Exercise Doesn't Work? More trash...

The following article is written about a recent study that found that exercise alone is not enough in the quest for weight loss. The first flaw in the study is that they had the participants exercising at low intensities. Exercise for weight loss must be designed as such. To burn calories, you have to work hard. Think of activity on a spectrum from sitting down to maximum effort. The closer you are to sitting and doing nothing, the less whatever you are doing counts as exercise. If you are sitting on a stationary bike at a pace comfortable enough to speak, that really isn't worthy of being called exercise. In order to coax the body into expending lots of calories, you have to challenge the metabolic systems.

The researchers also conclude that since most people want to "burn fat" they should exercise in the "fat burning zone," which is a complete fallacy. Yes, exercise at low intensities principally utilizes fat as the primary energy source, but fat is the primary energy source at rest, as well. You have to work hard and get into the "sugar burning zone" to affect weight loss...

Phys Ed: Why Doesn’t Exercise Lead to Weight Loss?

Well - Tara Parker-Pope on Health

November 4, 2009, 12:01 amPhys Ed: Why Doesn’t Exercise Lead to Weight Loss?

By Gretchen Reynolds,
Sven Hagolani/Getty Images

For some time, researchers have been finding that people who exercise don’t necessarily lose weight. A study published online in September in The British Journal of Sports Medicine was the latest to report apparently disappointing slimming results. In the study, 58 obese people completed 12 weeks of supervised aerobic training without changing their diets. The group lost an average of a little more than seven pounds, and many lost barely half that.How can that be? Exercise, it seems, should make you thin. Activity burns calories. No one doubts that.“Walking, even at a very easy pace, you’ll probably burn three or four calories a minute,” beyond what you would use quietly sitting in a chair, said Dan Carey, Ph.D., an assistant professor of exercise physiology at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, who studies exercise and metabolism.But few people, an overwhelming body of research shows, achieve significant weight loss with exercise alone, not without changing their eating habits. A new study from scientists at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver offers some reasons why. For the study, the researchers recruited several groups of people. Some were lean endurance athletes; some sedentary and lean; some sedentary and obese. Each of the subjects agreed to spend, over the course of the experiment, several 24-hour periods in a special laboratory room (a walk-in calorimeter) that measures the number of calories a person burns. Using various calculations, the researchers could also tell whether the calories expended were in the form of fat or carbohydrates, the body’s two main fuel sources. Burning more fat than carbohydrates is obviously desirable for weight loss, since the fat being burned comes primarily from body fat stores, and we all, even the leanest among us,have plenty of those.The Denver researchers were especially interested in how the athletes’ bodies would apportion and use calories. It has been well documented that regular endurance training increases the ability of the body to use fat as a fuel during exercise. They wondered, though, if the athletes — or any of the other subjects — would burn extra fat calories after exercising, a phenomenon that some exercisers (and even more diet and fitness books) call “afterburn.”“Many people believe that you rev up” your metabolism after an exercise session “so that you burn additional body fat throughout the day,” said Edward Melanson, Ph.D., an associate professor in the division of endocrinology at the School of Medicine and the lead author of the study. If afterburn were found to exist, it would suggest that even if you replaced the calories you used during an exercise session, you should lose weight, without gaining weight — the proverbial free lunch.Each of Melanson’s subjects spent 24 quiet hours in the calorimeter, followed later by another 24 hours that included an hourlong bout of stationary bicycling. The cycling was deliberately performed at a relatively easy intensity (about 55 percent of each person’s predetermined aerobic capacity). It is well known physiologically that, while high-intensity exercise demands mostly carbohydrate calories (since carbohydrates can quickly reach the bloodstream and, from there, laboring muscles), low-intensity exercise prompts the body to burn at least some stored fat. All of the subjects ate three meals a day.To their surprise, the researchers found that none of the groups, including the athletes, experienced “afterburn.” They did not use additional body fat on the day when they exercised. In fact, most of the subjects burned slightly less fat over the 24-hour study period when they exercised than when they did not.“The message of our work is really simple,” although not agreeable to hear, Melanson said. “It all comes down to energy balance,” or, as you might have guessed, calories in and calories out. People “are only burning 200 or 300 calories” in a typical 30-minute exercise session, Melanson points out. “You replace that with one bottle of Gatorade.”Related* More Phys Ed columns* Faster, Higher, Stronger* Fitness and Nutrition NewsThis does not mean that exercise has no impact on body weight, or that you can’t calibrate your workouts to maximize the amount of body fat that you burn, if that’s your goal.“If you work out at an easy intensity, you will burn a higher percentage of fat calories” than if you work out a higher intensity, Carey says, so you should draw down some of the padding you’ve accumulated on the hips or elsewhere — if you don’t replace all of the calories afterward. To help those hoping to reduce their body fat, he published formulas in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research last month that detailed the heart rates at which a person could maximize fat burning. “Heart rates of between 105 and 134” beats per minute, Carey said, represent the fat-burning zone. “It’s probably best to work out near the top of that zone,” he says, “so that you burn more calories over all” than at the extremely leisurely lower end.Perhaps just as important, bear in mind that exercise has benefits beyond weight reduction. In the study of obese people who took up exercise, most became notably healthier, increasing their aerobic capacity, decreasing their blood pressure and resting heart rates, and, the authors write, achieving “an acute exercise-induced increase in positive mood,” leading the authors to conclude that, “significant and meaningful health benefits can be achieved even in the presence of lower than expected exercise-induced weight loss.”Finally and thankfully, exercise seems to aid, physiologically, in the battle to keep off body fat once it has been, through resolute calorie reduction, chiseled away. In other work by Melanson’s group, published in September, laboratory rats that had been overfed and then slimmed through calorie reduction were able to “defend” their lower weight more effectively if they ran on a treadmill and ate at will than if they had no access to a treadmill. The exercise seemed to reset certain metabolic pathways within the rats, Melanson says, that blunted their body’s drive to replace the lost fat. Similar mechanisms, he adds, probably operate within the bodies of humans, providing scientific justification for signing up for that Thanksgiving Day 5K.

Exercise Improves Body Image For Fit And Unfit Alike

ScienceDaily (Oct. 9, 2009) — Attention weekend warriors: the simple act of exercise and not fitness itself can convince you that you look better, a new University of Florida study finds.

People who don't achieve workout milestones such as losing fat, gaining strength or boosting cardiovascular fitness feel just as good about their bodies as their more athletic counterparts, said Heather Hausenblas, a UF exercise psychologist. Her study is published in the September issue of the Journal of Health Psychology.

"You would think that if you become more fit that you would experience greater improvements in terms of body image, but that's not what we found," she said. "It may be that the requirements to receive the psychological benefits of exercise, including those relating to body image, differ substantially from the physical benefits."

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Exercise Improves Body Image For Fit And Unfit Alike

[Supertraining] Is the Exercise Cool-Down Really Necessary? - Inbox - Yahoo! Mail

Is the Exercise Cool-Down Really Necessary?

The New York Times

By GINA KOLATA
Published: October 13, 2009

MY husband and I were riding our bikes not long ago, and when we were about a mile from home, we did our usual thing. We call it the sprint to the finish: ride as hard and as fast as we can until we reach our driveway, racing to see who could get there first.

We pulled up, slammed on our brakes and hopped off our bikes. A neighbor was walking by and said, "How did you do that?"

"I just put on my brakes," I told him. No, he said, he meant how could we just stop like that without cooling down?

Strange as it might seem, that had never occurred to me. But the cool-down is enshrined in training lore. It's in physiology textbooks, personal trainers often insist on it, fitness magazines tell you that you must do it — and some exercise equipment at gyms automatically includes it. You punch in the time you want to work out on the machine and when your time is up, the machine automatically reduces the workload and continues for five minutes so you can cool down.

The problem, says Hirofumi Tanaka, an exercise physiologist at the University of Texas, Austin, is that there is pretty much no science behind the cool-down advice.

The cool-down, Dr. Tanaka said, "is an understudied topic."

"Everyone thinks it's an established fact," he added, "so they don't study it."

It's not even clear what a cool-down is supposed to be. Some say you just have to keep moving for a few minutes — walking to your car after you finish a run rather than stopping abruptly and standing there.

Others say you have to spend 5 to 10 minutes doing the same exercise, only slowly. Jog after your run, then transition into a walk. Still others say that a cool-down should include stretching.

And it's not clear what the cool-down is supposed to do. Some say it alleviates muscle soreness. Others say it prevents muscle tightness or relieves strain on the heart.

Exercise researchers say there is only one agreed-on fact about the possible risk of suddenly stopping intense exercise.

When you exercise hard, the blood vessels in your legs are expanded to send more blood to your legs and feet. And your heart is pumping fast. If you suddenly stop, your heart slows down, your blood is pooled in your legs and feet, and you can feel dizzy, even pass out.

The best athletes are most vulnerable, said Dr. Paul Thompson, a cardiologist and marathon runner who is an exercise researcher at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut.

"If you are well trained, your heart rate is slow already, and it slows down even faster with exercise," he said. "Also, there are bigger veins with a large capacity to pool blood in your legs."

That effect can also be deleterious for someone with heart disease, said Carl Foster, an exercise physiologist at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, because blood vessels leading to the heart are already narrowed, making it hard for blood to get in. "That's always a concern," Dr. Foster said. "But to my knowledge there is not a wealth of experimental data."

But does it matter for the ordinary, average athlete? "Probably not a great deal," Dr. Thompson said. And, anyway, most people don't just stand there, stock still, when their workout is over. They walk to the locker room or to their house or car, getting the cool-down benefit without officially "cooling down."

The idea of the cool-down seems to have originated with a popular theory — now known to be wrong — that muscles become sore after exercise because they accumulate lactic acid. In fact, lactic acid is a fuel. It's good to generate lactic acid, it's a normal part of exercise, and it has nothing to do with muscle soreness. But the lactic acid theory led to the notion that by slowly reducing the intensity of your workout you can give lactic acid a chance to dissipate.

Yet, Dr. Foster said, even though scientists know the lactic acid theory is wrong, it remains entrenched in the public's mind.

"It's an idea we can't get rid of," he said.

In fact, Dr. Tanaka said, one study of cyclists concluded that because lactic acid is good, it is better not to cool down after intense exercise. Lactic acid was turned back into glycogen, a muscle fuel, when cyclists simply stopped. When they cooled down, it was wasted, used up to fuel their muscles.

As far as muscle soreness goes, cooling down doesn't do anything to alleviate it, Dr. Tanaka said. And there is no physiological reason why it should.

That's also the conclusion of a study of muscle soreness by South African researchers who asked 52 healthy adults to walk backward downhill on a treadmill for 30 minutes — an exercise that can cause sore leg muscles. The participants were randomly assigned to cool down by walking slowly uphill for 10 minutes or simply to stop exercising. The result, the researchers reported, was that cooling down did nothing to prevent sore muscles.

And muscle tightness?

"In a different generation we would have called it an old wives' tale," Dr. Foster said. "Now I guess I'd call it an old physiologists' tale. There are no data to support the idea that a cool-down helps." But, he added, once again, "it's an idea we can't get rid of."
Exercise researchers say they act on their own advice.

Dr. Thompson says if he is doing a really hard track workout he will jog for a short distance when he finishes to avoid becoming dizzy. If he runs a half marathon, he will "start shuffling forward," after he crosses the finish line, for the same reason.

As for Dr. Tanaka, he does not cool down at all. He's a soccer player and, he says, he sees no particular reason to do anything after exercising other than just stop.

Boot Camp is changing locations!

Free Boot Camp Classes at Cornwall 5k click here Pay attention you! Get your butt to the Laurel Park annual 5k Run/Walk so you can participate in the activities! We need lots of support. This event is taking place in lieu of our traditional free Sunday Boot Camp, and we'd love to get all of our boot campers and friends out to the 5k to get a big group going. This is an easy run/walk event, so no pressure.
	Free Boot Camp Sunday, October 18, 2009 at 7:30AM We are going to begin a boot camp class for the month of October that is absolutely free. We'll conduct them at the Peekskill High School park (Depew) at 0730 on Sundays. There is no obligation or sales pitch, but we would like to expose you to our training style, energy, and personal approach to fitness. These classes will be available to our existing clients, as well. The boot camp will be absolutely achievable for any level of fitness, and we specialize in beginner fitness. You don't need to bring anything at all, except maybe a towel. Please check out our website at www.findingfitwithin.com for information about us. See you there! Laurel Park, Cornwall, NY See the full event details at http://www.meetup.com/Free-Boot-Camp-Classes/calendar/11386079/.
Check out what members are saying about Free Boot Camp Classes: "the obvious.. to promote good health.... fun but intense..." - JOSEPHINE ROCCO CORNWALL RUN INFORMATION

Star Client: Marie Dibart

Well, we've been in business for about a year now, and I feel like it's about time to begin a "Star Client" profile feature.

The first Star Client client of all is the unstoppable Marie Dibart from Peekskill, NY.


Marie's first email to me contained a quote that went something like, "I hope you can get me in shape."

I am pleased to say that Marie is absolutely in shape now! After around six months of dedicated training, she has lost nearly 50 lbs and gone from an "I don't run" attitude to casually running 4 miles. Even more impressive, she recently finished a Duathlon consisting of a 1 mile run, 14 mile bike, and a 3 mile run. This is not something the average person just wakes up and does. Her commitment to fitness and a strong dedication to her training regimen definitely paid off.

That's Marie and me after the race (left). Yes, she got balloons and a party hat, but somehow I ended up wearing the tiara.

Marie is a shining example of what can be accomplished simply by choosing a goal and letting nothing deter you. Starting the exercise program is easy, it's finishing and maintaining it that is the tough part.

Marie and her sister, Lenora, are both wonderful clients and our relationship has grown into something great, even though they grumble at me alot during the workouts... I am kind of brother from another mother, I guess.

Great job, Marie. I am proud of you. Keep working hard!

Damon

Women's Fitness Quiz

This should be a breeze...

Women's Fitness Quiz : Diet and Fitness Center : Discovery Health

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Interval Training... Why?

I've included an article below that discusses the benefits of interval training. This is not new information. The study was conducted two years ago, but athletes and trainers have known about the benefits of high intensity bursts followed by moderate or low instensity rest periods for decades. It just recently hit the main stream media, however.

Anyone who has trained with me definitely knows how effective circuits and intervals can be. I use the TRI-circuit system, which is an integrated interval/circuit type routine that combines strength and cardiovascular aspects into one quick, efficient program.

I find it interesting that every study conducted on interval training confirms its effectiveness, yet many people insist on sticking to moderate to low intensity cardiorespiratory exercise as their sole means for developing fitness.

Interval Training Burns More Fat, Increases Fitness, Study Finds

ScienceDaily (June 29, 2007) — Interval training burns fat and improves fitness more quickly than constant but moderately intensive physical activity, according to research by a University of Guelph researcher.

The study by Jason Talanian, a PhD student in the Department of Human Health and Nutritional Sciences, was published recently in the Journal of Applied Physiology. It found that after interval training, the amount of fat burned in an hour of continuous moderate cycling increased by 36 percent and cardiovascular fitness increased by 13 per cent.

Fitness buffs and athletes have long used interval training — short bursts of intensive effort interspersed with more moderate stretches — to improve performance. But Talanian’s study shows that the practice also improves cardiovascular fitness and helps the body burn more fat, even during low-intensity or moderate workouts.

Talanian studied women riding stationary bikes in hard-easy intervals in the training lab of his supervisor, Guelph Prof. Lawrence Spriet. The eight subjects included moderately fit women in their 20s as well as borderline sedentary subjects and an active soccer player. They trained every other day for two weeks. They alternated 10 sets of four-minute bursts of riding at 90-per-cent effort with two-minute rest intervals.

It did not matter how fit the subjects were before. After interval training, they experienced not only an increase in fat used and in aerobic capacity, but also an increase of enzyme activity in the muscle

Talanian notes that faster fat burning and greater overall fitness may not necessarily mean immediate weight loss. The technique may improve someone’s potential to burn more fat, “but for weight loss, you need to consider a balance of exercise and a healthy diet,” he said.

The message from his studies is to mix interval training into an exercise routine once or twice a week, particularly in running, swimming or cycling.

For his follow-up study, Talanian plans to look at about a dozen women over a six-week training period. “We will look at muscle transporters that carry fatty acids into the cell that might help explain those earlier results,” he said.

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