Over training/over eating?

JJ2944 wrote: »

Ps, what is NEAT?

& with moderate exercise and losing weight being easier, what would you suggest as in how many of each type of sessions in a week/for how long?

Thanks.

NEAT is Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. It is the calories you burn just going about your day to day doing stuff...also, fidgeting and other involuntary movements. Very often, more strenuous exercise can cause a reduction in NEAT that may offset or partially offset energy expenditure from exercise because you are fatigued.

As an example, I used to be quite heavily into endurance cycling and the training that went along with doing those kinds of races and events. On long ride training days or other more strenuous training days like hill repeats or climbing days or after riding and event, I'd be pretty well spent. Typically these things were done in the mornings and I would basically spend the rest of the day and evening doing almost nothing besides getting up off the couch to go to the bathroom because I was spent. I'm a pretty fidgety and twitchy person as well and I would notice that those kinds of involuntary movements would be pretty non-existent after those kinds of efforts. After my first century ride I ate some food at the post event tent and my wife drove me home and I passed out in the car...arrived at the house and went straight to bed around 4:30 PM and slept for 14 hours.

Contrast that with, say a Saturday morning ride for 45-60 minutes...getting home and doing some pool maintenance, mowing the lawn, and then taking the kids out for the afternoon to the zoo...coming home and maybe doing some cleaning, cooking dinner, etc and not really sitting down until later in the evening. From a purely calorie/energy expenditure perspective, it's likely that I burned just as many, if not more calories in this scenario than a hard effort training day or a 1/2 century ride (probably no comparison to the century). People tend to substantially underappreciate how many calories you burn going about a busy day and tend to over-appreciate a really strenuous workout and ignore the fatigue that follows.

In regards to more moderate exercise...for me, I didn't get into endurance stuff and that kind of heavy training load until I was in maintenance. In general, that kind of training made me insatiably hungry...I literally ate all of the food, all of the time and was still hungry. It would have been very difficult for me to maintain a consistent calorie deficit with that training load...not to mention, my performance would not have been where I wanted it. When I was actively losing weight I hit the weight room 3x per week, walked most days and went for a jog or ride maybe 2-3x per week for 30 minutes or so. My weight training sessions were really the only physically strenuous thing I put my body through and I lost weight pretty easily because it was pretty easy to maintain an efficient calorie deficit and be consistent with it.