Exercise - Good for your health? Ummm..Not always.

I see it all the time, people begin a new exercise routine and throw themselves headlong into it for a few weeks. Then, suddenly, boom, they get ill, and are forced to lay off for a week or so. This enforced lay-off unfortunately allows detraining to occur, and because the person is new to exercise, the gains disappear extremely rapidly.

Then the self-talk starts; ‘Why should I bother training, if I’ll end up ill again and lose all of my gains?’ or ‘What’s the point? Exercise is meant to make me healthier, not unhealthy.’

This negative spiral of despair continues until the person convinces themselves not to continue their exercise program any more. Chalk another person up to the Health and Fitness scrapheap.

You can’t blame them. The majority of celebrity fitness ‘experts’ and ‘gurus’, where the majority of people access their knowledge of fitness, still trot out the same old ‘no pain, no gain’, and ‘feel the burn’-esque philosophical maxims. Unfortunately just like their vacuous ‘personalities’, their knowledge of physiology and exercise is also found to be wanting.

Beyond all question, any exercise above playground clapping game level, puts your bodily systems under pressure. The body’s response to this challenge is the cause for the defensive changes and growth that is the hallmark of improved fitness.

So unless you want to limit your chosen fitness activity to lawn bowls or crazy golf which provide little challenge and therefore little gain, then you’d better learn to respect your immune system.

If you do however want to make improvements in fitness you need to use effective exercise such as resistance training or play higher intensity sports both of which overload the body quite severely. Overload is the key, but overload, taken too far leads to overtraining and system crash.

Even if you can will yourself through subsequent bouts of illness and continue training, is this really the way to go?

Take for example that a lot of elite sportspeople die earlier than the average person. How can this be? Aren’t they super fit? Yes, but years of excessive overload, whether taken to the point of clinical overtraining or not, depresses the immunity of these people and leaves them prey to disease.

The most obvious disease caused by depressed immunity is Cancer. Your body develops Cancerous cells thousands, if not millions, of times during your lifetime. In the majority of circumstances, your immune system recognises and destroys the abnormal cell before it becomes entrenched and replicates. Cancer like many other diseases are a result of immune system failure.

You may have experienced this yourself or with someone close to you. For instance, it has become popular to run marathons. Whether this be for a personal challenge or to support a charity, both of which are great causes, but a little myopic. The general training plan used by most marathon newcomers is to begin 3-6 months prior to the event and increase volume of training each week until the race date. With a lot of people they are taking a body that may not have seen exercise in maybe 10-20 years or more, and asking it to develop over a period of 12 weeks the ability to run 26 miles. Seen in that light, I’m sure you can appreciate how stressful this is to the body. And it shows, research done on both professional and recreational runners show a huge hike in infections following participation in a marathon. If you’ve attempted a marathon before, think back, did you suffer an illness during the weeks leading up or following the event, when you were supposedly at your fittest?

In fact a few years ago there was quite a high profile case that may have involved the above factors. Big Brother contestant Jade Goody in a well documented lack of preparation attempted to complete the 2006 London Marathon. Jade actually collapsed 21 miles in, demonstrating total body shut down. To complete 21 miles would have been a monumental effort for the young lady and she really should have been advised not to have participated. Two years later Jade was diagnosed with Cervical Cancer and after a valiant effort unfortunately succumbed to the disease. Were the two linked? We don’t know for sure, but to my mind the Marathon scenario sticks out like a red flag.

Your immune system is vital to prevent many diseases and your overall health, without a strong immunity you are prey to all manner of virus’s, bacteria, chemicals and other insults that your body is exposed to daily. In terms of fitness and performance, a strong immunity will take the handbrakes off, allowing you to use the full power of your motor.

In a later article I’ll show you how to bolster your immune system, here I want to leave you with a simple way to identify whether you are falling into overtraining or immune system overload.

We use four measures, three are simple assessments you can easily do at home, the last test requires the assistance of a Doctor or Medical Lab. The tests follow the acroymn HIBI.

H – Waking (H)eart Rate. This needs to be taken daily and immediately upon waking, whilst still lying in bed. If your waking heart rate is eight beats or more above the previous week’s average then this is a sign that you are overloading your immune system.

I – (I)nsomnia. If you have trouble sleeping, or maintaining a regular sleep pattern, despite feeling tired, then it’s likely you are in immunity overload.

B- (B)odyweight. This needs to be measured daily, preferably in the morning. If you find that your bodyweight has dropped by 3lbs or more below your previous week’s average then it’s a good sign you’re immune system is overloading.

I- (I)mmunity. This requires the performance of a Full Blood Count (FBC). You will either need to ask your Doctor for this test, or, if available to you, you can approach an independent lab. What you are looking for (or not looking for really) is elevated levels of Segmented Neutrophils, Lymphocytes, Monocytes and Eosinophils. If you find these measures elevated in the absence of obvious illness or injury, you are in immune system overload.

Using HIBI or just HIB to detect an overloaded immune system can help you eliminate the possibility of losing weeks and months of training gains due to illness. It may even help you reduce the possibility of developing the big diseases, which make lost training time seem trivial by comparison.

To end, I promised a follow up article to show you ways to strengthen immunity, but in the meantime, if you notice any of the above symptoms, cut back on your training to reduce the imposed stress and get more sleep. Sleep is one of the key players in immunity.

Want Optimum Body Composition Results? You’ve Got To Resistance Train

You may have noticed my preference for resistance training as an exercise modality. With practically every client, resistance training is usually the best method for achieving the majority of goals. This is especially true of physique transformations, the results you can achieve in muscle and body composition will be greater and last longer if you perform progressive resistance training rather than perform endurance training.

If you’ve been reading my work you should already be well aware of this, but it’s nice to have some academic backup to support what we have all known for years.  Some new research coming out of Taiwan found that resistance training is more effective at building long-lasting lean body mass than endurance training. Let’s take a brief look at the study.

Previously untrained individuals performed three training sessions a week, either a periodised resistance training program of ten exercises, or 30 minutes of treadmill running at an intensity of 70-85% of maximal heart rate. The fact that the endurance group (EG) had a greater increase in maximal oxygen uptake (an indicator of cardiovascular capacity), was not really a revelation, but, and here’s what most people fail to appreciate, the resistance training group (RG) also improved (EG by 17 percent, RG by 12 percent). Lean body mass increased 71 percent in the RG and they maintained significantly more muscle after six months of detraining (a period of no training).

As I always say ‘the devil’s in the details’ and to a lay person the way this study is presented in no different. Take for instance that the study suggested the EG increased lean mass by 12 percent after training. So they gained muscle? Nope, the EG actually lost half a kilo of muscle over the six month training period, it only appears that way statistically because they lost fat mass during the period.

Between the two groups only the RG group had gains in strength and hypertrophy with training, and they had a statistically insignificant (but still very real) trend toward reduction in body fat.

After six months of detraining, the EG had lost the training gains with a return to pre-training body weight, body size and cardiovascular fitness. The RG lost its cardiovascular fitness but maintained some strength and lean mass, with higher than baseline values.

While greater cardiovascular gains can be made with endurance training, the benefits for body composition, strength, and overall long-term effects are substantially greater from lifting weights. A good way to increase cardiovascular capacity without compromising your program, is to perform high-intensity interval sprints or circuit training in addition to a resistance training program

Reference:

Lo, M., Lin, L., Yao, W., Ma, M. Training and Detraining Effects of the Resistance Vs. Endurance Program on Body Composition, Body Size and Physical Performance in Young Men.  Journal of Strength and Conditioning. July 2011. Published Ahead of Print.

Lies to Adults

One of the biggest barriers I have when discussing training and nutrition is that of Calories.

In fact, let’s start out differently by laying it on the line. Calories, at least in the common usage, are a myth. This (the Calorie concept) is principally used by the weight-loss industry to keep customers locked in to a vicious cycle that only serves the bottom line; profit.

If you want to achieve any appreciable result with your body, you need to discard the concept almost entirely. Interested? read on.

To understand how the Calorie myth became accepted ‘common knowledge’, we need to quickly take a look at the way it, and other ‘not quite right’ concepts, are perpetuated.

The (common) Calorie concept is what we call a ‘Lie to Children’. ‘Lies to Children’ also go by the name of a ‘Wittgenstein’s Ladder’. A ‘Lie to Children’ is a teaching tool that simplifies a complex concept to make it easier to access and understand. However, as the name ‘Wittgenstein’s Ladder’ implies it is then meant to lead on to another step. The following steps then reveal the ‘lie’ and provide more accurate explanations of the concept(s).

The problem is most people are given a ladder with only one step. Hence ‘Lies to Children’ easily become ‘Lies to Adults’.

So the fact that we are surrounded by adults that (through no fault of their own) believe in this distorted Calorie concept, the continual ignorant usage of Calories in popular media and the food industry, and the deceitful use of it in the weight loss industry, it’s no surprise that we are in this current state of confusion.

To help you see clearly, let’s dig a little deeper. Not too deep though, as it can be a pretty deep hole.

Calories are simply the measure of heat produced by the burning (combustion) of food in a fairly basic piece of equipment called a bomb calorimeter. Now here’s the problem, the instrument cannot distinguish whether a potato is being burnt, or poo. They both give off Calorific measurements, but do you think a poo would nourish as well as a potato? I’m not sure how many WW points a poo is worth? But if the request is made, I’ll work it out.

That’s only the first step. Foods in a bomb calorimeter are burnt. We are neither a bomb calorimeter, nor do we ‘burn’ anything. The human body and the way it processes energy is only vaguely associated with the concept of Calories. This disconnect is most easily demonstrated by hospitalised obese patients who despite being fed a Calorie controlled diet (usually 1,200 Calories per day) continue to gain fat. How is this possible, when common Caloric concept says that it is quite impossible? Well, since the indisputable evidence is clearly in front of your eyes, maybe it’s time you questioned the concept.

If the human body doesn’t burn (combust) fuel, how is it able to derive energy? Well, combustion is fairly crude and inefficient means of liberating stored energy, and Nature, being the mother of efficiency, gave us a much cleaner and effective system. This system is able to harness the amazing boundless force of the Universe; light.

Our body, processes food in a number of steps which eventually, via our mitochondria, extracts the light energy from food and transfers it to a chemical called Adenosine Tri-Phosphate (ATP).

ATP, and the Solar energy it contains, powers your life.

I’m going to curtail this article here, but will show in upcoming articles, how this (essentially) processing of nuclear power can be optimised, or as has happened due to the continual and misapplied emphasis on Calories, go very, very wrong.