Ignite Your Metabolism from Menshealth.com

Well I just read this article at Menshealth.com and wanted to get some opinions from people who think that this might/might not work

The Rest of it can be found >>HERE<<

Now my goal is not to look like a poser or model, but loosing some flab from my stomach wouldn't hurt especially in summer. Oh by the way, my current BF % is around 10% @185lbs

Any opinions and comments would be appreciated.

 

Theres some things that are slightly incorrect in that article. Nothing major though and it gives some reasonable advice on losing weight.
If you helps you lose weight, go for it.

Although you do become more efficient as you train, the difference is minimal.
Pretty much everyone (that doesnt have a disability) has an energy efficiency of around 22% ie 22% of the fuel you burn goes to movement, the rest is wasted as heat. With training this can increase to 23-24%. Some elite cycling athletes have been measured at 26ish%.
But really for an average person, training makes little difference to your efficiency.

This is a flawed theory. Lactate has minimal effect on fat burning during exercise, and no effect after exercise. Lactate is quickly cleared from the muscles and blood when you stop exercising, so any fat burning effect is gone. Leaving 3 minutes before sets allows you to do more work in each set, ie you can complete more reps, which will help you burn more energy.
Leaving 3 minutes has also been shown to get larger increases in muscle mass, which in turn will help you burn more energy through out the day and lose fat.
So stick with 2-3 minutes between sets.

and this from the rest of the article

Although high intensity interval exercise has been shown in several studies to be better at fat loss, that doesnt mean you need to stop doing long runs or long cardio. Some people enjoy it more, if thats the case, keep doing it.

Losing fat is all about expending more energy than you take in. Over time you will lose fat. Unfortunately you may have genetics that store fat around your belly in preference to other places. You can lose the gut, it will just take effort and time, there is no quick and easy fix.
You can safely drop your % body fat to 4 or 5%. At that level you will probably see the gut disappear.

Just stick with it, eat a bit less and exercise a bit more.

 

Thank you for replying to my question.

I was convinced that this theory might work because of the story that with 8-15 reps you create more lactate which triggers certain hormones that cause the body to burn fat. If I'm not mistaken the lactate is made from lactic acid which is the cause of fatique in muscles. I was a little confused on how the lactate can help with fat loss.

I started with a good diet about 4 months ago and dropped from 13% to 10% (I'm not realy sure how accurate this is, thou).
I guess I should've mentioned that I started weight training about year and a half ago with some good results as far as muscle and strenght gains. When I just started I weighted 150lbs now I'm at 185. My stomach is really the only place I have fat right now, so I'm not too obsessed with it...but wouldn't mind loosing it. My workouts consist of core exercises such as bench, incline bench, squats, dead lifts, military press, shoulder press, and back row with addition of exercises for other muscle groups such as triceps, abs, biceps, calves...pretty much the whole bodyworkout per session with alternating exercises on different days. I also do cardio on days between along with some sparing and bag work at least once a week.

 

The way it works is quite complex biochemistry and it only affects you when you are actually exercising.
Lactate is lactic acid, just different names for it. More recent research has debunked the idea that lactic acid is the cause of fatigue. It certainly is associated with it and may affect some muscle enzymes, but not the major cause of muscle fatigue.
The new idea for a 'major' cause of fatigue is inorganic phosphate affecting calcium release (which is used for muscle contraction). Of course fatigue has many causes, so it's pointless trying to pinpoint one.

It looks like your doing some good workouts. If you find you are hitting a plateau on fat loss, try reducing your energy intake slightly and see how you go. But 10% body fat is pretty damn good anyway.

 

So basically what they said about lactate causing your body to burn fat even after workout is not entirely true?
I am not really familiar with all the causes of muscle fatique, but I heard that lactate is one of them. I guess the only way from here now is to "tune" out the diet a bit more and give exercises some time to take effect. I do try to keep calorie intake under 2000 cal/day (sometimes even lower) and also try to make sure most of them come from proteins and carbs. Only problem is the stubborn belly fat that won't go away :woo:

I appreciate all the info.

 

Pretty much. During your workout, it helps release fat for fuel. Afterwards it doesn't do much.
This is where High intensity interval training may help you though. It does increase fat usage after workouts for 24-48 hours.
If you do a HIIT ratio of say 15 seconds on, 15 seconds off. Do that for a half hour (if you can, its damn hard) that will raise your metabolic rate for some time.
The 15 seconds on needs to be flat out, no holds barred intensity. Like you life depended on you working as hard as possible. Then 15 seconds of slow recovery.

If you are stuck, give it a try, it certainly won't make you put on weight.

 

I don't know about all the lactate stuff, but cutting down rest periods to 75, or even 60s between sets definitely causes me to lose bodyfat quickly. Doing the exact same routines, the exact same diet with rest periods as the only variable the difference is very noticeable.

Is that a typo? Have you ever done that? I don't know anyone personally who would be capable of doing anything remotely like that without wrecking themselves and having their performance drop to a crawl before the end of it. For most people I know a HIIT session of 15 total intervals is alot.

 

I wondered about that too, 15 on and off for half an hour is a total of 60 rounds. I'm usually collapsing at 8 or 10 on a really good day.

 

Do you do high reps or low reps?

 

I've managed a half hour a couple times, but like you said, my performance dropped off massively towards the end, so that 'running' was more like jogging.
I can usually manage 20-25 minutes like that. I'm on the verge of spewing when I do. But god its fun.

Go here
ACSM Position Stands
For position statements by ACSM (American college of Sports Medicine) including one on weights.
They are the bees nees on sports.
Come to think of it though, the paper is on building muscle, not losing fat...
So maybe the shorter rest periods could work.

 

Without meaning to detract from anything you're doing but I suspect you're holding back a little, whether subconciously or not. At a full on sprint someone in could shape should be covering over 100m for their first run and resting 15 seconds*, repeating with this intensity for half an hour is near impossible unless you have an abnormal anaerobic threshold. I suspect you may be tailing off into aerobic work faster than you think.

*I do realise that the distance covered will drop with further cycles.

 

How much of the calories consumed translate into actual work is different than how many calories the work requires. Is it possible you're confusing the two? The former doesn't increase much percentage wise, but the latter does. As one's endurance and strength increase, one's ability to efficiently utilize oxygen and fuel increase, so that performing a given task takes less energy than it did, say, 6 months prior.

The lactic acid itself doesn't actually contribute to fat loss, it triggers a large release of growth hormone, and that's what actually drives the change in body composition. The more lactic acid you can release and sustain during a workout, the more growth hormone your body will produce, and the more the workout will have an effect on fat loss.

Charles Poliquin has been using this phenomenon to produce incredibly lean clients for quite some time, to great effect.

 

If you're using very short rest periods you pretty much have no choice but to use lighter weight and more reps. 8 - 12 kind of region for most stuff, maybe up to 15 for bigger compound exercises. Using antagonistic pairings is also helpful, it means you can keep working & keep the intensity* up without failing too early on a given exercise.



*by which I mean general 'God I'm gonna puke in a minute' intensity as opposed to the %1RM definition.

 

What I do now is start of with lighter weight at 10 reps, then do less reps as I keep adding weight. For example let's say I'm doing deadlift: I'll start of with 150 and do 10 reps, then add 10-15lbs and do 8 reps, then add 10 lbs, and do 6, and so on all the way where I do my max with 2 reps. I've been told that this is a good way to gain muscle strenght.
BTW what is antagonistic pairing?
Now, if you do 15 reps with lower weight, wouldn't that make you bulkier a.k.a atrophy your muscles? In the article they say it keeps the lactate levels up which trigger hormones that make the body burn fat, so I was just curious about that.

 

I'm not confusing the two. How much energy you translate into work is directly related to how much energy you burn doing that work. For a given amount of work, almost everyone will use the same amount of energy (you can measure this by measuring their oxygen consumption). This is because everyones energy efficiency is the same ~22%. If someone had a higher efficiency, ie 26% they would burn less fuel as more goes to doing the work. Example, at 200 Watts (watts is joules/second) on a bike, a person with 22% efficiency requires ~54 kilojoules per minute, a person with 26% requires about ~45 kilojoules per minute. But this change rarely happens to any great extent after training.
You can test elite cyclists against a person that has never cycled, and they will have the almost exactly the same oxygen consumption, which means the same energy expenditure, for a given workload. Of course the elite cyclist could perform a much higher rate of work if they wanted to, but for the same work, they use that same energy. After training your ability to a maximum amount of work increases, but your efficiency is pretty much set.

No, your efficiency hardly changes. The amount of energy a given workload uses does not change. Physics tells you this. To complete a set amount of work, you must use a certain amount of energy. And as our efficiency is the same, our energy expenditure is the same.
As a % of our maximum ability it certainly is less, but the amount of work, and therefore the amount of energy we expend is pretty much the same. The task will seem easier, thats why we train, but i guarantee you the energy expended is the same.

The lactic acid theory for GH release is very tenuous, theres some research that says it causes GH release, others that find no link. For instance this one here saying lactic acid has no direct effect on pituitary function:
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1525-1373.1999.d01-16.x
Although an increase in many hormones, including growth hormone, testosterone and IGF-1 occurs, lactic acid is probably not the major cause. It may play some role, but it seems to be very little.

Good chance. either way it seems to work for me and i'm buggered afterwards.

 

Well, tonight I tried some of this new routine stuff: lower weight higher reps. Did some military press, deadlifts, rows, dumbell incline press, curls, situps, and tricep pulldowns. On the core exercises I did 3 sets of 15 reps, and the rest I did 3 sets of 10-12 reps. All I can say is that after I was done I literally felt like I was about to puke. I guess I'll give it a month or two and see how it goes and then post some updates here.

Thx for all the info and help.

 

I'm not surprised, it sounds like a tough workout! I only wanted to clarify what HIIT is, not diminish the effectiveness of what you posted.

 

So then what is actually changing then? If an elite marathon runner and a guy who's never ran a day in his life both run a mile, they both apparently use the same amount of energy, but one doesn't break a sweat and the other almost ends up in a coma - what is the actual difference between the two? Or what's the difference between someone who can bench 650lbs and someone who can barely squeek out 200lbs doing 20 reps of 135 lbs?

Someone with greater aerobic conditioning will have a greater VO2 Max, and I was under the impression that your VO2 max was the maximum amount of oxygen you can utilize during a strenuous activity. When someone's body can't utilize enough oxygen for the task at hand, the anaerobic system takes up a good portion of the work load, does it not? And anaerobic energy is terribly inefficient, breaking down glycogen for something like 2 ATP, and creating a lot of lactic acid. However the aerobic energy system makes something like 15 times more ATP for a given unit of glycogen, isn't that greater energy efficiency? And isn't someone with a higher VO2 max able to create energy aerobically more so than someone who hasn't trained their aerobic system at all?

I don't think it's quite as simple as applying the laws of physics, because there are far, far more variables to consider than you are mentioning.

For instance, I was taught in my junior high health class that walking 800m will burn just as much energy as sprinting 800m, because you're moving your body the same distance either way, and according to physics said Coach Jake, it requires just as much energy no matter how fast you go if the distance is the same.

Is this the kind of argument you're referring to?

 

But when you spring your muscles work harder and you would burn more energy that way than by walking the same distance...

 

Exactly, which is why it often doesn't work to try and apply simple physics principles to something as complicated as the human body.