Question: I suppose a follow-up question to this answer is just how rare it would be to cross a true “point of no return” where you may have fouled up your internal physiology to where it may never be able to rebound. Or is it usually a case of time and reversing some of the actions that cause it in the first place? i.e. the longer and more extreme the descent, the longer it will take to recover, but recovery is entirely possible

Would clinically severe eating disorders probably be the only instances where someone could allow things to devolve to such a degree that any sort of irreparable damage may have been done to some part of the body and its normal functioning?

Answer: First let me say that I am not and do not claim to be any sort of expert on the topic of eating disorders.  It’s simply not been a major area of interest of mine.  I think it’s worth considering that what is going on in something like anorexia or bulimia is quite different than what is going on with the topic I was primarily addressing in the original Q&A, to wit contest diets in bodybuilders/physique athletes.

For example, if nothing else we can see massive differences in the nutritional intake of a dieting bodybuilder/physique competitor (typically based around high protein intakes and ‘healthy’ foods) as opposed to the near complete absence of food in the anorexic or the alternation of binging and purging in the bulimic.

With that said, what little literature I have looked at in terms of recovery from eating disorders doesn’t lead me to believe that there is any sort of permanent damage.  So long as a ‘normal’ weight is regained (here we’re typically looking at the anorexic), things come more or less back to normal.  Even in the seminal Minnesota study, metabolic rate eventually rebounded to normal; of course the subjects had regained all of the fat they had lost as well for that to occur.

But again, this is really outside of my major sphere of interest; if anyone reading this has expertise that can contribute to this question, I think we’d all love to see it.

Question: Layne Norton once said that from the day one begins to eat normally again, it can take anywhere from 3-4 months to completely restore BMR to 100% from post-dieting levels. Although he didn’t cite it, do you know of any studies roughly reflecting this extended time frame? I’m only referring to restoration of normal hormone output and, thus, adaptive thermogenesis, since if the weight loss were maintained, BMR would still be relatively lower than it was pre-diet simply by virtue of a lower final body weight.

Answer: No direct research on this comes to mind immediately although it may exist. I think the problem is that, usually in looking at post-diet ‘recovery’ there is almost always a regain in body fat which tends to color the issue.  For example, in the Minnesota study that I mentioned in the question above, following the 6 months of semi-starvation, the men were allowed to eat as much as they wanted.  And they went nuts, eating massive numbers of calories and regaining fat.  Which normalized metabolic rate eventually but doesn’t really apply to what you seem to be describing.

Frankly, I’m not 100% sure that hormones will ever return to completely normal (see next question) assuming that the lowered body weight/body fat level is maintained. They can be improved by raising calories to maintenance for sure.  This is part of the rationale behind The Full Diet Break although that’s really meant to break up periods of explicit dieting (I also suggest it at the end a diet to start normalizing things).  Which is a long way of saying “I don’t know”  If Layne has a reference for that, I’d love to see it.

Question: So there is evidence of metabolic derangement, but do you think it is permanent even when returning to normal caloric intake?

Answer: The studies of the post-obese (see next question) suggest that, even at weight maintenance (i.e. when calories have been returned to normal), there is still a small overall reduction in basal metabolic rate (on the order of perhaps 5%) compared to someone who is ‘naturally’ of that weight.  Meaning that if you compare someone who is 180 pounds without dieting to someone who has dieted down to 180 pounds, the second person will show a slightly reduced metabolic rate compared to the predicted values.  But the effect is slight when calories are brought back to maintenance.

As I discussed in the original Q&A, it looks like the main impact in terms of reducing daily energy expenditure is on spontaneous activity levels; this probably explains why exercise seems to have so much bigger of an impact on weight maintenance than weight loss (as I discussed in Exercise and Weight/Fat Loss Part 2).

I am unaware of any research examining if this is maintained in the long-term (i.e. will the post-obese continue to show decreases in spontaneous activity).  However, the long-term studies of the post-obese (ranging from 2-5 years if my memory serves correctly) suggest that the effect on basal metabolic rate never goes away.  So yes, it’s effectively permanent; it’s simply small.

Question: I’m also wondering about the permanence of any such metabolic adaptations. It seems likely to me that metabolism would return to normal at some point. If so, how long would it take? It seems like I read something about this in a discussion of the Minnesota study, but I’d have to go searching to see if I’m remembering correctly.

Answer: As noted in the question above, what data I’ve seen looking at the post-obese in the long-term suggest that there is a slight reduction in basal metabolic rate that doesn’t appear to ever go away.  At least not in any practical time frame.  Based on what we know about the issue of setpoint (discussed in Set Points, Settling Points and Bodyweight Regulation Part 1) I wouldn’t expect this to ever truly go away.   I imagine someone will ask the logical followup to this in the comments which is “So what about people who get and stay lean in the long-term, how do they do it?”  Maybe addressing that will get me past my writer’s block to write an actual article about it.

Question: I am a clinical nutritionist at clinic where we see a lot of people with “screwed up metabolisms”. In a different vein, there are the people who got fat from overeating and eating the wrong types of foods and became insulin resistant. Now they have to eat low calorie diets otherwise they gain weight.

One of my clients weighs 360 lbs and her BMR according to the the InBody is 2700 calories. The girl eats maybe 1200 calories a day and maintains that weight. Reversing insulin resistance by eating the proper foods and incorporating resistance training obviously helps. I am wondering if there is an approach to increasing calories systematically when working to reverse insulin resistance without gaining weight?

Answer: This is really a bit outside of what the original Q&A was discussing but I’ll address it anyhow; certainly there can be metabolic derangements that occur in obesity (what’s cause and what’s effect is often hard to determine).  However, it’s highly unlikely that your client is truly maintaining her weight on 1200 calories per day if her measured BMR is that high (meaning that her total daily energy expenditure is even higher); insulin resistance or not, that’s simply a physiological impossibility.

The more likely (and exceedingly common) issue is that she’s simply consuming more food than she’s aware of or self-reporting.  Because even in studies of insulin resistance, when calories are reduced (and and accurately monitored), weight/fat loss occurs.  So either she’s a physiological anomaly or she’s not really eating 1200 calories per day.  And my experience (along with a large body of research) suggests that it’s the latter issue that’s the cause of the problem.

Thanks for the questions folks!

I would be surprised if most on the Internet or who were involved in training and nutrition weren’t familiar with the name Tom Venuto.   I’ve known Tom (via email correspondence anyhow) for over a decade and he’s always been one of the good guys in the field.  I may not always agree with him, but I’ll always listen to what he has to say.

For those who have been living under a rock and have managed to avoid hearing about him, Tom is not only a successful natural bodybuilder, he is the author of perhaps one of the best books ever written about fat loss which is Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle.

In a field where most of the information ranges from bad to downright awful, Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle stands out as being filled with excellent information on the how-to’s of shedding fat.

From diet to training to everything in-between, it’s all covered and all quality information (even if a few bits of the information are a bit out of date/incorrect; such as the old saw that eating many small meals stokes the metabolism).

Tom is also the author of a book that I’ve been meaning to review for months called The Body Fat Solution which deals more with behavioral issues related to losing fat and keeping it off.  Also, a highly recommended read.

But today I want to talk about Tom’s new product/project which he’s given the (somewhat gag inducing) title of The Holy Grail Body Transformation Program. By ‘holy grail’, as you can see in the subtitle on the cover graphic above, Tom is referring to that commonly desired goal of gaining muscle and losing fat at the same time.

This is a goal that many seek and few attain; usually trying to do both things at once tends to lead most people to spin their wheels.  But as much as anything, this has to do with how they approach the goal.  There are also some issues involved with expectations about what is realistic.  I’ve discussed this issue in some detail in Adding Muscle While Losing Fat – Q&A and won’t rehash that here.  On to the review.

Beginning first with science and theory, Tom looks at some of the basic issues surrounding the topic of gaining muscle while losing fat and why, in a fundamental sort of way, the two goals are antithetical (Tom also examines exceptions, pretty much the same ones I’ve talked about before).  Anyone who has read my own Ultimate Diet 2.0 or the articles Calorie Partitioning Part 1 and Calorie Partitioning Part 2 here on the site will be familiar with this information.  Tom doesn’t spend endless time on this information but covers it thoroughly enough to be clear.

The meat of the book is of course the diet approach and if you’ve already guessed that it’s a cyclical dieting program, you guessed right.  Because fundamentally, outside of the exceptions such as overweight beginners or folks returning from a layoff (or drugs), alternating caloric deficits and surpluses is really the only meaningful way to achieve the goal of simultaneous fat loss and muscle gain since they require distinct nutritional, hormonal and physiological states.

Tom looks at the issue from a rather large scale (e.g. yearly alternation of longer term bulking and dieting phases) to weekly to daily variations in caloric intake; I imagine that well-read, err, readers of my site will be familiar with many of the concepts he’s talking about.

Tom does a thorough job of examining a variety of different strategies (both in terms of the number of dieting days and number of feeding days) ranging from 3:2-3 (3 days dieting, 2-3 days overfeeding) to 3:1 to floating carb days.  As well, daily variation in carb/caloric intake is examined based on the time training is performed.  Essentially what Tom has done is to gather a variety of different strategies (depending on the specifics of the goal) that have been used and looked at them all at once.  I’d note that primarily carbohydrate intake is being modified here so, in essence, the caloric cycling ideas are really carb cycling ideas.

I would note one thing here: the topic of intermittent fasting (IF’ing) is NOT discussed.  I guess we’ll have to keep waiting for Martin Berkhan’s long-awaited book to see this treated in the way it deserved to be.  Neither is the concept of Every Other Day (EOD) refeeds that gets talked about on the support forum from time to time.

Next Tom moves to the discussion of training with, as you might imagine, most of the focus on resistance training (since this is the key to a lot of good things that are desired when the goal is body recomposition).  He doesn’t go into a tremendous number of details here and there are no sample workouts in the main part of the book.

I’d note that one of the appendices does have a sample workout under the name of The New Bodybuilding, basically a 3-4 day/week combination of heavy strength and hypertrophy work; the focus is primarily on more or less general guidelines for proper resistance training.  Tom also addresses the issue of metabolic work and gives different guidelines (primarily for lower intensity cardio) in terms of frequency and duration depending on the specific goal.

Which brings me to my biggest criticism of Tom’s book: there is little attention given to how to ideally integrate the training ideas with the dietary strategies that are outlined (outside of one short comment in the diet section on floating carb days and placing them around important workouts).  Simply, achieving the ‘holy grail’ goal works better when training and diet are integrated properly.

The book rounds itself out with a brief section on lifestyle factors and several appendices that include meal plans, a primer on determining energy requirements and a food database.  I should mention that there is a throwaway ‘bonus’ on the topic of within-day energy balance; essentially an interview with sports nutritionist Dr. Dan Bernadot espousing the idea that large scale swings in caloric intake during the day have negative impacts on body composition.

I say throwaway because it doesn’t say much; as well I think the ideas presented have been amply disproven by the success of people following IF’ing type approaches where very large scale swings in caloric intake are having, if anything, positive benefits when integrated properly with training.

Summing Up: Is The Holy Grail Body Transformation Program great?  I’d have to say no.  It certainly doesn’t live up to the standard set by Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle and the lack of integration of the training and diet may leave some people confused about how best to approach their goal.  But it does provide a reasonably comprehensive examination of how to cycle calories and carbs to try to achieve the ultimate goal of body recomposition.  Until Martin finally finishes his IF’ing book, Tom’s new book certainly provides a decent look at the topic.  Finally, at $29, the price is certainly reasonable (as such things go).

This sounds like bro-hype but I’m wondering: Is there any truth to this phenomenon?

Answer: This seemed a good followup Q&A after last Friday’s Lean Body Mass Maintenance and Metabolic Rate Slowdown – Q&A since it’s semi-related and I seem to have total writer’s block regarding anything approximating a feature article right now.

There are several issues at stake here and I’m going to address them in reverse order.  Certainly I have seen some weirdness occur (and there is at least one study to support this) where excessive cardio in the face of a large caloric deficit can cause problems, not the least of which is stalled fat/weight loss.  In that study, the combination of a very large deficit plus about 6 hours of cardio seemed to decrease metabolic rate more than the diet alone. This is something I intend to cover in more detail at a later date.

This, along with personal observations, was what led me to strongly suggest against doing a lot of cardio on The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook program; in fact I’d say that a majority of failures on that program can be tracked to people trying to do too much cardio and it doing more harm than good.   Invariably, the folks who minimize activity (beyond the basic weight workouts) and let the deficit of the diet do the work do better in terms of fat loss.  So certainly there is an element of truth to that.

However, we need to look at magnitudes here and do a bit of reality checking. Several in fact.

The first is to look at the food intake.  700-900 calories is not a lot of food and, typically, at the end of a contest diet, hunger is simply off the map.  I find it doubtful that someone is truly consuming that little food on a day to day basis at the end of a contest diet.

Note that I did not say impossible (anorexics certainly seem to do this); I’m simply doubtful that someone is consuming that little food in the face of extreme hunger on a day to day basis.  They may be reporting that that is their true food intake but I’d be doubtful that it was truly that low on an everyday basis.

Now, as discussed in the Q&A I linked above (as well as in other articles on the site and in my books), there is no doubt that the body undergoes a variety of rather annoying adaptations to reduced calories and fat loss.  Reduced metabolic rate, reduced spontaneous activity, etc. all occur and this works to slow fat loss.  But what we’re really dealing with here is a magnitude issue.

First and foremost, if someone is claiming to get fat on only 900 calories per day, that implies that their actual total daily energy expenditure is actually LESS than that. That is, as I discuss in some detail in The Energy Balance Equation, we know that to actively gain fat requires a caloric surplus (relative to expenditure).

To gain fat at say 900 calories, and to do so at any fast rate would imply that daily energy expenditure was significantly less than that.  For example, assume that someone eating only 900 calories per day were gaining fat at a rate of 1 pound per week.  That would imply a 500 cal/day surplus or a total daily energy expenditure of 400 calories per day.

For an average sized male who started out with a maintenance energy expenditure of 2700 calories per day that would be an 85% reduction.  For an smaller female who started with perhaps a 1700 calorie/day maintenance, that would be a 75% reduction from where they started.  And simply, that level of reduction is far and beyond everything that’s ever been measured in the history of research on this topic.

Now, some might argue that the stressors of competition dieting haven’t been examined and they’d probably be right; to my knowledge, no-one has examined the metabolic rate of a bodybuilder following an extreme contest diet.  Quite in fact, most studies don’t examine lean individuals at all but there is one study that is possibly relevant which is the seminal Minnesota Semi-Starvation Study.

I’ve talked about this study before and it represents one of the most massively well-controlled studies on the topic ever done (or that will ever be done).  In it, war objectors were placed on approximately a 50% reduction from maintenance calories (which only put them around 1500 calories/day or thereabouts in the first place) and were held there for 6 straight months.  Activity (walking) was enforced and most men reached the lower limits of body fat percentage by the end of it.  I’d note that only men were studied so it’s possible that women, who are prone to showing more resistance to fat loss, could show a differential response.

And the total reduction in daily energy expenditure only amounted to 40% (of which the majority of that was due to the weight loss).  Weight and fat loss had basically stopped at the end of the study which makes sense; the original 50% deficit had been reduced to at most 10% due to the 40% reduction in metabolic rate.

The bottom line is that no study I’ve ever seen has suggested that total daily energy expenditure could be reduced to the levels that are implied by ‘gaining fat rapidly at 700-900 calories/day’.

So what’s going on?  Certainly some bad hormonal things go on when you combine heavy activity with heavy deficits for extended periods to low body fat levels (I’d note that various types of cylical dieting such as my own Ultimate Diet 2.0 and Martin Berkhan’s Intermittent Fasting approach seem to side-step at least some of this).   Thyroid levels drops, nervous system output drops, testosterone levels crater, cortisol goes through the roof.

And I would suspect/suggest that it is this last effect that is being observed and taken as evidence of ‘metabolic damage’.  In a water depleted, glycogen depleted bodybuilder coming out of a contest diet, water balance is going to go absolutely crazy and cortisol is one mediator of this.  Water retention secondary to glycogen storage will also contribute.

So you have a situation where a post-contest bodybuilder may be seeing just massive swings in water weight (which can appear like rapid fat gain) following the contest; especially when you consider the normal runaway hunger that tends to occur at that point.

Between glycogen storage and simple cortisol mediated water retention, I can’t see any other reason to explain the observation.  Even one day of overeating carbs can cause massive water retention (for example, shifts in water weight of 7-10 pounds over a day or two are not uncommon on cyclical diets) and I suspect that’s what is being observed.

Which is all a long way of saying the following: certainly there is evidence of metabolic derangement when you diet people down to low levels of body fat, this can probably be made worse if you undergo the normal severe overtraining cycle that most dieters go through at that point.  But I don’t see any physiological way that true rapid FAT gain can occur at such low calorie levels.  I’d suspect that water retention (and a bit of neurosis equating water weight gain with true fat gain) is the primary culprit here.

Is this a faulty assumption? I’ve read on many a website that the body goes into “starvation mode”, however that argument doesn’t sit well with me. Either the body requires X amount of energy to function, or it doesn’t. I think “starvation mode” might simply be reduced activity in general, so for a relatively insane individual (read:athlete) who is willing to push hard on a restrictive diet, metabolic slowdown shouldn’t be an issue?

Answer: I suspect that some of this comes down to an issue of semantics (you sort of get to part of what I’m going to talk about in your second paragraph) but some of it doesn’t.  The short answer to your question is that your assumption isn’t entirely correct; even with 100% maintenance of lean body mass (LBM) there can still be some metabolic slowdown.  Now here’s the longer answer.

First and foremost, we need to define some terms and what’s meant by metabolic rate since I suspect that’s part of where some of the confusion is coming from.  On a daily basis, an individual’s total daily energy expenditure is given by three components, which I’ve discussed in detail in Metabolic Rate Overview. They are

1. Resting/Basal Metabolic Rate (RMR/BMR; what I suspect you’re referring to above)
2. Thermic Effect of Food (TEF)
3. Thermic Effect of Activity (TEA)

Where TEA has now been divided into two distinct components: the thermic effect of exercise and non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT).  The distinction being that the first is calories burned during formal exercise and the second, NEAT, is the calories burned during activities such as daily moving around, fidgeting, moving from sitting to standing, etc.  I discussed the potentially major impact of NEAT in a recent research review on Role of Nonexercise Activity Thermogenesis in Resistance to Fat Gain in Humans.

Now, each of the above is determined by various factors including body composition, diet, etc.  And all of them are affected by dieting and the loss of body mass.  Studies have repeatedly shown that individuals who have been dieted down to a given weight will have a lower than predicted metabolic rate compared to someone who didn’t diet to that weight.  That is, someone who ‘naturally’ weighs 200 pounds will have a higher total energy expenditure than someone who dieted down to 200 pounds.

So what’s causing this reduction in total energy expenditure.  A majority of the ‘metabolic slowdown’ that occurs is due simply to the loss of body mass.  Because larger bodies burn more calories (both at rest and during activities) and smaller bodies burn less.

But that’s not the only cause of metabolic slowdown here.  There is also an adaptive component of metabolic rate slowdown that is mediated by changes in hormones: leptin, insulin, thyroid, catecholamines.  As these change (decrease) on a diet, you find that tissues burn fewer calories per unit mass.  I’d mention that not all studies find this, about half do and half don’t.  That is, your assumption that a given body composition always burns the identical number of calories on a day to day basis isn’t entirely correct.

Of course, an important question is how much of a change this amounts to.  During active weight loss, the impact is relatively greater (because hormones tend to be more greatly affected); at weight maintenance (once a person has stabilized), the impact isn’t huge.  In some studies of the post-obese (folks who have been dieted down and maintained at that weight) show a relatively modest 5% or so reduction in RMR.  The effect exists but is not massive; it’s also highly variable, with people showing relatively more or less of an effect.

There is also evidence that individuals move around less when they lose/are losing weight.  As James Krieger recently wrote on his Weightology.net website, it looks like changes in activity (especially NEAT) are the far larger contribution to the reduction in overall energy expenditure on a day to day basis; the number of calories burned in that activity also appear to be reduced due to improved muscular efficiency.

In that study, decreases in RMR were about 150 calories per day but reductions in activity expenditure were up in the 300 calorie plus range with the total effect being over 400 calories.  This is likely why daily activity has such a profound impact on weight maintenance as I discussed in Exercise and Weight/Fat Loss Part 2: since the body is ‘automatically’ decreasing activity energy expenditure, you have to make up for it.

So basically you’re both correct and incorrect.  The greatest impact on total daily energy expenditure certainly appears to be due to decreased spontaneous activity during the day. However, there is also an added component of a reduction in resting energy expenditure due to changes in RMR, even with complete maintenance of lean body mass.  Some of this is due to simply being smaller, some of it is an adaptive reduction in metabolic rate due to shifting hormone levels (which, again, not all studies find).

And semi-tangentially, a long while back I had written an article as a background primer to something I had intended to write about alcohol.  Well, now I don’t have to since Martin Berkhan over at Leangains.com has written it.   In his article The Truth about Alcohol, Fat Loss and Muscle Gain he pretty much covers everything you could ever want to know about the topic.

Answer: The short answer, as you might have guessed is no.  Now, as always, here’s the longer answer.

I suspect that the idea that one needed to eat fat to burn fat came out of a misunderstanding of some of the early literature on low-carbohydrate/high-fat/ketogenic diets (note: I’m defining a ketogenic diet here as any diet that contains less than 100 grams of dietary carbohydrate; a topic discussed in more detail in my first book The Ketogenic Diet).

In those studies, there was clearly an increase in the body’s use of fat for fuel (indicated by a large scale decrease in something called the respiratory exchange ratio or RER) and I have a hunch that people assumed that it was the huge increase in dietary fat that was driving the increase in fat burning.

But as I discussed in Nutrient Intake, Nutrient Storage and Nutrient Oxidation as well as in How We Get Fat, the burning (oxidation) of fat isn’t really related to fat intake per se.  Rather, it’s related to carbohydrate intake.  That is, the act of eating dietary fat doesn’t usually have a major impact on how much fat you burn.   I say ‘not usually’ as some studies find that very high fat intakes (like 80 grams all at once) have a small effect on fat oxidation by the body. But for the most part, how much fat the body burns during the day is related primarily to carbohydrate intake, secondarily to protein intake, and almost not at all to dietary fat intake itself.

Also consider that the following three conditions:

1. Complete fasting (no food intake at all)
2. A high-fat, low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet (e.g. 30% protein, 65% fat, 5% carbohydrate)
3. A protein sparing modified fast (PSMF, such as my own Rapid Fat Loss Handbook)

All generate basically the identical shift in the body’s fuel utilization: a decrease in resting RER indicating a shift to using predominantly fat for fuel.  Again I say basically since both the ketogenic diet and the PSMF will be marginally different than complete fasting due to the intake of dietary protein.  But for the most part, the shift in fuel use by the body is identical in all three conditions, you see a huge drop in RER indicating a massive increase in the use of dietary fat for fuel.

And the commonality in all of those conditions is not the presence or absence of dietary fat (diets 1 and 3 have little or no dietary fat, diet 2 has quite a bit).   Rather, it’s the lack of dietary carbohydrates.   Which, based on what we know about how the body determines fuel usage makes sense.  As I discussed in the linked articles above, when you eat more carbs, you burn more carbs (and less fat); eat fewer carbs and you burn fewer carbs (and more fat). Which means that in all three conditions above it’s the absence of dietary carbohydrates driving the increase in fat burning, not the presence of dietary fat.

Which isn’t to say that increasing dietary fat intake under some conditions can’t have benefits (such as increased fullness, food enjoyment or flexibility, limiting the daily deficit to moderate levels if that’s the goal, etc.) which are discussed in other articles on the site (I’d suggest the Comparing the Diets series for an overview of different dietary approaches).  It’s simply that increasing fat burning per se simply isn’t one of them; rather, that’s accomplished by reducing carbohydrates and total caloric intake.

Hope that answers your question.

Answer: The above question actually came through in the comments section of Exercise and Weight/Fat Loss: Part 2 and I thought it was important enough to address explicitly since it’s a place where I still see many mainstream diets and dieters making mistakes.   It’s worth noting that bodybuilders and other strength athletes have been promoting higher protein intakes while dieting for decades and this is yet another place where modern science has ended up validating those beliefs many years after the fact.

The question of adequate protein under different conditions is one that has a long history of debate, the issue of maintenance requirements as well as protein intakes for athletes is still highly debated with science on both sides of the story (for details you can refer to The Protein Book).

With regards dieting specifically, this was a topic of much study in the 60’s and 70’s as researchers started looking past the simple issue of weight loss and into that of changes in body composition; the goal moved from weight loss per se to that of generating fat loss while minimizing lean body mass and muscle mass loss.

After much toing and froing and research had been done it was eventually found that a protein intake of about 1.5 g/kg of lean body mass (LBM; note that researchers actually used Ideal Body Weight but this is a rough proxy for LBM) was necessary to spare LBM losses in a non-training obese individual consuming low calories.

This is about double the DRI for protein (at 0.8 g/kg) at maintenance calories.  So for an overweight individual at say 200 pounds and 30% body fat (this would give them an LBM of 140 lbs or 63 kg), that would be a protein intake of 95 grams of protein per day.   Please note that this value is simply a minimum and dieters may still find that higher protein intakes are beneficial from a hunger blunting effect or what have you (see below).

In that context, I’d mention that at least one of the studies I referred to in Exercise and Weight/Fat Loss: Part 2 that found no benefit of resistance training gave something like 40 grams of protein to the subjects; far less than necessary or adequate.  So it’s no surprise that no protein sparing effect of exercise was seen; the diet was inadequate in the first place.

It’s worth noting that more recent research supports further benefits of increased protein intakes while dieting, beyond simple lean body mass maintenance.  Protein is the most filling nutrient (meaning that higher protein intakes tend to control hunger better) and studies have found that higher protein intakes can help to stabilize blood sugar levels while dieting which has benefits from both an energy level and appetite standpoint.  Protein high in the amino acid leucine (with the dairy proteins whey and casein being the two proteins highest in leucine) seem to have extra benefit in this regard.

Now, as individuals get leaner, protein requirement tend to go up further for reasons discussed in other articles on this site.  As well, regular training tends to further increase protein requirements.  So lean athletes trying to lose fat while sparing lean body mass loss need even higher protein intakes than this.  And we’ve known for decades now that caloric intake per se tends to impact on protein requirements; as caloric intake goes down, protein requirements go up. And vice versa.

While less data on this group is available, bodybuilders and athletes have long used a protein intake of 2.2 g/kg (1 g/lb) lean body mass as a generalized intake level and as folks get very lean, intakes of 3.3 g/kg (1.5 g/lb) of lean body mass may be required to stave off muscle loss while dieting.  In some very extreme cases, such as the near protein only diet approach of my own Rapid Fat Loss Handbook even higher protein intakes may be required for very lean individuals.

So basically we have an intake continuum ranging from about 1.5 g/kg (0.68 g/lb) as a minimum for the obese non-training individual up to a high of around 3.3 g/kg (1.5 g/lb) of protein per pound of lean body mass for very lean heavily training athletes or bodybuilders with middle ground values being found in between those two extremes.  You’ll note that I didn’t put any of those values in terms of percentages for reasons discussed in Diet Percentages: Part 1 and Diet Percentages: Part 2.

So that’s what I mean by ‘adequate protein on a diet’ when I use that phrase.  It’s context dependent with the primary variables being body fat percentage (as this goes up, protein requirements go down), caloric intake (as caloric intake goes down, protein requirements go up and vice versa), and activity (with regular activity generally increasing protein requirements).

Certainly larger amounts of exercise can approach significance (and as folks become fitter, they can burn more calories with activity) but the idea that a little bit of exercise is going to have a massive impact on anything is fairly misguided.  However, there are more ways that exercise might positively impact on weight/fat loss (especially when combined with changes in diet) and that’s what I want to look at today.   I’d mention that readers should check out PJ Striet’s comments in Exercise and Weight/Fat Loss: Part 1 for some other potential benefits of exercise outside of weight and fat loss per se.

Quality of Weight Lost

In Exercise and Weight/Fat Loss: Part 1 I sort of confusingly jumped back and forth between weight and fat loss (mainly using fat loss as a way of estimating how much exercise might actually impact on things); for the most part the big meta-analyses and a lot of studies have focused more on total weight lost in response to exercise with most of them finding, at best, a small impact.

However, anyone who hasn’t had their head under a rock for the past couple of decades, or who has read anything on this website, knows that there is more to the overall equation than just weight loss.  As I discuss in some detail in What Does Body Composition Mean? the body is made of a number of different components including muscle mass, organs, water, connective tissues, minerals, fat, etc.

Just looking at changes in body weight can be misleading; it’s more important to look at what’s happening to body composition; that is, under most circumstances, folks want to lose fat while minimizing or eliminating the loss of lean body mass (especially muscle mass).

Does exercise help with that? That is, does the addition of exercise to a diet change the proportion of what’s lost; that is does it change the quality of weight lost (ideally shifting the loss towards more fat and less muscle mass).  And when you look at the studies the answer is a big old it depends.  A lot of which has to do with the specifics of the diet (especially the amount of protein provided) and the type of exercise done.

For the most part, exercise is found to have a protein sparing effect of some sort; that is less muscle and more fat is lost in response to the same caloric deficit.  It’s not universal with not all studies finding an impact (depending on the, type, frequency, duration and intensity of activity) but certainly the trend is for that.

And here is a place where there does seem to be a difference in what type of activity being done with studies (and practical experience) finding that resistance training (especially coupled with adequate protein intake) being superior to aerobic activity (or a low protein intake) for limiting lean body mass loss and, thus increasing fat loss in response to a diet.  And while more mixed, there is some suggestion that this helps to limit the normal drop in metabolic rate that tends to occur with weight loss.

Put differently, as I phrased it in The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook, if there’s a single type of exercise to do while dieting, it’s proper resistance training.  Coupled with an adequate protein intake, that alone tends to limit (or eliminate) lean body mass losses such that the weight which is lost (in response to the caloric deficit) comes predominantly from fat mass.

So this is a place where even if exercise doesn’t increase the quantity of total weight loss per se (i.e. how much the scale actually changes), it can impact on the quality of weight lost; with proper exercise causing more fat and less muscle loss than would otherwise occur.  Here again, proper resistance exercise, especially coupled with adequate protein, seems to be superior to aerobic activity or diets with insufficient protein.  You can read more about proper resistance training in Weight Training for Fat Loss Part 1 and Weight Training for Fat Loss Part 2.

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Accountability/Adherence

Perhaps one of the most potentially beneficial places that exercise can play a role during weight loss is with adherence.  I’ve mentioned this in articles before but, for many people, the simple fact of doing some sort of exercise on a given day makes it more likely for them to stick to their diet.  The underlying logic seems to be along the lines of “I worked out today, why would I blow my diet?”

In a lot of ways, this may actually be one of the single most important aspects of successful weight loss attempts, long-term adherence to the plan. I’ve ‘joked’ about this before, saying that the best diet is the one that you can stick to and there is much truth to this joke; at the end of the day after you work through all of the potential benefits of one diet versus another or what have you, the best one for a given individual is the one that they can stick to in the long-term.  If regular daily activity of some sort helps an individual adhere to their dietary plan, that benefit alone may be more important than any actual metabolic effects of the exercise bout itself.

Basically, for some people there seems to be a psychological coupling of exercise with good dietary habits on a day to day basis and clearly that can be of benefit.  Of course, there is a potential negative that needs to be considered: when/if people stop exercising often their dietary habits fall off just as quickly.

In fact, one odd study years ago looked at this issue comparing diet, exercise and diet+exercise for both short- and long-term results.  It found that the diet+exercise group ran into problems such that, when subjects stopped exercising, their diet habits fell apart too.

There is another potential place that this can backfire which I’m going to look at next.

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Exercise and Hunger/Appetite

The impact of exercise on hunger and/or appetite is, to put it mildly, complicated.  This is because human hunger/appetite (I’m not going to bother making the distinction between the two here) is exceedingly complex being an interplay of biology, psychology and environment.  These are often separated out for convenience but they all interact.

Looking solely at biology, overall exercise seems to have a beneficial overall impact on acute hunger, showing a decrease at least in the short-term (other work has shown that the overall hunger/appetite regulation system works more effectively when regular activity is performed).

This seems to be related to increased levels of various gut hormones involved in signalling fullness, as well exercise can increase leptin transport into the brain (other studies suggest that long-term aerobic activity may improve leptin sensitivity which is good given that obesity is generally associated with leptin resistance in the brain).    There may still be as of yet undiscovered mechanisms for exercise to impact on hunger/appetite.

Other work suggests that even if exercise can increase hunger, any increase in food intake tends to be less than the energy burnt during the activity itself; that is exercise still has an overall benefit.   It’s worth mentioning that even here there tends to be a large degree of individuality, some people compensate for the energy expenditure of activity better than others and this may be part of what contributes to individual differences in results.

One thing I noticed years ago (and forgot to mention in the Training the Obese Beginner series) is that beginners often seem to get a slight increase in hunger following activity, at least in the first few weeks of training.  I suspect this is due to their general over-reliance on glucose for fuel (falling blood glucose being one of many stimuli for hunger).   At about the week 4 mark, as their bodies started to get the first adaptation to training and started to use more fat for fuel; this effect generally went away.

It’s worth noting that emerging research suggests that there may be gender differences in this effect (along with many others) with women, as usual, getting the short end of the stick when it comes to exercise and hunger regulation.  And this is consistent with earlier studies showing that, under uncontrolled eating conditions, women are less likely to lose weight in response to exercise than men.

Of course, the above tends to interact massively with the psychology of the individual and whether or not they are consciously controlling their food intake.  That second issue is a major confound in a lot of studies that people tend to forget about when they compared different studies.

However, this isn’t always the case and one trap that many exercisers often fall into is assuming that their exercise bout has burned far more calories than it has (you’ll hear folks figuring they must have burned at least 1000 calories in an hour of moderate activity when the reality is probably closer to 400-500) and figuring that they’ve ‘earned’ that big post-exercise junk-food meal.

As I mentioned in Exercise and Weight/Fat Loss: Part 1 it’s usually quite trivial to overcome all but the most massive exercise related energy expenditures.  You can put down 1000+ calories in a big post-workout meal with ease, more than compensating for the energy burn of the activity.

But as much as anything I feel that this comes down to an issue of misinformation and education; people need to be realistic about the number of calories they are burning during activity.  It’s simply almost never as high as they think and realizing this is a first step to avoiding habits that will tend to not only offset but actually reverse any beneficial impact of activity.

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Weight Loss Maintenance

As a final topic, I want to look at an issue that is perhaps more important in the big scheme of things than actual weight loss per se.  The rather simple fact that needs to be recognized is that weight/fat loss per se isn’t really the hard part; people consistently do and can lose fat/weight all the time.

The issue is with keeping it off.  That is to say, although people successfully lose weight/fat all the time, they usually end up gaining it back. Frankly, I am of the opinion that strategies to lose fat/weight are no longer the important issue, rather research and practice needs to find out what makes people so poor at long-term adherence to dietary changes (or behavioral changes of all types) and find solutions to that.  Is it biological, psychological, is the distinction even meaningful?  And how do we fix it?

But beyond that issue, this is one place where exercise has routinely shown to have a benefit with regards to overall body weight/body fat reduction programs.  That is, while most studies have not found a massive impact of exercise on weight/fat loss per se, the impact on weight loss maintenance seems to be much much larger.

Both epidemiological and intervention studies have found that maintenance of regular activity following weight loss is associated with better long-term weight maintenance (I’d note that keeping protein intake high also has benefits) but with one major caveat: it takes quite a bit of activity (I’d note that this seems to assume that the diet is relatively uncontrolled after the active weight loss period).

Various lines of research suggest that a weekly exercise energy expenditure of 2500-2800 calories per week is required to maintain the lowered body weight.  If we assume an average of 5-10 cal/min for low to moderate intensity activity, this works out to between 280-500 minutes of exercise per week or somewhere between 40-70 minutes of activity (depending on intensity and frequency) per day.

Again, the above seems to assume that the diet is relatively more uncontrolled following the actual weight-loss intervention which isn’t automatically a good assumption.  But it does put into perspective what may be required in terms of daily activity to maintain weight loss.

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Summing Up

So that’s a (for me anyhow) fairly brief look at the potential impact of exercise on weight/fat loss.  As I discussed in some detail in Exercise and Weight/Fat Loss: Part 1, the unfortunate reality is that all but the most extensive exercise programs are unlikely to have much of an overall impact on the absolute quantity of weight lost, especially in the absence of dietary changes.

The average beginner/overweight individual simply can’t burn enough calories in realistic amounts of exercise to have much of an impact.  Reducing caloric intake through various means (discussed in detail in other articles on the site) will almost always have a larger impact on overall energy balance.

However, that doesn’t make exercise useless and there are other ways that activity can positively (and negatively) impact on the overall goal of weight/fat loss.  The first of those is in shifting the quality of weight lost; even if exercise doesn’t affect the total magnitude of scale change, proper activity (with resistance training coupled with sufficient protein intake being superior to aerobic work/low protein) can decrease the loss of lean body mass and increase the total loss of fat.

There are also potential benefits to adherence/accountability with some people essentially coupling daily activity with adhering to their diet.  Anything that makes someone stick to their diet in the long-term can only be beneficial. As noted, this can sometimes backfire, where the person then loses all good dietary habits if their exercise program is interrupted for whatever reason.

In terms of hunger and appetite, exercise seems to have an overall beneficial impact but interactions with the individual psychology of the dieter can affect this greatly; some people will rationalize the consumption of food based on a misunderstanding of their actual calorie burn.  This can completely overcome any benefit of the exercise in terms of energy expenditure.

Finally, exercise appears to have the greatest potential benefit in terms of long-term weight loss maintenance; here studies have shown that regular exercise improves long-term weight loss maintenance.  However, it takes quite a bit with upwards of an hour or more of daily activity required to completely offset post-diet weight gains.

I suppose the issue isn’t really one of the realities of exercise and fat/weight loss but rather how the message was misinterpreted.  Many have held up exercise as some sort of panacea for all things, health, fitness and of course what everyone is really interested in: losing weight/fat and I suspect the message got a bit garbled as it so often does: people figured that they could do a bit of easy exercise and the pounds would just melt right off.

The realities, unfortunately, are often quite a bit different and in this series of articles (which I’ll hopefully keep to a mere two parts), I want to look at the possible ways that exercise might impact on one’s overall body recomposition goals.  You’ll notice that I used the word ways plural in that sentence; while most focus on the direct role of exercise on fat loss (via direct calorie and/or fat burning) it turns out that there are more ways than just that for exercise to impact on things.

For the most part, I’m going to sort of cluster all exercise in one big grouping for the sake of simplicity.  Clearly resistance training and aerobic training aren’t the same and have differential effects; when needed I’ll make distinctions between them.  It’s important to realize that most research on exercise and fat loss have used obese individuals (researchers by and large not being interested in lean folks trying to get leaner) and that has potentially other impacts on a lot of this.  Again, as needed, I’ll make note of this.

Today, since it will take the most verbiage, I’m only going to look at the primary way that exercise can (or can not) impact on body recomposition goals and that is in terms of its impact on total weight loss; that is the quantity of weight lost.  I’ll note ahead of time that I am going to confusingly jump back and forth between fat and weight although they are not the same thing.  This will make more sense in Part 2 when I attempt to cover all of the other ways that exercise may potentially impact on things.

Quantity of Weight Loss

Most commonly, exercise is held up as a way of either directly causing weight/fat loss or for increasing the amount of weight/fat lost when added to a diet with the focus primarily on the direct effects of exercise on calorie/fat burning either during the exercise bout or afterwards.   As noted above since it will take the longest, that’s the only issue I’m going to look at today.  Basically, I’m going to give a reality check on the impact of realistic amounts of exercise in terms of its impact on body weight/body fat.  It’s not a reality many are happy with.

In previous articles as well as in my books, most recently in the Training the Obese Beginner series, I’ve made the comment that, generally speaking, the only people who can burn a tremendous number of calories during exercise are trained athletes; and they aren’t the ones that usually need it.  That statement appears to have confused some people but the point I was trying to make is that the number of calories that can be burned with realistic amounts of exercise in beginners is usually fairly low.

In my first book The Ketogenic Diet, I cited some paper or another indicating that most untrained folks can burn perhaps 5-10 cal/minute in exercise if you’re talking about sustainable intensities; this might hit 15 cal/minute but that would be for high intensity interval-type training.

However, the duration of that activity tends to be exceedingly limited and the total average calorie burn for the activity will be lower due to the rest intervals.  As well, this isn’t an intensity of training that can be done frequently.   Even achieving 10 cal/minute would be fairly challenging for an relatively untrained/low-trained individual.

Of course, as training status goes up, folks can burn proportionally more calories.  A moderately trained individual might be able to burn 10 cal/minute fairly easily and hit 15 cal/minute for extended periods if they are willing to work a bit.  20 cal/minute might be achievable for short periods but, again, the total burned during activity would be balanced out by the low intensity nature of the rest intervals.

As I discussed in Steady State vs. Intervals and EPOC: Practical Application, when I have compared interval sessions of varying types to steady state training with a Powermeter, the total caloric expenditure is usually about identical because of how the rest intervals affect the average intensity.  The steady state sessions are far easier to complete and can be done more frequently as well.

A very highly trained athlete might be able to burn 15 cal/minute as a matter of course, 20 cal/minute if they are willing to work and hit even higher values for high intensity training.  Certainly these athletes sometimes need to drop fat (usually to improve power to weight ratio) and they have the advantage of being able to burn a tremendous number of calories with even low intensity activity.   Simply tacking on an ‘easy’ 30-45 minutes to their normal training can burn a pretty large number of calories making fat loss relatively easy without much change in diet.  But that last group is not who we are realistically talking about here.

I’d note that the above values are for cardiovascular activities.  People always ask about calorie burn during weight training and it’s harder to pin down values.  It also depends staggeringly on the type of activities done (e.g. whole body vs. isolation exercises), rest intervals, rep ranges, etc.    Clearly repetition clean and jerk will burn a lot more calories than barbell curls.

On average, studies have found a calorie burn of 7-9 cal/minute seems to be about right (again with huge variability) but that only holds for the actual work time and a lot of time in the weight room is usually spent resting.  When we have tracked calorie burn for various types of weight training (ranging from Olympic lifting to isolation machine work) with tools such as the Bodybugg/GoWearFit or Polar heart rate monitors, a calorie burn of 300-400 cal/hour is about the average.

So with the above values in hand, let’s look at realistically what we might expect in terms of weight loss using the values for a typical untrained/low fitness level individual assuming a calorie burn of 5-10 cal/minute and various durations and frequencies.   I’m going to compare 30 vs. 60 minutes and 3 vs. 6 days/week to estimate total caloric expenditure.

And here’s where the confusing bit comes in, to put in this in real world terms I’m going to move from weight loss to fat loss with the assumed value of a 3500 calorie deficit to lose one pound of fat; of course this assumes that 100% fat is being lost which is not always a safe assumption.  I’d note that total weight lost will be higher if a larger proportion of muscle is lost, an issue I discussed in The Energy Balance Equation.

I want to note up front that there is a HUGE assumption built into the following calculations: that nothing else is changing.  Not diet, not activity at other times during the day (some studies find that people compensate for exercise based energy expenditure by moving less later in the day), nothing.  The only change we’re making here is by adding exercise to an otherwise static situation.  For reasons far beyond the scope of what I want to talk about right now, this is not a good assumption.  It simply makes the math easier.

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Frankly, the results are pretty dismal; you don’t even get to a one pound fat loss per week until you reach 6 days/week of an hour of fairly challenging exercise every day.  Certainly the folks who think that brisk walking for 30 minutes a few times per week is going to have a major impact on much of anything without a complete overhaul in diet are incorrect; the impact is simply negligible.

It’s also worth mentioning that the above caloric expenditure is actually somewhat of an overestimation since it includes the calories that would be burned by simply sitting around doing nothing.  That is, if you did nothing during that hour, you’d burn perhaps 60-100 calories/hour or so depending on that activity.  The above values include that resting expenditure so the actual impact on energy expenditure above and beyond normal are going to be slightly lower.

But it’s fairly easy based on the above values (which again represent a massive number of assumptions in the first place) to see how many people have concluded that exercise is worthless for fat loss.  And certainly a majority of studies (including most of the big meta-analyses) have reached that conclusion: compared to dieting alone, exercise tends to add very little to the quantity of weight lost.  Even added to a diet, exercise tends to impact on the total weight loss marginally at most; the diet is doing most of the work in terms of the actual quantity of weight lost (here I’m switching back to talking just about weight).

And this is simple mathematics, removing 1000 calories/day from the diet can be achieved with relatively more or less ease (depending on how bad the diet is to start with); the average beginner simply can’t burn that many calories with any realistic amount of exercise.  At a low intensity and a calorie burn of 5 cal/min, that would require 200 minutes of activity per day, over 3 hours.  At a challenging 10 cal/min, you’re looking at 100 minutes, an hour and forty minutes.  This is simply beyond what most people can, are willing, or have time to do.

This is also why I mentioned the huge assumption that diet is unchanging in the above estimations; another conclusion often reached is that exercise is worthless as the amount of calories that can be burned can be offset by even a small increase in food intake.  An average bagel may contain 250 calories (or more if they are the big ones), you can overcome the deficit generated by the lower amounts of activity with a small increase in food intake.

I’d mention that the only impact of exercise on weight/fat loss tends to be due to the deficit created; studies where the calories from activity are replaced by increasing food intake show no changes in anything.  That is to say, if you compensate for the activity by eating more (an issue I’ll talk about later), nothing really happens.

In this vein, most of the exercise and diet studies have used fairly low-moderate amounts of activity (in line with the above chart) and few have progressed anything over the course of the study, volume or intensity; most show neglible effects on much of anything (even the much vaunted interval studies only show maybe a 1-2 lbs fat loss over 12 weeks compared to steady state training).

The latter is a problem to me since no good fitness program would be so static without some progression in frequency, duration, intensity or all three as folks got fitter and were able to handle more or harder training.  As I mentioned in the Training the Obese Beginner series, one consequence of regular fitness training is an improvement in fitness, allowing folks to train at higher levels (both driving fitness higher as well as burning more calories).

So while realistic amounts of exercise may not be able to play a major role initially in weight loss, over time it not only adds up (albeit in depressingly small amounts) but can end up contributing further down the road as fitness improves.   That’s in addition to some other indirect ways that exercise may help that I’ll talk about shortly.  Finally, there turns out to be a huge area where exercise has been shown to play a role that I’ll talk about when I wrap up the series.

I’d note before moving on that some studies using fairly large amounts of activity (one that comes to mind had subjects cycle 2 hours/day 6 days/week) have shown a greater impact on weight and fat losses.  But these amounts of activities are usually considered to be fairly unrealistic for most people.  I’m simply making the point that for people who can do a lot of activity (one person on my forum actually got into the habit of doing 8 hours of low intensity cycling during the day believe it or not) there can be an impact.

But the simple fact is that, for the average untrained individual, realistic amounts of activity are unlikely to have massive direct impacts on either body weight or body fat; the caloric expenditure simply isn’t significant enough to impact on anything.  As well, changes in diet have the potential to make a much greater contribution to the creation of a caloric deficit; removing 500 or even 1000 calories per day from the diet can usually be achieved much more readily than adding the same amount of activity.  At least in certain populations.

But as noted in the introduction, there are several other ways that exercise can positively impact on weight/fat loss goals. Those will be the topic of Part 2 on Friday.

Read Exercise and Weight/Fat Loss: Part 2

A little while back, in trying to fix my own ignorance about swimming, I read what is often considered a classic in the field of training literature which is the book “The Science of Swimming” by James ‘Doc’ Counsilman.  Written in 1968, the book represented one of the first attempts to apply much in the way of science to the technique of swimming.  Suffice to say that swimming is very strange and, so far as I can tell even in 2010, nobody is exactly sure how swimming ‘works’.  That is, in terms of what’s going on mechanically in the water.

But this is not an article about swimming, rather there is a particular quote in the book that really resonated with me (especially after some of the silliness I had been seeing on the support forum) and that prompted this article.  In discussing technique considerations and stroke mechanics, Counsilman writes:

Do not subordinate fundamental principles to minor details.

It’s quotes like these, ones that are so to the point and clear that really stand out for me.  It’s also the sign of a truly knowledgeable person: people who know their field can express complicated ideas in simple language.  People who use complex language to confuse you don’t really know what they are talking about.  But that’s a different topic for a different day.

In this specific case, Counsilman was talking about worrying about details of stroke mechanics (or trying to fix or alter them) without paying attention to the fundamentals of proper stroke mechanics.  Because the fundamental principles outweigh the minor details by miles.  But it applies equally well to the issues of diet and training.

As I’ve written about in a previous article How Detail Oriented Do You Need to Be, with the advent of the Internet (along with other forms of constantly running media) people are absolutely overwhelmed with information, much of it dealing with what can only be termed completely irrelevant details.  That is, stuff that just isn’t likely to make an iota of difference to anything in the real world.  I think the reason for this trend is that writing about the basics and the fundamentals all the time isn’t sexy or interesting. It certainly doesn’t sell magazines.

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Let’s Get the Big Exception Out of the Way

Certainly, there is a time and a place where details can matter.    As discussed in How Detail Oriented Do You Need to Be usually it’s people who are at the very extreme high level of performance or leanness looking for that next level up.  Yeah, fine, if I’m trying to diet a male down to 5% body fat without muscle loss, the details may start to matter (though amusingly some can do it without ever moving past the most basic of approaches).  An elite athlete looking for that last bit of performance is in that position where all of the esoteric stuff, the insane details, start to matter.

But those tend to represent such a tiny percentage of the training or dieting population as to be almost irrelevant.  They may be the more interesting subgroup  (because coaches like getting up their own butts with this stuff too) but they aren’t the largest percentage of the training or dieting population.

And while everyone on the Internet thinks that they are advanced, the simple fact is that most are not; most would be served by simplifying more than complexifying.  As well, the individuals in the situations above have spent years working on the fundamentals to the point that they are so well entrenched that they needn’t be worried about.  At that point the details can matter.

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So Let’s Talk about Everybody Else

As I mentioned, by  the definition of the word ‘most’, most people training or altering their diet are not in the above situations, looking for that last bit of a percentage point gain where details may start to matter.  Which unfortunately, doesn’t stop them from all too often focusing on the minor details to such a degree that one of two damaging things happens which are:

1. They never actually get started on their plan.
2. They manage to completely forget about the fundamental principles.

Both are clearly a problem and I want to talk about both in some detail.

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Just Do Something

One of the primary end results of the unnecessary focus on details is that people often spend weeks (or months) looking for the perfect program, the perfect diet.  And invariably they are focusing on the minor, minor, minor details that separate different successful programs.  So one program has such and such a set and rep scheme, another slightly different.   One training program might be more frequency based, another more intensity based (as discussed in A Quick Look at Some Popular Hypertrophy Programs).

I see people do it all the time: asking for a compare and contrast of one training program vs. another.  Is one ‘better’ than the other?  What about this third one? What about this one?  What about that one?

The same holds for diet.  One uses carb-cycling of some form or fashion on a daily basis, another uses big-carb refeeds less frequently (most of my plans), a third does something else entirely.   And every approach seems to work stunningly (at least for some people) or not at all (in others).  But that gets into the issue of context more than anything else; what is right (or potentially ideal) for one person or one situation is not right for another.  Context matters.

Of more relevance, what often happens is that people get so overwhelmed at focusing on the details that they never act.  They spend weeks looking for the perfect diet or training program (which doesn’t really exist in the first place, at best all programs have pros and cons and are, at most, best under a given set of circumstances) and lose time when they should simply be doing something.

Because, at the end of the day, assuming the training or diet isn’t completely and utterly moronic (and make no mistake, there are plenty of those out there) actually doing something is always better than talking about it for weeks on end.

Yet it’s that latter pattern I see altogether too many falling into: people spend days and weeks and longer asking about this plan versus the other plan, this program versus the other.  Time that would be more productively spent actually starting any one of the myriad programs that they’ve asked about.

And this is especially true at the beginner stage (less so at the intermediate stage although the same principles still hold).  When you’re starting out in training or diet, the ‘nice’ thing is that everything works.  One set, three sets, it all works; for the most part any non-idiotic diet will be effective to some degree for generating weight or fat loss.

Hell, some of the idiotic stuff usually works at this level simply because it’s better than what the person was doing beforehand. It’s not that the new approach is better so much as what was left behind was awful. But at this point, the details just don’t matter.  What matters is actually doing something.  You usually won’t find out if something is right for you ahead of time unless you just hunker down and try it.  So stop worrying and start hunkering.

Once again, as folks get more advanced, the details can start to matter.  Basically, you often have to worry more and more about less and less as you try to get to higher levels of performance or leanness or muscularity.   But by the time someone truly reaches that stage, they usually know enough about how their body responds, on top of having years of fundamentals under their belt, that they either know what to do next or how to proceed.  As mentioned above, while everyone wants to think that they are advanced, the reality is that they are not.

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Forgetting Fundamental Principles

Make no mistake, I often get rather focused on details, and many articles on this site reflect that.  Of course, I try my best to balance those out with articles looking fundamental concepts; that is, the basics that are important and should underlie all intelligently set up approaches.  That’s why I write the primers on various topics and try to look at fundamental principles instead of just getting up my own butt with complicated details (that fascinate me but are often not globally very relevant).

It’s worth noting that most of my own complicated approaches to things are aimed at the advanced people in the first place.  The Ultimate Diet 2.0 is an advance diet for advanced dieters; it’s aimed at people for whom the details matter.  Even there, while the overall structure of the diet is a bit complicated, any given day actually isn’t.

The information in The Stubborn Fat Solution is equally detail oriented.  But again, it’s aimed at folks looking at the last little bits of fat, the stuff that doesn’t come off easily without an attention to such details.   For everyone else, such details are not needed: that training and dieting gets done is more important than how it gets done exactly.

But the fundamental principles must always be adhered to, even in the advanced/complicated programs.  It’s simply that the details are less relevant for the non-advanced.  So, for example, as I looked at in The Fundamentals of Fat Loss Diets Part 1 and The Fundamentals of Fat Loss Diets Part 2, there are a set of fundamental principles of fat loss diets that I consider crucial to success, first and foremost among them the creation of a suitable caloric deficit.

And, frankly, any approach that meets those principles in one form or fashion will be a ‘good’ program.  So while I have my approach and Alan Aragon has his and someone like Borge Fagerli (Blade) has another, and Martin Berkhan has his intermittent fasting approach; if you looked at all those plans in terms of the fundamental principles, you’d see that they  all met them.  They may differ slightly in details and approach but the fundamentals are always present.

A similar article could be written (and I will eventually write it) regarding training principles for growth or strength gains.  There are fundamental principles (revolving around intensity, frequency, volume, etc.) that all intelligent programs must meet.  How they are met is less relevant than that they are met in some form or fashion.  And while people will argue endlessly about the (apparent) differences in application; when you get down to the fundamentals most programs are not as different as you think.  Not the good ones anyhow.

The problem comes in when people start focusing on details (that may or may not be relevant) to the exception of those fundamental principles.  So people want some magic combination of foods or whatever to get around the necessity to create a caloric deficit; they hope that they can avoid the fundamental principle of fat loss (an imbalance between energy intake and output) with some minor detail.  That’s when the problems start.

I can’t count the number of times someone has come on the support forum with a question about “Why am I stalling/why am I not losing weight?” and they can’t even answer the basic questions of “How many calories are you eating per day?  How much protein?  How many total carbs?  How much total dietary fat?”  They can tell you just about everything about their diet except the relevant stuff: how much.

So they are worrying about the glycemic index of one food versus another and one protein source versus another and whether 12.7% of one nutrient is better or worse than 17.2% of the same nutrient and one supplement versus another and…..  And they haven’t even figured out how much they are currently eating per day, or their total macronutrient intake or anything else that actually matters.  On and on it goes and I’m sure readers can see this for themselves across the Internet.

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Making My Point

Make no mistake, worrying about minor details can have value in certain circumstances and don’t misconstrue what I’m saying here.  For some it’s a true physiological need; those advanced people who need to worry about the details because they are at a level that matters.  But, as I noted above, those folks have already spent so much time on the fundamentals that they are in a position where it may matter.

For others, there is often a psychological need to worry about details.  There is a type of dieter I once saw Dan Duchaine describe as ‘wanting all the plumbing’ who tends to follow diet and training programs better when they have an insane amount of details to worry about.   They may not need them in the sense of a true physiological need but they want them and will only be happy if they have them present.

And, to a degree, a lot of what is written in the athletic and bodybuilding literature (those subcultures being towards the obsessive end of things) is geared towards that; giving people a lot of details that are often irrelevant to worry about and obsess about.  Certainly psychological needs are important and have to be taken into account but those details must be placed on top of a basic of fundamentals.  Many of those folks often learn over time that the details aren’t really that relevant anyhow.  But starting out they often need/want those details to be happy or to follow their program.

Because what you usually find is this: once you get the fundamental principles in order, most of the minor details don’t matter very much.  At the very least, they don’t add nearly to the results that most people hope for.  And until you get the fundamental principles in place, the minor details don’t matter at all.  That’s on top of the situation where obsessing about those details prevent someone from ever actually acting in the first place.

As Doc said so clearly and succinctly: Do not subordinate fundamental principles to minor details.

Today I want to look specifically at how I approached training (again noting that there are obviously more ways to approach the situation than just this one).  I’ll also look a bit at some things I might do differently now as well as talking about progressions, variation, etc. to keep the obese beginner moving towards their goals.  And I will finish today even if it ends up being long.

We catch up with a beginning trainee just having done roughly 30 minutes of paperwork and possibly some basic measurements (tape measure, weight, skinfolds, depending on the situation) leaving roughly 30 minutes or thereabouts for the first workout.  What did I have them do?

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Part 1: Cardio

Pretty much without exception, we’d start with cardio.  Usually I’d use the treadmill and I choose this for a variety of reasons.  First and foremost, everybody knows how to walk.  Second, the intensity can be easily controlled by adjusting pace and incline.  Third, walking tends not to cause the local muscular fatigue that something like an exercise bike or Stairmaster or whatever does in beginners since it’s more whole body; this limits unpleasant sensations and excessive fatigue that tie into the aspects of generating positive affect I talked about in Training the Obese Beginner: Part 4.  Fourth, it gave me a chance to chat and give the first of many mini-lectures without having to worry about any other issues.

I would note that there is no real reason not to go outside and walk if that’s available.  It is harder to gauge the intensity but can have benefits in terms of teaching clients that they can always find something to do activity wise even if they don’t have machines available.  But I was always working in environments where the outdoors were busy streets or the gym was in a strip mall or what have you and I had to work with what was available.

At one gym I worked at, we didn’t have treadmills so I’d walk with them on the track that surrounded the main area.   In contrast, two friends in the Austin area get their clients walking outdoors since the area around the gym will support it and they don’t want them reliant on machines.  It’s just a function of adapting to what you have available and trainers need to keep in mind that the principles are what’s important; the details less so.

Now, I said previously that I generally see it as a ‘waste’ to monitor cardio with clients.  This is true although sometimes you have to or it doesn’t get done.  If a client wants to pay me to keep them company on the treadmill, I guess that’s their problem even if I’d rather them get into the habit of doing it on their own so the hour is spent on more useful things.

However, in the initial stages, since they don’t need much weight training and I had the time, I would monitor their cardio sessions.  This allowed me to give a lot of little mini-lectures which goes towards the education aspect of training I mentioned in previous parts of this series.  Cardio sessions were an excellent time to start educating the client about what they were doing and why they were doing it.

It’s all too easy as a trainer to just say ‘Do this’ but that may not help the client ideally in the long term.  What if they move, what if you move, what happens when you go on a vacation? A lot of things can happen that cut the client off from you.  If you’ve taught the client why they are doing certain things and how to train, they can do it on their own.

If you’ve made them nothing but reliant on you, you haven’t done that.  My goal, in a lot of ways, was to get my clients to the point that they didn’t need me any more.  Perhaps not fantastic from an income perspective but it was the only way I felt good about what I was doing.  I usually found that, if I were doing my job well, clients would often continue hiring me because they wanted to do so, not necessarily because they needed to do so.

In any case, a key mini-lecture that I always gave on the first day was to explain the FITT principle of training: frequency, intensity, time and type.  Or how often, how hard, how long and what.  I needed to make them aware of things like minimums for activity (e.g. 3X/week for cardio work, more if possible but 3Xweek as a minimum, weight training a minimum of 2X/week).  Time (e.g. 20 minutes cardio as a minimum, more may be better, but that’s the minimum).  Type of cardio activity, really doesn’t matter at this point, do what you’ll consistently do.

But the big one for this first lecture was intensity.  How hard does it need to be to be worthwhile and how hard did I want them working.  This ties into the stuff I talked about in Training the Obese Beginner Part 4; since most were at least familiar with the concept, I’d first introduce them to the whole idea of heart rate and then basically throw it out, preferring to use the rating of perceived exertion (RPE) scale.  It’s less of a hassle than using heart rate and, with practice, turns out to be just as accurate.

I used the 1-10 RPE scale (rather than the original 6-20, explaining the distinction will have to wait for another article) and would give them an idea of the ranges by describing 1 as sitting on the couch and 10 as an all-out effort (I used the example of getting to the airport late and having to sprint to the terminal and feeling like you’re going to die in the process since that was something most could relate to).

I told them that, during their initial cardio sessions, I wanted them working at about a 3-4 on this scale, which I described as challenging but doable (so not too hard but not too easy either).   Which is sort of interesting since it basically would seem to be what the data on affect and self-paced activity suggests; let people work at a self-selected intensity and they’ll work at a challenging but achievable level somewhat below the point where they would cross the ventilatory threshold and start to generate a negative affect.

And, without even knowing that what I was doing might be a good thing, I let them set that intensity to start with.  Usually it was fairly slow, brisk walking if that.  I didn’t care.  I told them to make it challenging but not impossible and usually they’d pick the right pace or maybe a little bit below that.

If I had them check heart rate, it was always pretty much in the right spot anyhow or maybe a little bit below the supposed ‘ideal’ range.  And, as I’ve hammered throughout this series, I far more interested in them accomplishing the workout successfully than how hard they were working; there would always be time to increase the workload.

Related to this, someone in the comments section of Training the Obese Beginner Part 4 asked about the ‘talk test’ and this is another valid way of setting a proper aerobic intensity.  I would tell my clients that another way to gauge cardio intensity is that they should be able to keep a broken conversation during the workout.

That if they could talk non-stop it was too easy, if they were gasping for breath between words, it was too hard.  If they could keep a broken conversation, that was right.  This would invariably put them at the same 3-4 RPE and correct workload/HR for them.

Now, as I noted in a previous part, I have had beginner clients for whom 5 minutes of continuous activity at even this moderate of a workload was nearly at their limits.   I would simply tell them to stop the session if they started to feel particularly fatigued and let the duration fall where it may in that first session.  If it was 5 minutes, that was fine.  if they went to 10 minutes, I’d usually still stop them since we had other stuff to do with the remaining time.

But now wasn’t the time to push things at all.  Remember the goal: break them in without breaking them.

If there were time later in the session, I might take them back to the treadmill for 5-10 more minutes.  An alternate approach would be to throw in 5 minutes of cardio in-between weight exercises if the time is available.  Do 5 minutes 4 times and you get 20 minutes across the session; do 10 minutes twice and you get the same 20 minutes total and a successful initial workout.

Either way, the client gets 10-20 minutes of activity, without dying in the process in their initial workout which was just fine with me.  Even if they only get 10 total minutes, that’s still more than they would have done otherwise and I’d always get them to add a minute or two at the next workout to start working on progression from the get go.  It usually only took a few workouts (or maybe a couple of weeks tops) to get them to 20 minutes of continuous activity.

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Part 2: Weights

After cardio was done, it was time for weights.  Those of you embroiled in the current trends in fitness are wondering ‘what about the dynamic stretching, what about foam rolling, what about activation?’  Well, I didn’t do any of it.  At the time, nobody did and I wouldn’t have had time anyhow during the first session.  Full range weight training acts as a dynamic stretching stimulus as it is.

Make no mistake, that’s all fantastic stuff to add if you have time and they have the interest (and certainly it can be important and play a role in the gym).  But this is about day 1, the goal was getting them through 20-30 minutes of activity successfully.  Even if I had known about all that currently trendy stuff, I wouldn’t have done any of it.  Not on day 1 anyhow (I’d often stretch clients at the end of workouts at later sessions).  Save it for the second or third session when you have the full hour and more time to work with.

So now we went to weights.  And here I will show my hereticism and spur yet another silly debate in the comments section: I used machines almost exclusively and almost without exception (sometimes I’d teach a dumbbell chest press if I were bored with teaching the chest press machines).  Yes, I know…non-functional.  Yes, I know…body weight is better.

But guess what?  It really doesn’t matter at this stage and remember my overarching goal: generate success without breaking the client.  And in untrained beginners with no previous training background or movement background, anything more complex than the simplest of stuff is too much under most circumstances.  I saw too much to lose and little to be gained by using more complexity than a basic machine approach provided.

Now, people with a movement background can’t understand this, they understand where there bodies are in space, they don’t understand why someone new to activity (whether obese or not) just feels like a moronic spazz trying to do complicated stuff.

If you give an obese beginner that type of stuff (whether functional movements or simply complex free weight exercises) and they tend to feel terrible; they can’t do it, they feel uncomfortable and that is a bad thing on the first day.  I didn’t see it as generating the positive reinforcement I wanted and could always teach those movements later as necessary.  This was sort of the vague point I made in an earlier part: with total beginners you have to get them in shape to train.  That means using activities that they can actually accomplish meaningfully.  Many movements in vogue today don’t meet that important criterion in my opinion.

As well, I often only had 3 short sessions to get the person to basic competency in the weight room; as I discussed in detail in the Beginning Weight Training series, that tended to limit how complex of a movement I could teach.  I could get them to basic competency on machines in 3 sessions.  No way could I teach anything much more complex like a squat or what have you.  Because they’d end up killing themselves training alone on those movements; they’d know just enough to get hurt.

Now, once again, I realize that the above is heretical in the day and age where ‘functional’ training and body weight stuff are all the rage.  So…

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Let me Rant A Little Bit About Body Weight/Functional Exercises

I read a lot of training e-books, it’s part of my job to keep track with what people in the industry are doing and where the trends are moving so that I can bitch about it.  And I always smile when I see someone advocating things like t-pushups and burpees and all of that trendy bodyweight stuff….and the exercises are almost always being demonstrated by someone who weighs maybe 160 lbs and is already fit.   And who has spent most of their week reading marketing manuals and working on their sales page.

Because if you think an untrained female who weighs 300 lbs can do a push-up period much less a one-armed t-push up then you’re out of your mind.  Burpees are often just as bad; they can be done but not well.  Those types of movements end up being a miserable disappointing experience for the beginner obese client in my opinion.  And since I don’t see them as accomplishing much more in this population than simpler, more easily learned, movements, I see no point to them.  At least not initially.  Please note that last word before you leave nasty comments on this article.

Similarly, it used to kill me watching a 130 lb female personal trainer putting their 250 lb female client through walking lunge sets.  I mean, that’s what the trainer (who is light with years of training behind them) does to look all hot, what’s the problem?   But that trainer has no clue about what’s it’s like to be that big, to have no movement background or years of training.  Nor do they seem to see the problems the client is having with the movement (knees breaking in, torso collapsing); they are usually too busy flirting with the cute guy in the tank top or another personal trainer.

Again, I know that there is this popular meme that you need to be able to control body weight before you lift weights.  And that’s true maybe if you’re working with young male athletes who can actually do body weight movements well from the get go.

But it’s rarely true if you’re working with untrained older individuals who haven’t done an ounce of exercise for a decade.  And almost never true for the obese beginner who I’m writing about.   Maybe for some lower body movements but certainly not upper body where neither the strength nor coordination is there.

Basically, for a lot of body weight movements, you need a base of strength to be able to do them competently.  And if you can’t do them competently (or at all) because the load of your body is simply too high, then you can’t use them to gain the strength that you need.

In contrast, by using machines, I could start with weights that were far lighter than body weight to actually build the basic strength and technique needed to do more complex stuff down the road.  And do so in a controlled environment and in a fashion that let me provide positive reinforcement by having the client experience success from the first workout on.  Which, as I continue to hammer home I feel is a key in training the obese beginner (and arguably less true in training the psycho motivated wannabe athlete in which case, go to town).

Related to this, I’ve noted that many beginners are already self-conscious as hell about being in the gym in the first place, and this can be even more true for the obese beginner.  Making them look (and more importantly feel) foolish in the gym by giving them complex movements that they can’t do is not good for adherence.  They have to feel success and they have to feel it from day 1.

In a related vein, I tried to avoid having my obese clients have to get up and down off the floor too often; as that seemed to also cause embarrassment for some.  For that reason alone, even though I think poorly of most of them, I usually used ab machines rather than floor ab work.  I simply taught them correctly (focus on spinal flexion rather than hip flexion).

Which isn’t to say that I don’t think that more complex movements are useless in this population; there may very well be specific situations where they are appropriate.  They could always be added later after the client was into good habits, had lost some weight, had developed some of the basic strength and fitness needed to do them and needed some variety in their training or to move to something more intensive.

But I don’t think they are the right thing to start with under most circumstances.  That is, I’m not saying that I used machines exclusively forever (I know at least one person will claim that in the comments section), simply that I usually always started with them.

Ok, let’s get off that soapbox…I’ll save the rest of that rant for a series on exercise choice that I’m going to write at some point.

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Back to my Point

So I used machines with the majority of beginners, obese or not.  Because my goal was to get people in shape to train, to get them into regular exercise habits and to do it in such a fashion that they got the greatest chance of feeling success from the first to second workout.  And complex multi-planar and/or body weight movements don’t tend to achieve that goal in my opinion.  There’s too much going on and too much chance of embarrassment or feeling bad about it.

On machines, I could control not only the loading more accurately but ensure that they got at least something out of it training wise since they could actually do more than a handful of repetitions without dying in the process.   So that’s what I did and this is how I approached in in that first session.

Following cardio of whatever duration, we’d go do weights, typically 4 movements on the first day (the routine I traditionally used appears below).  That allowed me to train the ‘full body’ and was about all I had time for at this point anyhow.  Again, it allowed me to break them in without breaking them.

Now I come from the ‘tell me, show me, involve me’ school of teaching.  First I’d introduce the exercise and tell them what it was and what it trained.  For example, “This is the chest press, it will train your chest muscles along with your shoulders and triceps.  If you had to pick only one or two upper body exercises, this should be one of them along with the next movement I’m going to show you which is the row.”

Then I’d show them how to do the movement focusing on just a handful of technique cues explaining as I showed a few repetitions.  What the movement pattern was, rough movement speeds, along with how to set the machine and how I’d note the settings on their workout card so they got used to the notations on weight, sets and reps along with how to set the machine on their own.  I’d also introduce them to breathing although, as noted in Breathing During Weight Training, I didn’t get into many details on the first workout: I cared that they breathed, not how they breathed.  Those could wait until workout 2 or 3.

Then I’d have them do a set.  I always went light, most of this was experience in terms of where to start and I always erred on the side of too light.  I know that there are charts with percentage of body weight to start movements at; I never used them and don’t recommend that you do.

It never hurts to start too light and can hurt a lot to start too heavy.  Remember the goal of the first day: break them in without breaking them.  I didn’t want them to be sore the next day if I could avoid it (invariably pecs always got a bit sore no matter how light I went, I have no idea why).

As well, this allowed me to apply one of the ‘tricks’ I mentioned in a previous part of the series.  By starting super light on day 1, I was usually able to have them increase the weight a little bit at the second workout.  That was along with them feeling much more comfortable in the movement patterns and more confident.  I could tell them that they had already made progress.  More importantly it was progress that they could usually feel in terms of the movement patterns feeling more comfortable.  Seeing the weight go up from workout 1 to workout 2 didn’t hurt either.

Was it real progress in terms of strength?  No, not really.  But yes, sort of in that there is a neural component of learning to lift.  But mostly it was a function of my starting so damn light that they couldn’t help but raise the weight.   It may be a trick but the end result was the same; they could see that their efforts from day 1 weren’t ‘wasted’, immediate progress was part of positive reinforcement.  Even if I had to cheat a bit to get it, I wanted them to feel not only success on Day 1 but progress by Day 2.

During that single set, I’d cue every repetition, depending on the movement and the gender I’d use touch training to get them aware of the muscles involved (e.g. placing my hands on their mid-back and cueing scapular retraction during rowing, often actively moving their shoulders forwards and back to show them the movement they should be doing).  Be careful with this: ask before you touch and don’t touch inappropriately (e.g. a male trainer cueing a female trainee’s pecs is looking for a lawsuit).

For some movements, I might lead them through the first few repetitions to show them the movement pattern.  So if I were teaching a DB bench press, I’d manually follow them through a few reps moving them through the curved movement before letting them go on their own for the remainder of the set.

They also got a second mini-lecture during this part of the workout: I’d tell them that the goal was anywhere between 8 and 12 repetitions and to stop if they felt it getting too challenging.  Usually, by selecting the right weight, they always got to 12 the first day.  Not every time but almost always.

I also taught them the basics of a single progression approach; basically I told them to get as many reps as they could get in good form and when they got to 12, that they should go up in weight a little bit (this often meant showing them how to use little plates to increment the weights in smaller jumps than most machines will allow).  I’d tell them that a weight increase would often drop the reps back to 8 (or sometimes less) and to build back up to 12 and then go up again.  Is this an ideal form of progression?  For beginners, I think so.

Now, here’s the exact ‘basic’ workout I used with beginners of all sorts. Sure I gave them the ‘you’ll get an individualized program’ speech but, let’s face it, this is mostly nonsense.  Beginners all need basically the same thing unless you’re dealing with injuries or whatever.

1. Leg Press (1)*
2. Calf Raise (3) (done on leg press machine after leg press)
3. Leg curl (2)
4. Bench Press (1)*
5. Row (1)*
6. Shoulder Press (2)
7. Lat Pulldown (2)
8. Triceps Pushdown (3)
9. Biceps Curl (3)
10. Crunch (1)*
11. Back Extension (3)

The numbers after each exercise indicate the workout number I introduced them at.  So everything with a 1 (leg press, chest press, row, crunch) was done at the first workout.  At the second workout, those 4 would be done with the addition of everything with a 2 after it: so the leg curl, shoulder press and lat pulldown.  At workout 3, I’d add the direct arm work and back extensions.

The exercises with a * after them are sort of the ‘big 4′ I would emphasize.  I’d make the clients aware that, if they had massively limited time (e.g. only 10 minutes to train), just doing those 4 movements would basically work ‘everything’.  I’ll come back to this point below.  You might note that the exercises are ordered to move from larger to smaller and to alternate pushing and pulling movements to minimize fatigue.

So within 3 workouts, I would move them from 4 movements to a total of 11.  Again, doing 1 set of 8-12 reps/exercise and progressing weights as they were able (E.g. get to 12 reps easily, time to move up).  By the time you factored in teaching and re-cueing things, along with an increase in cardio duration before and/or after, this usually made for a full hour of training.

So within 3 workouts, having started at a very moderate 25-30 minutes or less, I’d have them to a full hour of a basic routine and do it without really overwhelming them too heavily.  The weight routine itself rarely took more than 30 total minutes to complete; as I noted I often moved clients to 30 minutes workouts so long as they were willing to do cardio on their own time.

Some of you may question the inclusion of such small muscle group movements as arm work or whatever.  To a degree this was a bit of pandering to the client.  Men always want arm work to get buffed and women are concerned with ‘toning their arms’.  So I put it in to keep them happy.  Sure, we can quibble but there is an element of keeping the client happy.  It never took more than a few minutes anyhow.

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Cardio Progressions and Variations

So that was the first 3 basic workouts, moving them to what I considered a full hour workout fairly rapidly.   Often they would go off on their own at that point and I had to hope that I’d given them enough information to progress on their own without me.  That was part of the endless mini-lecturing during every workout (many would often hire me again 6 weeks later for a new routine).

But assuming I continued working with them, the focus from that point on was then on progression from that basic workout.   With the cardio, the goal was to first get them to a minimum of 20 minutes continuously at least three times per week, regardless of the pace.  This is sort of the bare minimum to start building any type of aerobic fitness and get any sort of metabolic or physiological effects and I could get most there with some type of work within a few workouts.  Of course, I always encouraged folks to do more on their own time if they were able or willing.

But the first goalpost was to hit 20 minutes three times per week consistently.  More was better but that was the bare minimum I wanted to see.  In some cases, I’d be overseeing the cardio; in others I was only handling weight room stuff and cardio was being done on the client’s own time (either before or after weight training).

Around week 4, clients usually saw the first cardio adaptation where they would invariably report some experience out in the real world where their increased fitness came in handy; even if the initial fat loss was slow in coming this invariably had the benefit of making them realize the benefits of what thye were doing (invariably by week 8, measurable fat loss would have occurred).

One specific case comes to mind, a client who had gone camping with her family and was able, for the first time, to carry her child on her back without gasping for breath.  This was huge for her and acted as a massive positive reinforcement for the role of exercise in her life; she was able to do something important to her with less effort.  But as noted, this is usually a slower adaptation for cardio stuff which is why it was so important in my mind to focus on weight room stuff and clients feeling progression and positive feedback there.

Around week 4, assuming the client had been getting their consistent cardio in, I’d also usually start introducing them to working a bit harder during the cardio sessions.  While it wasn’t formal interval type training, I’d get them to start introducing 30-60 seconds of exercise at an intensity that was above their current comfort zone within their cardio session.

It was a way to start getting them used to working a bit harder as well as pushing their fitness up to the next level.  It also helped to make them aware, or so I hoped, that they couldn’t expect to stay at the same level of training forever and keep seeing progress; at some point they had to push a bit harder and get out of their comfort zone. But I always made sure that they had reached the first goalpost and gotten into good habits with more accomplishable stuff first.

So if they were doing 30 minutes at a moderate pace at this point, I’d have them go 1 minute harder every 5 minutes and push just a little bit above their current comfort level (I’m talking maybe a small bump in treadmill speed or whatever).  Then come back to their previous training intensity and then repeat that multiple times throughout the workout.

And I’d tell them to try to increase the duration of the harder bits gradually while reducing the times at a lower intensity.  Over several workouts, this would eventually have them working the full duration at the higher intensity.

Eventually, I might have moved some folks to true high-intensity interval training but, at least with the majority of this population, the progression they were seeing from doing the moderate stuff was sufficient that there was simply no need to bother with it.

So what about weights?

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Weight Progressions and Variations

With the routine I presented above, at the time I simply had clients doing a single set of 8-12 repetitions on everything, progressing weight as they were able.  So when they got to 12 reps fairly easily, I’d have them raise weight a bit, dropping reps and building them back up until they hit 12 again.  Rinse and repeat.  Very simple, very doable, very effective in the initial stages of training (keep in mind we’re talking here about folks looking at fat loss and general health so their strength goals are much more moderate than someone else).

Over time, they would usually start to push a bit harder of their own accord.  This was a very gradual progression and happened a lot as a function of the double progression itself.  Since they usually wanted to get to 12, especially as they got more confident in the exercises, they’ start pushing themselves a bit harder over time.  My only requirement was that they only did as many reps as they could do in good form.  But in addition, I’d often encourage them to get the next repetition when it looked like they were giving up a bit early.  Just to teach them that they had more in them and could work harder without dying.

Over time this taught them that they could push harder than they thought.  Over the span of  the first 4-6 weeks of training, they often got to where they working fairly close to their limits without ever having felt particularly overloaded; it just happened exceedingly gradually.  As well, as the weights got heavier, they might start including a single warm-up set prior to the main set.  This was time for another mini-lecture on the topic of appropriate warm-ups and such.

I’d note that, given my comments in previous parts of this series regarding the benefits of glycogen depletion on whole body fat oxidation and muscular insulin sensitivity, I’d be likely to do things differently now with this population of clients.  So rather than focusing on adding weight in a moderate repetition range, I’d probably be more likely to build the reps up to the 15-20 repetition range over the first couple of workouts still sticking with that single set.  Then I’d add sets.

So they’d still start with that single set of 8-12 and then rather than increasing weight, I’d probably push up the reps in good form and use a double progression in the 15-20 repetition range (such that the total duration of the set if 45-60 seconds, where glycogen is best depleted).  Just a consideration for trainers reading this series looking to apply the information from previous parts.

So rather than building up to the full 11 movements over the first week and then maintaining at a single set, trainers might consider sticking with the big 4 (or some combination) of leg press, chest press, row and something for core and start building the sets up, perhaps adding a set per week of 15-20 repetitions, to a maximum of 3-4 sets.

Done for 4 compound exercises (or even lower body, compound push, compound pull), that’s 12-16 sets. With a moderate rest interval, that can be accomplished in 30-40 minutes leaving time for other stuff (warmups, cooldowns, foam rolling, etc.).  And built up over the first 3-4 weeks, this will not only start to build the clients work capacity but do a good job of depleting muscle glycogen to enhance full body fat oxidation.

Combined with a lowering of calories/carbohydrates, this will start to retrain the obese client’s body to use fat for a fuel more effectively as discussed in previous parts of the series.  And is effectively what a lot of the metabolic type weight training workouts out there are attempting to accomplish.  I’m simply suggesting building up to it over the first few weeks rather than jumping straight into the full volume and killing people.

I’d note that, even within the context of my own basic 1 set routine, usually about week 6 or so, I’d either introduce them to some new movements or switch everything out.  This was often a time to move to more complex exercises if I felt they were ready.  It wouldn’t necessarily be a wholesale replacement, I might just change some movements and not others.

So rather than a machine chest press, I’d teach them a DB flat or incline press.  Rather than the row machine, they’d get a cable row.  Machine shoulder presses might become a DB overhead press or lateral raises and I might teach a different variant on the pulldown (medium overgrip rather than narrow undergrip).  As much as anything this was to prevent boredom (both theirs and mine), as well it gave them more options for when they were in the gym.

By getting them used to free weight exercises, this also gave them options for when they were traveling since machines can vary from gym to gym.  Sometimes they’d do the original workout one day and the new movements at a another.  Of course, they’d continue working on progression and such.  In some cases, clients might be moved to a basic split routine (if it fit their goals and schedule), a basic upper/lower kind of thing.

This was often useful for 30 minute clients as I could get them doing more movements and sets without running over the time I had for them.  So rather than 11 exercises for one set of a full body routine done every day, I could get them doing multiple sets of 5-6 exercises at each workout with a split routine of some sort.

I think you get the idea.  Basically the goal was to break them in without breaking them and then get them into a nice gradual progression such that by week 4-6 (past the time good habits are starting to get ingrained) they had actually developed some fitness and momentum without ever really breaking them.  By the time they had built their fitness up from a near zero baseline at week zero, they were often working far harder than they ever thought possible and had reached that point without ever feeling overloaded.

Intensifying things a bit at this point is not only a good idea but reasonable, they have the basic fitness to handle it now and should have developed enough confidence from receiving positive reinforcement to be ready for it.  It still needn’t be some major shock to the system, just a gradual increase in the workload (either frequency, volume, intensity or some combination) to get them moving to the next level of fitness and training.

If nothing else, it’s crucial to make clients of all sorts understand that progression is the name of the game.   People working at the same level endlessly aren’t getting fitter and usually aren’t getting leaner either (you can see this in any gym anywhere).  Teaching beginner clients about the critical need to progress over time is a key to the educational aspect of being a trainer.  It doesn’t have to be a continuous death-march to higher and higher levels of intensity and volume but over time things do need to progress to avoid stagnation.

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Summing Up

So finally, that would seem to wrap this up.  I know it took me a long time to get to the point and hopefully the information presented in this final piece was worth the wait.  I imagine some readers are wondering about diet, which I only touched on a little bit in previous parts of the series.  Frankly, there’s enough information elsewhere on the site regarding setting up diets and such that I don’t feel the need to rehash it here.

With most beginning clients, I tended to focus more on qualitative changes (e.g. making different food choices) to reduce their caloric intake rather than being on so much of a specific diet; much of this was because most simply weren’t that interested in making wholesale changes to their diet.

Certainly lowering calories and carbohydrates accomplishes some nice things and there is good reason to skew towards a higher protein/higher fat/lower carbohydrate diet in the obese/insulin resistant client.  But often just making some qualitative changes is sufficient to get things started (one thing I always emphasized was getting some protein at every meal).  More details and complications can be introduced as the client is ready for them.

A lot of this was just client dependent and covering that would take another full and overwritten article series.  I sort of touch on this idea in How Detail Oriented Do You Need to Be? basically distinguishing between the type-a ‘all the plumbing diet’ types of folks and those who want small manageable changes.  There are pros and cons to both approaches depending on the specifics of the client and the situation.

And that’s all folks.