Moderation, my ass.*

“Everything in moderation”.

How many billion times have you heard that one?

I’m here to tell you folks, it’s complete B.S. to all but a very few people.

First of all, “moderation” is a relative term.  A cocktail “every now and then” to one person means every other month.  To another person it means every other trip to the kitchen.

Secondly, moderation is for people who already have what they want.  As I said that’s a VERY small group of people.

Specifically with regards to people trying to lose body fat, it’s an infinitesimal group of people.  I’ve spent a good chunk of my life working with people trying to lose body fat and almost nobody looks at their body and says “Nope.  There’s no extra fat/skin anywhere on my body thatI wouldn’t like to trim down and tighten up.”  The next person I hear say that will be the first.

So put the above together and what do you have?

Moderation is a good way to NEVER get to your fat loss goal. 

Moderation is for AFTER you get to your goal and you’re OK with “maintaining” until you decide what your next goal is.

But as I mentioned, that’s very few of us.

If I’ve learned anything in the decade plus I’ve been doing this, I’ve learned you will never lose body fat being “moderate”.

Be bad ass.  Be hard core.  Pick a fight with body fat and kick its ass.

If you got in a real fight would you say “Moderation is the key, here.”?

Hell no, you would fight HARD!

Same with body fat.  Set a goal and be 100% committed to it until you get there.

Start exercising correctly and take the crap out of your diet.  If you aren't sure what those things are, ASK.  Don't be ashamed - have you looked around lately?  Most people don't know what those things are...

It doesn’t have to be forever. 14 days, 3 weeks, 28 days - something like that.  (Why do you think most diets and weight loss contests are around those lengths of time?  Because it’s long enough you can reach a goal but short enough you can be compliant.)

And those lengths of time are really not that hard to commit to.  Unless you are SERIOUSLY weak minded and weak willed - you probably aren’t.  Unless you won the lottery of weak willed, you can go a few weeks without (insert food) and (insert drink) in your diet.

Give it a shot.  Get serious about it.  When you reach your goal, then you can reevaluate “moderation”.

*I got the idea for this blog from Dan John and Thomas Plummer, two of the most well respected people in the world of health and fitness.

This is a waste of time:

I’ve written about this before but it bears repeating:  Monitoring how many calories you burn during an individual workout is a complete waste of time.

That is akin to counting your calories at one meal but ignoring how much you eat the rest of the day.

If the goal is fat loss (it should be – I’ve never met anyone who wanted to gain body fat), then the focus shouldn’t be on the caloric expenditure of your workout.  The focus needs to be on your resting metabolic rate (RMR).  This is how many calories you burn at rest over 24 hours.

The point of an individual workout, and exercise in general is to raise your metabolism so you’re burning more calories 24/7/365.

That is a crucial point about health, fitness and fat loss that many people just don’t get.  Many people still focus on how many calories their workout expends with no concern for whether or not their exercise selection is ramping up the metabolism.

This is why (again) you can’t lose body fat by performing long duration “cardio”.  It’s not intense enough to raise your metabolism so your body stops burning calories as soon as you stop exercising. 

And unfortunately you’ll never be able to out exercise or out cardio your food intake.  Jogging two miles burns about 300 calories.  That’s a very small meal that just wiped away the caloric expenditure of your jog.

Make sure you choose exercises and workouts that raise that metabolism so you become a calories burning machine – you won’t need to count calories from individual workout.  And remember, genetics do play a role in your metabolism, but whatever yours is can be improved.  Your metabolism, to a certain extent, is a choice.

Great Tip For Back Health Part 2

If you missed part 1, don’t worry, you can read it below J

“Your back has a finite number of bends.” – Dr. Stuart McGill

I’ve heard some great advice during my years in the fitness business.  That line is in the top three, easy.

It was spoken by Dr. Stuart McGill, who is generally considered a leading researcher and practitioner in the field of low back performance and injury prevention.  Keyword: “Practitioner”.   He actually applies his research to real people to see if it holds up.

In addition to reading two of his books, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing him speak in person on two occasions.  If you’ve ever trained with me or even if you’ve only followed my advice, you’ve been heavily influenced by Dr. Mcgill, as well.

And his quote above and that point in general, is a great one.

Your lower back is not supposed to bend.  It only can – very slightly – as a defense mechanism, similar to how a skyscraper bends slightly in the wind to prevent cracking.  But if you keep doing it over and over, eventually it will crack.

We all have a number of bends in us that our backs can handle.  Some of us, not many perhaps.  Maybe we’ll have back issues early in life.  

Some of us may be lucky and get tens of thousands of bends before tells us “No More.”

But make no mistake about it:  At some point, your back will bend and your body will say “No more” and it will be an unpleasant experience.  It may be when you’re 18 it may be when you’re 80.

It doesn’t really matter.  

What matters is that you realize that you didn’t hurt your back when you picked up your kid, were gardening, playing with your dog etc. – you set it up to fail with thousands of bends prior to the event and that action was the final straw.

So keep this in mind as you lean, slouch and bend over to pick things up.

Keep this in mind when you exercise.  When you squat and lunge and push up.

Does your spine bend when you do those things?

Do your best to prevent it.  There are countless ways to do this through exercise.  If you have questions about how to do so, let me know – we’re here to help.

Jon

Great Tip For Back Health, Part 1

Below is one of the best analogies I’ve ever heard about back pain and injuries.  Because oddly enough, for a topic and issue that is so widespread, people rarely seem to “get it” when it comes to the topic of back health – and more specifically, preventing problems.

You need to look at your back as a credit card being held in your hands.  When you bend it, the same thing happens to your back that happens to a credit card – not much.  It basically goes back into its original shape.

Unless you do it repeatedly.  Multiple times.  Over and over.  Day after day.  Week after week.  Year after year.

Eventually a little white stress line will appear.  Then maybe a small tear.  Then eventually, after repeated stress – it will tear significantly.  It’s the same way with both your credit card and your back.

And like bending a credit card, if you continually bend your back, you may get away with it for awhile – but eventually it will tear.  So that last time you tweaked it doing something relatively innocuous, it wasn’t that one move.  It just happened to be the culmination of thousands of bends.

This is EXTREMELY important if you exercise.  If you move incorrectly while exercising, you’re not only speeding up the injury process, but often you’re doing it with a load because you’re holding weights.  This obviously increases the risk exponentially.  So that lunge or squat that you’re doing that isn’t very good – you know the one with not too much hip movement but a lot of spinal movement? 

Real bad. 

It was that which set up your back for an injury, not the seemingly harmless playing with your kid, picking up a box, etc. that did it.  That was only the final straw.

More on part 2 next week, but for now:

View your back as a credit card:  You’ll be able to bend it a few times without incident – but keeping it up over time – especially through improper exercise – is a good way to get hurt.

Thanks to Mike Boyle for the analogy.

Have you asked this question?

Here’s another question that I get pretty often, so I figured it would be easier to explain in a blog post.

Did you ever think this, or ask yourself this before coming to the TR?

When people are considering coming into the TR but are curious about exactly what it will entail from an exercise standpoint, they often ask:

“What will I be doing?”  As in, exactly what exercises will be involved?

Imagine me with a blank stare.  I have no idea why you would ask that.  I mean…how can I possibly answer that?

This is what goes through my mind:

That’s like if you took your car in for service, and you said to the auto tech, “What are you going to do to my car?”

He would look at you with a blank stare, then pause to see if more information was coming, and then he would say (hopefully politely):  “Uh…it depends on what’s wrong with your car…?” with a quizzical look.  That’s if he were polite.  It’s more likely he would look at you like you were a dumbass.

But when I get asked that question, I’m pretty much in the same situation as that hypothetical auto tech:

I have no idea what you’ll be doing in the TR.  Not until I have an idea of what your goals are, what your exercise and injury history is, and what your movement strengths and limitations are.

Any trainer who would tell you what you will be doing without establishing those parameters first is a not very bright trainer.

At the Training Rim, EVERYONE goes through a Q&A about exercise, physical history and injury history, and a Functional Movement Screen.  Then – and only then – can I tell you what you’ll be doing.  And even after that we'll only go through the two week trial of personal training, then re-evaluate the program after those two weeks.

Otherwise, it’ll be the same as if you ask an auto tech to change your oil – when you have a flat tire. The answer won't match the problem.

We put the "personal" in personal training.  We administer the solution to YOUR problem.

I Love Exercise Science

It fascinates me on numerous levels.  Below may explain why to some degree, albeit quite randomly.

It keeps getting less and less expensive to exercise.  You can outfit your house with a pretty good gym for less than $1,000.  I charge less for personal training than I did in 2005.  Consider that.

There’s also more information available about exercise than ever before.  Books, videos, personal demonstrations and lessons can be attained quicker than the snap of a finger in some cases.

Yet orthopedic ailments continue to rise.  Obesity rates continue to rise.

Why is that? 

I’d be lying if I said I knew.  It’s definitely multi-factorial but I think it’s mostly because people believe what they want to believe.  The cognitive dissonance of learning that a personal long standing belief, even if based upon dogma, could be wrong – is just too much to handle for most of us.  We’d rather keep going down a road that doesn’t work rather than deal with it.

Of course that’s not to say any of us know what we’re talking about.  I was told once that we as humans know very little about how we move.  We’re sure that our brain sends messages to our muscles to move.  That’s really it.  I’ve found that not only is that sentiment accurate, but anyone who pretends they know more than that, is by and large, full of shit.

Which is another reason I love exercise science.  No one will ever have it figured out.

There are very smart people who are injured and/or can’t lose weight.  There are imbeciles that are ripped and healthy as horses.  This adds to the intrigue for me.

Another part of the problem, is there is no “normal”.  Everyone is different in an exponential number of ways.  That complicates matters somewhat, which creates even more interest – for me, anyway.

Exercise requires more than anything, patience and persistence.  Learning what works for you takes a lot of trial and error.  This is why hiring someone who’s done decades of trial and error on a large sample size can save you A LOT of time.

But ironically, fitness attracts the impatient.  This creates great people watching opportunities, and a great show.  Have you ever just watched people in the gym or at the park working out?  It’s like a slow motion train wreck.  You see how it’s going to end but you’re helpless to do anything for the poor bastards involved.

The cool thing is you can make decisions today that will make you a better version of you tomorrow and the day after and the day after, etc.  But people will still choose to try a one hour workout today that will somehow cathartically cleanse the decades’ worth of sloth and gluttony that preceded it.

Most people view exercise as a quick path fix to sexiness.

Smart people view it as an investment.

Every day you eat and exercise intelligently, it yields a small dividend.  Do this day after day and eventually all these small dividends add up to a pretty big return on your investment.

Exercise science gives a scary insight into human behavior.  I swear after 15 years of observing people try to get lean and healthy, I think I’m as much an expert in human behavior as I am in exercise science.

I know everyone has an opinion on how to get healthy and lean through exercise.  Almost all are biased, incomplete, uninformed or just plain idiotic.

But for an area that most of us know very little about, we sure do spend a lot of money and time in our area of ignorance.

*Thanks to Morgan Housel for the idea for this rambling piece.

Have You Noticed This?

In case you haven’t heard me mention the first 10,000 times I’ve said it, I love working out in the great outdoors.  And barring ungodly weather (over 95 degrees or under 25 degrees) I try to get out consistently.

I know many of you exercise outdoors as well.  And those of you who don’t, I know you have seen many people workout outside.  Enough probably, that you can probably relate to an observation I’ve made. 

Perhaps you’ve even made the same observation:

With almost no exceptions, people who work out outside – people you see at the track, park, jogging roadside, etc. - fall into one of two categories:

1. The minority, who move quickly and are fit and lean.

2. The overwhelming majority who move slowly and are unfit.

And here’s the important lesson for all of us to learn today, my fellow connoisseurs of all things fit and lean:

People who are lean, are lean because they move fast.  They are NOT moving fast because they are lean.

People who move slowly are unfit because they move slowly.  They are not moving slowly because they are unfit.

I cannot be clearer about the sequence of causation here:  If you move slowly, you will never become lean and fit.

Yes, I understand that moving fast is a relative term.  I know you will never be Usain Bolt.  But you can move faster than you do now.  You can push the pace a little.  You can make it so you get short of breath and have to stop to take a break.  Then you can repeat that process.

THAT is what gets your metabolism up, and THAT is what helps you get fit and lean.

Moving slowly only reinforces an already slow metabolism.  Moving slowly ensures time is being wasted at the least, joint issues from the repetitive motion at the worst.

Push the pace a little.  Get out of breath.  Keep it short and sweet, but breathtaking (literally).

That’s what the lean and fit do to get leaner and fitter.

Any questions, let me know.