Tag Archive: exercise

People tend to overestimate the amount of calories they burn

People tend to overestimate the amount of calories they burn. Period.

Ever been to a spin/zumba/fitness class and overheard this: “I just burned 600 calories on the elliptical and now I’m going to burn another 600 in this class!” I have. These same people in my life tend to complain about their inability to lose weight, barely break a sweat during these exercises and/or become frustrated that despite their hours at the gym nothing is budging. I was one of these girls once. I would hop on the elliptical and plug away for an hour then subtract 600 calories from my daily intake, and eat that 600 calories back.

Problem? Machines lie. Yep. I did this exercise above wearing a heart rate monitor and I clocked 21 calories. 21! That’s a far cry from 100 calories. This lies the same way that an elliptical says that the girl reading Cosmo without breaking a sweat burns the same amount of calories as the girl going HAM on the machine next to her. There has to be a conspiracy here.

These machines do not know how hard these exercises are for you. They’re also automatically set for a 150 pound female. They also can’t judge your heart rate. They can’t tell that you’re a marathon runner and you’re cross training on the elliptical, or that you’ve never so much as run a mile in your entire life. Without knowing your heart rate these machines are, at best, a guestimate.

This is a very common theme. It may not seem like a big deal to overestimate how many calories you burn going to a spin class or just running around the block, but over time it can be. Take me for example: I burn about 342 calories during my spin class, according to my HRM. I’ve heard an instructor claim, “How was that for a 600 calorie burn!” after a class. What? First of all, there is no way everyone was at the same level of fitness. Second of all, no. And I know for a fact that some people take these words as law and go home and subtract 600 calories from their intake for the day then eat it back. That’s almost 300 calories overestimating. 300 calories 3 times a week = 900 calories a week. That’s detrimental to weight loss and maintenance.

Machines, websites and people always will overestimate how many calories they burn. Invest in a heart rate monitor or pay attention to how you feel when you exercise if you’re tracking calories. If you’re not sweating during cardio, if your heart rate is not up, chances are you’re not working as hard as the machine thinks you are.

July 4, 2012 Exercise, Fat Loss, , Read more >

Why get a heart rate monitor?

Wrong!

Why get one?

If you go to the gym and use cardio machines you’ve seen the little “Calories burned” display. This display is usually auto set for a 30 year old 150 lb woman with average fitness. Meaning that me, a 22 year old 140 lb woman with above average fitness, would burn less calories than the machine says. Even putting in your weight, age and height still isn’t 100% accurate because very few people spent their time on their cardio machine with their hands attached to the heart rate calculator.

A heart rate monitor solves this. Depending on the type you get, a heart rate monitor can tell you everything from average heart rate per exercise, per interval, hourly chimes, interval timers, etc. It really depends on how fancy you want to get.

Do I need a fancy one?

Depends on your needs. For example, I’m a busy college student. I like to get the best out of my workouts. I like to do intervals where I spent 30 seconds in the upper portion of my target heart rate, and then a minute of recovery. Doing this on a treadmill is hard, because I am then sprinting with my hands glued to the machine. All I need is a monitor that tells me what my current heart rate is. Guess how much that costs? $5 on Amazon.com. This little baby even tells me my fat burn. Woohoo! Need one that you can see in the dark? How about a snazzy water proof one? All of these are less than $30.

I don’t even know what my target heart rate is.

I have a snazzy formula for that.

220 – your age = maximum heart rate

Your target heart rate is between 60 and 80% of that number. Any higher and you may be going into anaerobic threshold, which is a discussion for another day, but it doesn’t burn stored fat, so it’s not ideal for basic weight loss. Plus, AT is the culprit in those horrible lactic acid build ups that leave you immobilized for days. I don’t know about you, but I like to sit on the toilette the day after an intense work out and not feel like getting up will be death.

For me (again, a 22 year old woman) my maximum heart rate is 198. 60% of this is about 120, 80% of this is about 159. When I do low intensity long distance cardio I like to stay at about 130-140 beats per minute. If I’m trying to kick my ass, I get to 159-160 bpm and chill there. Again, according to your fitness plan depends on what you do with your target heart rate.

Long story short

For $5 a basic heart rate monitor is worth it! It takes the guess work out of walking the dog, spinning class, basic cardio, etc. It will help you to create a more ideal meal plan, and also help you gauge how effective your workouts really are. It will save you time in the long run.

July 4, 2012 Exercise Read more >

Clothes fitting tighter immediately after a workout?

Nothing is more amazing than taking a long cycle class or working up a serious sweat at the gym. After a good work out I usually feel and look at least 5 pounds lighter….until I try to put on my clothes. Ever had that experience before? One minute you’ve sworn you’re 10 lbs lighter for all the sweat you just expelled and the next you’re struggling to pull on your favorite pair of jeans that fit perfect just an hour earlier. What gives?

Blood. That’s what.

When you exercise your heart rate increases, we all know this. Your heart rate goes up because your heart has to pump blood to the muscles that you’re using in order to get adequate oxygen to them. Ever do 50 bicep curls and then suddenly you can feel your heart beating in your bicep? That’s because your body is pumping more blood to that area. It’s why your biceps look so much bigger after and during a work out than before. What does this mean? Is the blood making your muscles look bigger? Yes and no.

Everyone knows about veins and arteries – they’re the major highways that transport blood throughout your body. Coming off of these are little capillaries that spread to all the places your arteries and veins don’t reach. When you use a muscle often and build it up you increase the amount of capillaries in that region. The more bicep curls, the more muscle in that area, the more blood it needs, the more capillaries. When you’re not working out these capillaries don’t fill with as much blood as they do during a work out. There’s really no need to – your body is busy sending the blood to your internal organs to help digest food and transport nutrients and oxygen. During a work out your body decreases blood flow to these organs and instead sends it preferentially to your muscles.

So don’t fret if you go for a 10 mile run and suddenly your jeans are so tight you’re worried you’re going to Hulk out of them. Look at it as proof of a good work out. Let some time pass and the blood circulation will return to normal and your pants should fit again in no time.

July 4, 2012 Exercise, Fat Loss, , Read more >

High Reps and Low Weights vs Low Reps and High Weights: which is better?

This is an argument that you read a lot of Tumblr. We all decry the “20 reps, 5 lbs, LETS GO!” method of working out, especially for women, for many reasons. Some will say it’s sexist, it doesn’t work, it takes forever, etc. The current Tumblr Train is to lift heavy and love it.

You know I was going to throw some SCIENCE at you.

There’s a recent study that says both are equally effective at increasing muscle mass.

NOT SO FAST! This is where your critical thinking skills come into play.

The study design is this: using leg extensions, measure short-term elevations in protein synthesis and the cross-section of muscles with high reps at 30% of max vs. low reps at 90% of max. So if your max leg extension is 100 lbs, you’re going to do 30 lbs for high reps or 90 lbs for low reps. Here’s the kicker: you do them to fatigue. That means you’re going to plus away on that exercise until you can’t squeeze out another rep.

Problems: Leg extensions are kind of a horrible exercise for this because it’s not a compound exercise, it’s an isolation one. Using the trifecta (squat, dead, bench) may have been a better option to really assess how this plays out. Additionally, short-term protein synthesis isn’t the ONLY factor in determining muscle growth. It’s just a small frame in a very long, complex movie.

So how can we interpret this?

Say we accept that this is true – that doing 30lb leg extensions until you can’t any more and doing 90 lb leg extensions until you can’t anymore will build the same amount of muscle. Why should you stick to the heavier weight?

Time.

How long do you think it takes to get to fatigue repping out 30 pounds versus repping out 90 pounds? I personally don’t see the point in sitting on the same machine for 20 minutes when I can get the same results in a shorter span of time. While I do enjoy spending a lot of time at the gym (it’s my heaven) it seems silly to machine hog for 10-15 minutes when I can do something else.

Yeah, you can wash your hair with a spray bottle, but just hopping in the shower will get the job done just as well in a shorter amount of time.

Take home message: As long as your train to fatigue it doesn’t matter what weight you’re using. However, using a heavier weight means less time spent for the same results.

July 4, 2012 Exercise, Myths Read more >

Can you really lengthen your muscles, or is that a lie?

This comes from the myth of “toning,” which we’ll address some other time, but how many of you have heard this? Said this? The idea is to do exercises that burn fat while making your muscles look “long and lean.” Here’s the deal.

Muscles only grow one way: in diameter.

When muscles grow it is referred to as “hypertrophy.” Hypertrophy literally means an increase in cell size, versus hyperplasia which means an increase in cell number. Muscles cannot undergo hyperplasia, only hypertrophy. So when you’re increasing muscle mass you’re doing so by increasing the size of the individual cells in the muscle.

Additionally, let’s look at the physiology of muscles. Muscles are attached to bone at very specific spots, and are made up of muscles and tendons, plus other contractile proteins. Any medical student will roll their eyes and spew out the long list of origins and insertions, plus various attachments, of every muscle in the body they had to learn in anatomy. Knowing this, how do you increase the length of a muscle without changing the attachment of the muscle? It doesn’t make sense. It would imply that something else has to change too – like the ligaments or tendons it’s attached to would have to shorten in contrast, or the length of the bone would have to change to accommodate this new “length” in muscle to still allow the body to function normally.

Basically, picture a muscle on a bone. Now imagine that muscle growing in length, while nothing else around it changes. Doesn’t really work, does it?

When most medical texts refer to muscle length they’re referring to the tension of the muscle (usually using torque). When adding stretching routines to your workout (yoga, pilates, etc) that increased flexibility is a decrease in the slop of the angle/torque curve, or shifting that entire curve to the right. This is done by stretching the muscle, not by adding length or by somehow making the “bulkiness” of the muscle translate into longer muscles, not fatter muscle cells.

If you’re building muscle you’re building it one way: in diameter. Decreasing the fat that is covering your muscles is the only way for the muscle to appear “long” versus “bulky.”

July 4, 2012 Exercise, Myths Read more >