Mercola on Tabata

This piece from Dr. Mercola is long, but there's are many nuggets contained therein.

After monitoring the Japanese speed skating team in the early 90's, Dr. Tabata noticed that extremely hard but intermittent exercise appeared to be at least as effective as standard workouts that require several hours a week. The training protocol he came up with as a result requires a mere four minutes, four times a week. The caveat? Extremei ntensity.

Dr. Tabata's HIIT protocol calls for just 20 seconds of all-out drop-dead effort, followed by a mere 10 seconds of rest. This intense cycle is repeated eight times. According to Dr. Tabata:

"All-out effort at 170 percent of your VO2 max is the criterion of the protocol. If you feel OK afterwards you've not done it properly. The first three repetitions will feel easy but the last two will feel impossibly hard. In the original plan the aim was to get to eight, but some only lasted six or seven."

When performed four times per week for six weeks, participants in one experiment increased their anaerobic capacity by 28 percent, and their VO2 max (an indicator of cardiovascular health) and maximal aerobic power by 15 percent. This is in contrast to the control group, who performed an hour of steady cardiovascular exercise on a stationary bike five times a week. These participants improved their VO2 max by just 10 percent, and their regimen had no effect on their anaerobic capacity.

Dr. Tabata also has forthcoming research findings showing that his protocol reduces your risk of diabetes, which other HIIT studies have already suggested. And, according to the featured article:

"Another soon-to-be-published finding, which Tabata describes as 'rather significant,' shows that the Tabata protocol burns an extra 150 calories in the 12 hours after exercise, even at rest, due to the effect of excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. So while it is used by most people to get fit – or by fit people to get even fitter – it also burns fat."

Dr. Mercola offers a very thorough review of the benefits of hard, short workouts.  But the best advice is - just do it.  Short and intense builds muscle, rewards correct body position and mechanics and helps one to feel those things as applied to generating force.  Forget the 30 minutes on a treadmill five days a week - try 10 minutes of warm up workout and cool down instead.

If you like long slow distance, have at it, but please don't labor under the mis-understanding that short, hard exercise is bad for you; it's anything but.

Exercise and Weight Loss, Part 3

To summarize the last two posts, some folks say exercise is great for weight loss, and others say the science is ambiguous on the topic.  I've said I think there are too many variables, and the powers that be have not agreed which are the important variables, therefore the experiments that have been done have not been conclusive.   What's left to discuss, you might wonder - and the answer is that there is a way to think about food and diet to see how they might be complimentary for changing one's body composition towards more muscle, less fat.

First, training should be focused on desired physical outcomes - do you want to compete in endurance events?  Do you want to prepare for a fight or a sport or the needs of a profession (firefighting for example)?  Well then, you have a different priority than those many who simply want to look good naked.  Either way, burning calories doing mindless exercise that does not increase your work capacity is a dead end game.  Train for strength, speed, stamina, endurance, agility, balance, coordination, accuracy, power and skill - or any subset of the above.  Of those listed above, strength is often the most amenable to large, long term gains, but the best performance increases in the short term come from short, high power output workouts that demand and develop anaerobic fitness.  Go hard, rest, do it again, as many different ways as you can think of to go hard.  This is the CrossFit model, but you don't have to be an expert in CrossFit to either see/experience the virtue of this approach or to implement it.

Will this help you lose body fat and gain muscle?  Yes to the latter, but I can only offer a "maybe" to the former.

That's because, as has been said many times, you cannot out train a bad diet.  If you are pounding down 300g/day of "complex, whole grain carbohydrates", you better be training 2-4 hours per day or you are likely to be fat and sick.  A 30 minute drill on the elliptical trainer is not going to beat back the impact of that much sugar.

The goal of eating, if you are already fat and sick or if you feel yourself sliding down that pathway, must be to eat for glycemic control and nutrient quality.  Thus the prescription - eat meat, eggs, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch, no sugar/wheat.

Eating in this protein adequate, high fat, and relatively low carb template gives your body a chance to regulate blood sugar, and redevelop the capacity to run itself on the best human fuel - fat.  Most people on this type of a diet find that their body's 1.5 million year old system of feedback loops gives them a chance to eat only what they need, to trust hunger signals as legitimate signals of need, and therefore to eat what they need for health, and not more.  When eating this way, exercise may help to speed recomposition, especially if you train for intensity in short workouts.  

Avoid the big nasties of neolithic nutrition - wheat, sugar (HFCS, table sugar) and polyunsaturated oils.

Establish a baseline of carb intake - if 100g/day of carbs lets you lose weight over time, you have yourself a solution.  For many, especially if they've been punishing their metabolic systems for years, 100g/day will be too much.

Lastly, once you stabilize on your carb intake and food quality, experiment with fasting.

Whatever you do, don't think of it as a diet.  Think of ways you can sustain the new eating patterns for a lifetime.  There's no going back - if you lose weight and then start eating like you used to, you are no different than the alcoholic who relapses or the smoker who takes up the habit again.  Save yourself the hassle!

My recommendation - don't exercise for weight loss, that's a fool's game and wasteful.  Eat the right way (carb restriction, high quality food), and exercise to optimize improvements in desired physical capacity.  As you do this you are also heading off most of the diseases of civilization - osteoporosis, obesity, high blood pressure, metabolic syndrome - and the "A List" of diseases that follow metabolic syndrome:  cancer, vascular disease (heart attack and stroke), and neurological disease (Alzheimer's and the rest).
(edited 21 July)

Not Necessary

http://fitness.mercola.com/sites/fitness/archive/2012/06/29/whey-protein-for-sports-nutrition.aspx

The link above will take you to an article about nutrient timing.  It's good enough for what it is, but it's also not necessary to do anything this article recommends.  Eat good food, train smart, hard and consistently.  Train with intensity, use the major lifts, vary your workouts.

If you have time for more than that, perhaps you need what Dr. Mercola recommends.  More likely, you would do better not to worry about anything to do with nutrient timing; unnecessary complication.

Exercise For Brain Health, Maybe

An interesting study with some predictable findings and some findings that were a bit of a surprise.

The study involved 1,238 people who had never had a stroke. Participants completed a questionnaire about how often and how intensely they exercised at the beginning of the study and then had MRI scans of their brains an average of six years later, when they were an average of 70 years old.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/moderate-to-intense-exercise-may-protect-the-brain

The brain scans showed that 197 of the participants, or 16 percent, had small brain lesions, or infarcts, called silent strokes. People who engaged in moderate to intense exercise were 40 percent less likely to have the silent strokes than people who did no regular exercise. The results remained the same after the researchers took into account other vascular risk factors such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol and smoking. There was no difference between those who engaged in light exercise and those who did not exercise.
Because this was not an intervention study, we don't know how much or how "intensely" the participants were exercising - and because I didn't look the study up, I don't know how "intensity" was quantified in this study.  I have met people who were convinced they were strong and worked out intensely who were in fact nearly pathologically weak. 

Further, there's kind of a chicken and egg thing - if you start having mini-strokes, do you think that might have an effect on how often and how hard you work out?  It reminds me of the study that showed that all of the 80+ year old folks in some big city or another lived in apartments for which there was no elevator, and they lived on the 2nd floor or above.  Does that mean if you walk up a flight of stairs every day you'll live to 80+?  Maybe, but it might mean that if you are healthy enough to walk stairs, you can stay in your 2nd floor apartment and if you aren't, you moved out.

Another chicken and egg issue involves diet.  If, as Taubes et al suspect, a poor diet affects activity level in the same way it affects health (short summary:  High carb diets create the starvation effect and therefore reduce activity level while accelerating metabolic derrangement), the folks who are eating a high carb, low fat diet will not be exercising as much or as hard - they'll be "too tired" and "won't feel like it" and they will also likely have higher inflammation levels ("I'm hurting today, I don't think we can work out"). 

IOW - the poor diet (which in my book means high carb, low fat) drives low activity level AND other negative health outcomes from metabolic derrangement.

Further, the high intensity folks, although they suffered these mini strokes at a much lower rate, were not immune.

In short, while the study shows a significant statisitical correlation with intense exercise and brain health, it cannot tell us why that correlation exists. 

However, I still advocate frequent, intense, and relatively short workouts for all the other benefits which can be quantified by the results those types of workouts create - more muscle mass, improved health bio markers, faster and more significant adaptation to the higher intensity stimulus, and reduction of the negative adaptation associated with excessive amounts of "cardio" training (muscle consumption, inflammation, joint trauma, inferior range of motion, and too much time spent working out).

For more on how the paleolithic model applies to aging well, I recommend Art De Vany's book, "The New Evolution Diet", which provides a potent mix of anecdotal perspective (Art is 70+ and strong as a bull after 30 years of living like a hunter/gatherer) and science (Art's a PHD and provides a plethora of science that comports with his premise).

Fasting for ... Health?

Legend has it that fasting or skipping meals will suppress your metabolism and cause you to store fat and burn muscle.  This is a myth; in fact, science shows that short-term fasting (up to 48 hours) increases fat metabolism while protecting lean muscle.

Humans evolved as hunters during the ice ages.  They ate only when the hunt succeeded and fasted otherwise.  In the nineteenth century, native hunter-gatherers typically ate meals only once or twice daily.  Although they often fasted more than 18 hours between meals, they had lean, muscular bodies and superior fitness.

At any point in time your body is either fed or fasting.  When fed, it burns fuels derived from food; only when fasting does it burn body fat. 

To burn fat, you must have normal blood sugar and low blood insulin.  Meals can raise blood sugar well above 120 mg/dL (the diabetic level) and insulin will rise to control it; this stops your cells from burning fat.  Fasting lowers both sugar and insulin to healthy levels that allow rapid fat metabolism.

Fasting dramatically increases growth hormone levels, which increases fat burning, stimulates muscle growth, and rejuvenates tissues.  At the end of a 24-hour fast, you will have a slightly elevated metabolic rate due to increased adrenaline levels.  In prehistoric times, this adrenaline helped your ancestors have energy to go hunting on an empty stomach.

If the human metabolism went awry upon missing a meal or fasting a day, we would never have survived the ice ages.  Evolution built you to thrive on brief high intensity activity, infrequent feeding, and intermittent fasting.  You can have a lean, fit future by incorporating ancestral practices like intermittent fasting into your lifestyle.

Continue reading on Examiner.com: Slaying the fasting myth - Phoenix Low-Carb Lifestyle | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/low-carb-lifestyle-in-phoenix/slaying-the-fasting-myth#ixzz1DDByJmwf

I don't see anything here I disagree with, and I'll guarantee you this formula will net you an infinite improvement over the current fads in fitness and diet which include high carb low fat diets, low intensity long duration training with "cardio" and "toning" exercises, and caloric restriction to manage body composition.  And frankly, even if this later bit lets you live longer by some miracle, I'd rather live in the aforementioned style and live well - intensity in life trumps duration!

20 Minutes of Cardio - Not

Many folks have so ingrained the idea that "cardio" is helpful to body composition management that they want to add that "20 minutes of cardio" to any short, hard workout they may do.  They have associated the "cardio" to being lean, or feeling good, or it's a remnant from so many years of disciplined training, even when it provided minimal results.  And very few folks get more than minimal results for 20 minutes of cardio.  Why would I say that?  


First off, think of what adaptations are demanded by that 20 minutes of "cardio".  


There's a demand for efficiency above all else - less effort for more distance.  If you demand efficiency at low intensity over a long duration, you are demanding that your body be lighter and less muscular - and the farther you take that kind of training, the less muscle you will have, until you look like one of the emaciated dogs who rule the endurance world.  That kind of training will demand competency in the oxidative energy pathway only.  In short, you are asking your body to make itself light, efficient, and low powered.  You are cultivating the ability to produce less than 40% of your total power for a longish time - in other words, you are specializing in "not working very hard".  This is certainly better than nothing, but what other options are there?


You could spend the same 20 minutes running sprint intervals, or for that matter, only ten minutes, with a 3 or 4 to one work rest ratio, and you will demand that your body provide more power - the ability to do more work in less time - and you will demand competency in both the oxidative (aka aerobic) and glycolytic (aka anaerobic) energy pathways.  Of the two, glycolytic competency is more applicable to more sports, and more emergencies, than is oxidative competency.  If you engage interval work with sufficient intensity, you will begin to look more like the 800m athlete, lean but strong, and the 100m athlete, muscular, athletic, and powerful.


Aerobic work is significantly more efficient than anaerobic work - reportedly, 5 to 1 more fuel is burned for time under load doing sprints.  If you think exercise is important for weight loss, then you have five times as many reasons to be doing sprints - or maybe 9 times as many reasons, because metabolically speaking, when you stop the cardio session, your increased fuel burn also stops.  When you stop anaerobics, your body will 'benefit' from up to 9 hours of accelerated BMR (basal metabolic rate).  


My advice - build the intensity of your training over time so that you can drive yourself to complete exhaustion without over-work or injury in only a few minutes.  Think of "intense" as "a lot of work, quickly".  Some days, wreck yourself in under five minutes.  Some days go ten.  On rare occasions, see what it's like to do anaerobic workloads for 20 minutes.  If you feel like you need another 20 minutes of "cardio" after that, you should save that motive and energy for the next day when you push yourself harder for a shorter, more pain inducing workout.  On the other hand, if you feel nauseated, your option - push it and puke, or back off and finish at lower intensity.  Either way, you are getting fitter.

One example, of an infinite number of options, of a beginner high intensity WOD:  run as far as you can in 60s, rest for 2 minutes, repeat 2-3 times.  Drop a bean bag at the 60s point, and start your next run where you dropped the bag; measure how far you went in four minutes.  Repeat after 30 days to measure you improved anaerobic work capacity.  Make up, or find from CrossFit.com (or here:  No/Low Equipment WODs), other high intensity WODs, and work up a lather 3 to 4 days per week.

Another example:  10 pushups, 10 situps, run 200m, repeat for 8-15 minutes, record the workout duration and how many rounds you complete.

I know of no metric in which aerobic/endurance work provides more benefit than anaerobic work, and it generally take more time - but it does hurt less, which is my guess for why virtually no one does anaerobic work.  (Perversely, the vast majority of all studies of human health and performance are built around endurance work.)  The only reason I can think of to do aerobics is if you like to workout that way, if you want to be a competitive endurance athlete in spite of the small payback in health and fitness, or your job demands that you be able to "not work very hard" for a long, long time.

Go hard, go short.  Intensity trumps duration.

Bigger Bicepts, Bigger Bean

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/phys-ed-brains-and-brawn/

"... most of the science to date about activity and brain health has focused on the role of endurance exercise in improving our brain functioning. Aerobic exercise causes a steep spike in blood movement to the brain, an action that some researchers have speculated might be necessary for the creation of new brain cells, or neurogenesis. Running and other forms of aerobic exercise have been shown, in mice and men, to lead to neurogenesis in those portions of the brain associated with memory and thinking, providing another compelling reason to get out at lunchtime and run."

"In somewhat similar fashion, researchers from Japan recently found that loading the running wheels of animals improved their brain functioning. A loaded running wheel is not strictly analogous to weight lifting; it’s more similar in human terms to a stationary bicycle with the resistance dialed high — in this case, quite high, as the resistance equaled 30 percent of the rats’ body weights in the last week of the monthlong study. By then, the rats on the loaded wheels could run barely half as far as a separate group of rats on unloaded wheels, but the mice on the loaded wheels had packed on muscle mass, unlike the other rats. The animals that were assigned to the loaded wheels showed significantly increased levels of gene activity and B.D.N.F. levels within their brains. The higher the workload the animals managed to complete, the greater the genetic activity within their brains."

"Imagine what someone like Einstein might have accomplished if he had occasionally gone to the gym."


There you have it, proof positive that weightlifting is good for your brain.  Ok, not really, but here's where science has failed us in some respects.  Researchers have studied endurance athletes quite a bit more than other kinds, so extrapolation is required to estimate results for other types of exercise.  In my view, it would just be gravy if the high intensity, heavy weight training proves to be beneficial to the brain, because we know it's needed to age optimally.  Being more cognitively capable is grand, but so is a body that will do what the brains directs it to do.