.
Today, since it will take the most verbiage, I’m only going to look at the primary way that exercise can (or can not) impact on body recomposition goals and that is in terms of its impact on total weight loss; that is the quantity of weight lost. I’ll note ahead of time that I am going to confusingly jump back and forth between fat and weight although they are not the same thing. This will make more sense in Part 2 when I attempt to cover all of the other ways that exercise may potentially impact on things."
Pt1
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/exercise-and-weightfat-loss-part-1.html
Pt2
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/exercise-and-weightfat-loss-part-2.html
The article is interesting for a few reasons:
1) There can be an overstated impact of cardio work on weight loss. It's often used as a free pass to over consume, a problem which is compounded by the overestimation of intensity and total calories burned.
2) There is typically IMO too much value placed on cardio work and little if any value placed on resistance training. At the least there should be a balance and at best the focus should be on structured and enjoyable resistance training with an eye to energetic and varied cardio sessions. Note: you should not be killing yourself every workout or dreading the gym. If you are fix it up and make it "fun"...
Now I am a firm believer that, assuming the weight carried does not impact your health or limit your quality of life, a stronger fitter person with a little extra weight is superior to a fat out of shape person that happens to be 10lbs less fat than before. So weight and cardio training should be a major contributor to your health and wellness plan (also including diet, stress reduction, rest, etc...) but not the main driver of your weight loss, that's the job for your diet.
With that said if we're arguing thermodynamics calories consumed for exercise will obviously impact the bottom energy balance line. Just like with errors in self reporting of diets the same is true with exercise so a little underestimation of time and intensity maybe needed.
"Exercise and Weight/Fat Loss: Part 1
I think it was last year some time that Time magazine ran an article to the effect of “Exercise will make you fit but it won’t make you thin.” I remember someone asking me about this (it might have been my mom) and I wasn’t really sure what the issue was; I had written back in my first book The Ketogenic Diet about some of the realities of exercise and fat loss. Most of my other books have at least dealt with the issue to some degree.
I suppose the issue isn’t really one of the realities of exercise and fat/weight loss but rather how the message was misinterpreted. Many have held up exercise as some sort of panacea for all things, health, fitness and of course what everyone is really interested in: losing weight/fat and I suspect the message got a bit garbled as it so often does: people figured that they could do a bit of easy exercise and the pounds would just melt right off.
The realities, unfortunately, are often quite a bit different and in this series of articles (which I’ll hopefully keep to a mere two parts), I want to look at the possible ways that exercise might impact on one’s overall body recomposition goals. You’ll notice that I used the word ways plural in that sentence; while most focus on the direct role of exercise on fat loss (via direct calorie and/or fat burning) it turns out that there are more ways than just that for exercise to impact on things.
For the most part, I’m going to sort of cluster all exercise in one big grouping for the sake of simplicity. Clearly resistance training and aerobic training aren’t the same and have differential effects; when needed I’ll make distinctions between them. It’s important to realize that most research on exercise and fat loss have used obese individuals (researchers by and large not being interested in lean folks trying to get leaner) and that has potentially other impacts on a lot of this. Again, as needed, I’ll make note of this.
Today, since it will take the most verbiage, I’m only going to look at the primary way that exercise can (or can not) impact on body recomposition goals and that is in terms of its impact on total weight loss; that is the quantity of weight lost. I’ll note ahead of time that I am going to confusingly jump back and forth between fat and weight although they are not the same thing. This will make more sense in Part 2 when I attempt to cover all of the other ways that exercise may potentially impact on things."
Pt1
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/exercise-and-weightfat-loss-part-1.html
Pt2
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/exercise-and-weightfat-loss-part-2.html
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