Exercise…Weight loss…Diabetes!

I was reading through health news articles online and came upon this article and it prompted me to make comment.  Here is the article

news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080728/hl_nm/exercise_weight_dc

This article talks about the relationship between type 2 diabetes, exercise and weight loss.

They recommend that we walk 45 minutes more each day.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t have 45 minutes per day or more to exercise each and every day.

As we all know exercise is an essential for weight control.  Hold on, let me clarify that statement.  Lean muscle is essential for weight control.  Walking as an exercise does not significantly increase muscle mass which is why you have to do a lot of it to get weight loss changes.

Before you start discrediting me, you first have to understand the mechanics of weight loss.  Lean muscle is what burns or metabolizes fat, sugar and protein in the body.  This means the more lean muscle fibers that you use, the greater the burn, the better the weight loss and the better control you have over your blood sugar.

The act of walking at a pace of 3.5 mph involves 25% of the body’s muscles and those muscles are working only through an average of 15% of their full range of motion. This means that only 25%x15%=3.75%, or less than 4% of the body’s total muscle cells are involved in energy consumption during walking. These 3.75% of all the body’s muscle cells will consume more energy if you walk faster (or jog or run) or if you walk uphill or if you carry weights while walking. To get a high amount of energy consumption out of only 3.75% of your body’s muscle cells those few cells will have to be extremely highly trained, such as in top athletes.

To get from A to B, walking is a very energy efficient activity and therefore does not consume large amounts of energy. For a cardio workout you would like to engage in an energy wasting activity, an activity that needs a lot of energy to accomplish the task. Problem is that most doctors keep recommending walking as their favorite exercise prescription and they don’t even expect their patients to follow their advice of spending 45 to 90 minutes walking. They only keep recommending walking because it is advice that is immune to malpractice lawsuits. The reason why people will not follow their doctors’ advice and why the doctors do not follow their own advice is because people will not do things that require a lot of time and have marginal results.

After we exercise, our bodies continue to burn calories at a slowly decaying rate for up to 48 hours.  This process is called “Latent burn”.  The largest percentage of latent burn is during the first 4 to 5 hours after the workout. 80% of the latent burn is accomplished during this period of time.  Many people do not take this extra calorie burn into consideration when they start their exercise program.  While there are many variables here is an generalized example of how this works.

If you walk 3.5mph for 30 minutes and weigh 200 pounds you will burn approximately 125 calories during the workout.  When you finish your workout, the muscles will continue to burn calories for up to 48 hours based on the level of exertion, the percentage of muscle fibers used and the range of motion that they were put through.  Lets say you burn an average another 50 calories per hour for only a total of 375 calories.

I am going to propose something to you that may go against what you have been taught in the past.

Working out more intensely for a shorter period of time will actually burn more calories over a shorter period of time and will result in a much greater “latent” calorie burn!

Ten minutes of high range of motion resistance exercise such as aerobics, running or circuit training has as much effect on your ability to loose weight and will have a much larger Latent burn than 45 minutes of walking. In fact you will actually burn more calories throughout the day because you have many more muscles that are going through the latent burn cycle.

Using the same example as we used previously, consider this. If you workout hard for 10 minutes using 50% of the muscle fibers over 50% range of motion you will burn approximately 100 calories.  When you finish your workout, the muscles will continue to burn calories for the next 4 to 5 hours based on the level of exertion, the number of muscle fibers used and the range of motion that they were put through.  This time instead of burning only 50 calories per hour you burn 100 calories per hour for a total of 600 calories. In this case you have burned 225 more calories while working out less.

This is why you are seeing so many infomercials that say work out in only 10 per day 3 days per week.

It has been proven in many university and independent studies that working out more intensely for a shorter period of time has a greater impact on overall health.

As always you need to consult your physician before starting any nutrition or exercise program.

What are your thoughts?