It’s no secret that diet outperforms exercise for fat loss. A recent study (that I mentioned HERE) confirmed that.
However some people have taken this concept and said that exercise just doesn’t work for fat loss period.
Not true. Not true AT ALL.
You see, all of the studies that look at exercise tend to look at aerobic exercise. The ones that look at weight training nearly always use machine based exercises and isolation exercises.
That doesn’t reflect the type of exercise that we do at Results Fitness. And I’m willing to bet that it’s not the type of exercise that most of my readers are doing.
We have around 350 members right now, all on supervised training programs. That’s more than almost any fat loss study in existence. We also have close to 60 gyms or studios in our Results Fitness Mastermind group. Add to that all the colleagues and friends I have throughout the industry that share ideas with me and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that what we’re doing in the trenches is likely AHEAD of what’s being published. We just have more data. We see stuff that gyms without that network or number of clients would see. We connect the dots that others don’t.
As an aside a recent study stated aerobic exercise was better than weight training for fat loss. First off, if this were true, I’d have went out of business a long time ago!
But what the media failed to report is that after 8 months of machine based resistance training, three times per week, the participants showed no improvements whatsoever. That’s not a sign that resistance training doesn’t work – it’s a sign that THIS machine program doesn’t work.
Also overlooked so far by most is this sentence in the study (from the researchers): “The result is that the aerobic program likely expended approximately 67% more calories than the resistance program did. We would hypothesize that much of the difference in the effects on ectopic fat are due to the differences in caloric expenditure between the two training programs.”
So let’s look at the findings –
After 8 months of aerobic training the participants lost 4.4lbs (total weight – they didn’t measure body comp)
After 8 months of resistance training they lost 1.76lbs
Obviously 4lbs is way better than 1.76lbs but I wouldn’t say either program really worked would you?
And if we point out what the researchers said – the resistance training program burned 33% of the calories of the aerobic program (seriously, what kind of weight training program is that?) – but actually lost 40% as much fat. Isn’t that a better “return on investment?”
Regardless, the aerobic group involved running 12-20 miles per week. The average weight of the participant was 195lbs. Considering the time spent running each week – this would average out to be around 1800 or so calories burned per week (I used an 11 min mile average).
The researchers stated that the aerobic group burned 67% more calories than the resistance group. That means on average (again I’m extrapolating the data) – the resistance training group burned around 594 calories.
And this is the part that doesn’t make sense. The resistance training group averaged 135-180 mins training per week. That’s at the high end, 4.4 calories per minute spent training. Again – what kind of resistance training program burns that few calories per minute? (Especially in light of Scott’s work showing that 8 minutes of weight training burned somewhere between 159 and 231 calories)
My conclusion? “A well structured high intensity cardio program at 80% max heart rate for 12-20 miles per week was just 60% more effective than a machine based weight training routine, particularly when the cardio program burned 67% more calories”
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At Results Fitness, we’re testing things all the time, tweaking what we’re doing and adding some stuff from the research.
Now admittedly we extrapolate from the research and start applying it, but we know that interval training works and we’ve seen studies showing the metabolic demands of kettlebell training so we use both of those.
We know that free weight training is superior to machine training. We’re using suspension training, triplanar movements, sleds, ropes, tires, sandbags etc. We use unilateral exercise, offset loading, dynamic variable resistance training. We know that supersets burn more calories than straight sets in the same time frame. We’ve seen that explosive lifts burn more calories during and after training than slow lifts so we add those too.
So we use full body workouts, compound movements, short or incomplete rest periods, self limiting exercises, explosive lifts, performed in a superset fashion. We screen clients so that we can attack their weak movements and therefore weak muscle groups and therefore increase metabolism (all of them are linked). We periodize the plan and track the variables, constantly tweaking and upgrading the program as we go.
And of course, we coach nutrition, recovery and supplementation also. Reseach needs to look at one variable at a time. We use all the tools at our disposable and build people that are leaner, stronger, and look, feel and perform better.
Training for fat loss needs to include:
1) An emphasis on building muscle or at the very least maintaining muscle.
2) Make that muscle work – hard – in multiple movements and multiple planes of motion
3) Make that muscle work FAST. Power could be the missing factor in fat loss training.
4) Make the metabolism WORK – short rest periods, high work density – ramp up energy expenditure during and post-workout
5) And we add in non traditional interval training – where we work the whole body hard, working more muscle and more movements than traditional cardio
6) And we still add traditional cardio when needed :)
… and then we do it all again with a smart program and built-in progressions.
And I KNOW we’re not alone. There are a lot of readers of this blog getting out there and doing smart programs that are getting great results. Maybe one day the researchers will get in tune with what practitioners and in-the-trenches enthusiasts are actually doing…
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AC
PS – for more about our programming philosophy for fat loss clients, click HERE
