Monthly Archives: September 2007

What I’ve been Telling People For 15 Years

It’s not what you put out, it’s what you put in.

Thanks Gary!

And what Taubes leaves out of this fine article is the fact that you have to subtract the amount of calories you’d burn anyway from the total burned doing exercise simply doing nothing.

EXAMPLE:

1 hour treadmill run = ~300 calories burned.

1 hour sitting on rump = ~100 calories burned.

300-100 = 200 additional calories burned (mainly from sugar not stored body fat).

3,500 calories in a pound of fat.

3,500 -:- 200 = 17.5 days it would take you exercising to lose one pound of fat.

200 calories is a half of a banana and a small glass of skim milk.

Oh – and as you get more fit the amount of calories burned for that same hour goes down as heart rate doesn’t go up as much and the entire hour is just easier. Easier efforts burn less calories than harder efforts for the same time frame.

So now you have to run longer or faster or both.

Where is that orthopedic doctor’s phone number?

Soccer beats jogging

In this recent study previously untrained men who engaged in rigorous soccer for an hour a day, 3X per week lost significantly more fat than joggers over a 12 week period.

No big surprise, right? Soccer is obviously a lot more intense than plodding along like a – jogger.

What was more interesting is that the soccer players gained 4.5 pounds of muscle. Pretty impressive. But what about the joggers? No statistical gains in muscle mass.

What this indicates is not that playing soccer builds muscle – it indicates that intense muscular contractions build muscle – and soccer has plenty of that in the short burst sprints and powerful kicks.

But if you want to build muscle and burn fat beware of trying to do so by playing a sport like soccer that can rupture your Achilles tendon, snap your cruciate ligaments, compress your spine, strain your hamstrings, etc.

Notice that strength training is not mentioned.

There is a better way…

Stupidity beyond Stupidity

OK sports fans, you’re friendly neighborhood fitness giant IDEA supports this sort of stupidity:

Train Fast
With the exception of power-lifting, few sports are performed slowly. While many individuals would argue that performing movements quickly in the weight room may be dangerous, speed is not the primary factor that would determine an injury; it is control. Athletes do not get hurt because they are going too fast; they get hurt because they are going fast and are out of control. If clients want to be fast, you must train them fast.

Reading this made me laugh for like 10 minutes. And then it made me really, really, MAD.

First of all, power lifting is slow because the weights are so heavy they can’t be moved fast. These athletes commonly attempt one repetition maximums to see how strong they are in three different exercises, the bench press, the squat and the dead-lift.

Training fast in the weight room will not make you fast on the playing field unless training fast in the weight room makes you stronger (which it will sort of) and doesn’t injure you (which it will not sort of).

Deep down inside I think anyone who reads this article knows it’s just plain stupid.

If you want to be fast at a sport or activity you need SKILL and a high level of skill at that sport or activity and that takes practice. After you have developed great skill, you need great (or greater) muscular strength.

You can’t make your 4-cylinder car faster by driving it fast. No. You have to take out the engine and replace it with a beefier one.

But we can’t take our muscles and nerves out of our bodies and replace them with better ones. We can, however, make them better, or stronger by strength training. And as long as you are training for improvements in overall strength, you will, little by little become faster.

Training fast to be fast is like eating fast to digest fast. Two completely different things. Doesn’t work like this. In fact, training fast forces you to use very light weights which do little do make you stronger.

If you want to be a fastER runner, if you want to have a fastER tennis serve, if you want to have a swiftER golf swing do this:

1.Practice the sport as perfectly as possible by hiring a coach who knows what they are talking about.

2. Strength train in a slow and controlled manner, steadily but gradually increasing the resistance over time.

That’s it!