Which Exercise is Best for Weight Loss?

A decades old debate that appears to have taught us nothing in the having. It's always seemed to me like asking which food is best for weight gain. The correct answer is that they'll all get you there if you're determined enough. Naturally, one chooses using a simple algorithm involving questions like: what is most pleasant/ least unpleasant and: what am I best at/ least rubbish at, and: what's most convenient/ least inconvenient. The answers to each of which depends on the individual.

On the small chance that you have been hoodwinked into believing there is substance behind the idea that there is a best choice of exercise for weight loss, your intuitions were correct from the start. It's a nonsensical question. Weight loss and maintenance isn't hard because you're doing the wrong type of exercise. It's hard because our bodies change and so do we (as people).

Here's an interesting and perhaps useful way of looking at the challenge. What would you expect if, rather than weight loss, your goal was to complete a big event or acquire a new, specialised set of exercise or sporting skills, e.g. to complete a cycle tour or to take up a new sport and do well. With these types of goals, we accept that we will need new skills, lots of practise and hardwork, and plenty of time. We get that the kind of change needed is profound in the same way any kind of learning is. We expect to have to change at the level of our personness. 

Why then do we expect less or different for weight loss? Why do we believe weight loss is just a matter of subtracting mass from our body’s? The evidence of the difficulty of the challenge would suggest that it is much more than that. Perhaps we can borrow from ourselves by comparing it to something else in our lives. Some other kind of challenge that we have undertaken that we accepted would change us as a person or require a more comprehensive, more patient kind of investment*.

*a small albeit important qualification at this point - positive psychology is far more effective than negative psychology for long-term change. Weight loss might be more achievable when it isn’t driven by self-loathing but by the excitement of a new experience or as a new chapter in our lives.

Fitness: What It Is, What It Does, and How to Correctly Train It

Fitness is the capacity of the body to do work. Time taken and work done are the two factors or variables. With these in mind, we could define fitness as either the time taken to complete a fixed amount of work, e.g. running a race, or the work completed in a fixed amount of time, e.g. playing a game of sport. 

If we look a little closer at how the body responds to work we can see that neither of our definitions captures the true meaning of fitness. In turn, they don't work well as rules or instructions for fitness. 

The human body has three work modes: low mode, high mode, and a blend or mix of the two. Low mode is aerobic. High mode is anaerobic. The capacity of the body's aerobic energy system is synonymous with cardiovascular capacity. 

We need to take a moment here to fully recognise the importance of the aerobic system: every organ, tissue, and cell uses aerobic metabolism to do its work. The aerobic system is the body's essential power plant. This system is designed for sustained work output. The corollary of sustained work output is a lower rate of work. Aerobic or low mode can only sustain work up to a certain intensity level.

Cue, anaerobic, high mode work output. Some tissues and cells, such as muscle fibres, have two additional power production mechanisms. Both of these are anaerobic - the high mode. Anaerobic metabolism involves a higher rate of work than aerobic metabolism. However, just as aerobic work is limited to lower work intensities, anaerobic, high mode work cannot be sustained. These are the trade offs.

What is the third work mode, how does it work, and why is it important for our story?

It matters at this stage to paint a picture of how aerobic and anaerobic metabolism are organised. Aerobic metabolism is always on. Anaerobic metabolism switches on, over and above, aerobic metabolism when intensity of cellular work reaches a critical threshold. Note: the aerobic system continues to chug away at the same time. We can measure the switch from aerobic to anaerobic metabolism as lactic acid production. This is essentially what is measured in a VO2max test: concentrations of lactic acid and oxygen consumption.

The switch to anaerobic metabolism occurs because the aerobic, low mode system cannot keep up with the demand rate of the work. The cardiovascular system meets the increase in the demand rate of work by raising heart rate - as a means of moving more oxygen into and carbon dioxide out of the body. This is a fixed relationship: higher work rates = a higher heart rate. It is true of all bodies and for all conditions. We, therefore, also know the heart rate zone in which the switch occurs. More about this in a moment.

Back to the work modes. As heart rate rises, anaerobic metabolism switches on and superimposes aerobic metabolism, and the two systems cooperate to meet demand. This is the third work mode: mixed aerobic and anaerobic. It is the sweet spot for athletes; performance mode. Competitive games, races, crossfit-styled workouts etc. all occur in mixed low+high work mode. Performance mode is a compromise between sustained low power output and unsustainable high power output.

How sustainable is performance mode?

Sustaining performance mode is the singular purpose of conditioning for sport. It is the holy grail of the hours and hours of weekly cycling, swimming, rowing, running etc. It is also where considerable debate and confusion takes place because the basic questions remains: what is fitness and how do I create more of it. Is it aerobic capacity, anaerobic capacity, or a mix of the two?

To answer this we have to go back to one specific idea: sustainability. What we are really asking with our question is what sustains work output? In turn, this will enable us to define fitness and give us a basic training directive. 

We can extrapolate the information we need from the heart rate response curve. Remember that this curve is essentially the same for every human performing work of increasing intensities regardless of the nature of the work. 

Anaerobic metabolism switches on between 60 and 75% of maximum heart rate. Higher for trained athletes and lower for untrained athletes. Mixed aerobic+anaerobic or performance mode comprises the next 5% of the curve as heart rate rises. Above this, the curve steepens quickly. 

The boundary between low and mixed mode is termed the first threshold or turn point, while the boundary between mixed and high mode is termed the second threshold or turn point. Exercise is essentially sustainable before and after the first turn point, but is not sustainable after the second. Though the mixed zone is the performance sweet spot, the first turn point - the heart rate value at which the body switches on anaerobic metabolism is the critical boundary. The higher the first turn point, the higher the sweet spot. A high sweet spot means a higher rate of internal or metabolic work. By extension, the higher the external work: tempo, power, load etc.

Let’s run back over that last statement one more time because we’ve arrived at the key idea that gives us a definition of fitness. The first turn point, which is the heart rate value above which the body switches on anaerobic metabolism (to support aerobic metabolism), determines the rate of work we can sustain. It is the capacity of the low mode system that ultimately determines how hard and for how long mixed aerobic+anaerobic can be sustained. 

Fitness = absolute aerobic or cardiovascular capacity.

The relationship between aerobic and anaerobic capacity is analogous to the relationship between cooks and serving staff in a restaurant. Serving staff can only serve meals as fast as the cooks can prepare them. However efficient and effective the serving staff may be, it is the kitchen that ultimately sets the serving rate for the whole restaurant. Aerobic capacity sits at the heart of the metabolic kitchen.

What does this tell us about how to train fitness?

Let’s return to the definition we have already: the performance of the aerobic system determines the sustainability of effort. The work we can sustain is the result of the capacity of the system. Work appears on both sides of the equation: as a stimulus or cause to the left of the equals sign and as the product on the right. However, as a stimulus it does not vary much around values on or slightly below 60-70% of maximum heart rate. What changes is the other stimulus or cause, which is time.

Time is the training variable we are supposed to program or change. Aerobic capacity increases with more and more sub-threshold training time. Remember that the aerobic system is designed for sustained work.

The most important idea that defines fitness and conditioning for fitness is found in one word: sustainability.

Before I sign off I should point out that there is a small piece of the fitness puzzle that matters, way up at the top of the heart rate curve: medium interval sets at 90% of max heart rate to increase VO2max. Another small piece involves tempo sets in the performance sweet spot. These are ‘small’ pieces of the overall puzzle both in training time or load and mileage. They also matter not one iota if they’re not complemented by an appropriately large aerobic system. “Low mode is high mode” should be every athlete's conditioning motto.

Summary of the key points:

• Fitness and fitness conditioning should be defined by how the body does work.

• The human body has three work modes: low mode aerobic metabolism, high mode anaerobic metabolism, and a mixed aerobic+anaerobic performance mode.

• Aerobic metabolism - low work mode - sustainably supports low intensity work, including all of our life support systems, thinking, and exercise. 

• Anaerobic metabolism - high mode - supports high intensity work but cannot be sustained. Mixed performance mode is sustainable but tenuous.

• Aerobic metabolism is always on, and anaerobic metabolism switches on to complement low mode when power or work rate values reach a heart rate threshold. The anaerobic switch or threshold is called the first turn point. 

• The first turn point occurs between 60 and 75% of maximum heart rate. Higher for trained athletes and lower for untrained athletes.

• Mixed aerobic+anaerobic mode is sustained for an extra ~10 beats per minute until a second heart rate threshold or turn point is reached. Above the second turn point, heart rate rises quickly and power cannot be sustained. 

• Sustaining performance mode - the zone between the first and second turn points - is the holy grail of conditioning.

• Larger aerobic or cardiovascular capacity is associated with a higher first turn point and higher work and power values in the performance zone.

• Fitness is, therefore, proportional to absolute aerobic or low mode capacity.

• The performance of the aerobic low mode system determines the sustainability of effort.

• Higher work or power values are the product of conditioning. The work we do to stimulate these adaptations is fixed on or slight below 60-70% of maximum heart rate.

• Time is the training variable we are supposed to program or change. Aerobic capacity is increased with greater sub-threshold training time.

• The most important idea that defines fitness and conditioning for fitness is found in one word: sustainability.

What can parents do to motivate and support their children to get fit?

How hard is it to get your teenagers to work on their fitness!!
They love their sport - hockey, football, rowing etc. - but won't get fit to support themselves. This can be especially frustrating in the off-season as we know that much of the early part of the season is taken up recovering fitness.

While I don't believe there is magic dust for this problem I do believe there are some simple truths about fitness and what motivates children to do anything that can help us.

Truth#1

Children are social creatures. Us adults have a nasty habit of deciding what matters in sport and then trying to transplant these truths into their minds. Win, become a champion, score goals, break records... These are fantasies in the minds of children. Born of a narrative built by Dads (mostly but not exclusively). Well intentioned but badly misplaced and misinformed. Stand in the school playground - something I get do every day - and watch. You will see joyfulness and relentless effort and, underlying it all, social connection.

Truth#2

Endurance exercise does not need the highest possible demand on the body. One of the most pervasive myths is the equivalence of effort and outcome or productivity in exercise. I genuinely don't know how this myth got started because there are so few capacities constructed by maximal effort (fun fact: maximal effort or rate is the only one!). 

The human body's aerobic (cardiovascular) system is a vast network of metabolic processes and we can signal it to grow by lifting aerobic stress up to the point beyond which we cease normal breathing and heart rate function: between 60 and 70% of maximal heart rate. Much lower than most people realise and within our capability to keep talking.

Pushing our children to high levels of physical duress actually makes many of them afraid for their lives. They don't understand what they are experiencing and it's an instinctive reaction to stop. It takes most humans quite a lot of experience to discover that it's not an existential threat when our heart rates and breathing rates are at their limit. 

In any case, it's bloody unpleasant and hardly surprising that most children don't want to come back again for more.

So what can parents do to motivate and support their children to get fit?

Asking them to exercise alone and in a way that is extremely uncomfortable does not work. They need companionship and it can't be physically awful. Exercise with them, arrange a group of children - the bigger the better - and keep the intensity low. Your number one goal is adherence so reward participation. Let them nominate a reward system for themselves that is linked to sessions completed. Above all, create an environment in which friendships can be formed. 

Pull-ups - a misunderstood super exercise

Pull-ups are a super exercise, and they're also misunderstood.

Pull-ups are a super exercise because they comprehensively strengthen the top half of the posterior torso mechanical chain. This chain of muscles holds the human body upright.

The human body is designed to 'pull' - we're natural climbers - and pull-ups are highly specific for this. 

You should have pull-ups in your strength conditioning routine.

Should have, but many people don't. 

The concept of the 'pull-up' is synonymous with the concept of the 'chin-up', whereby the object of the exercise is to hang and then pull until the chin reaches over the bar. It shouldn't be because this is the big misconception.

To get the effect you don't need to get your chin over the bar, or anywhere close to it for that matter. It's also not a necessary pre-requisite for progress in the movement.

There are three basic grips: underhanded or supinated, overhanded or pronated, and a neutral grip (palms face inwards toward each other), provided the apparatus provides this position. 

The basic differences between them is that the neutral grip is the strongest arrangement of the available muscles, followed by the underhanded grip. The pronated or classic pull-up grip is the weakest of the three grip positions. 

There is no best grip. Each provides a different arrangement of arm, shoulder, and back muscles. Cycle them to your hearts content.

What does matter is effort. Whether you can pull yourself most of the way, part of the way, or barely at all, pull with everything you've got. Effort creates stress in the soft tissues (muscles and connective tissues), and this is needed for strengthening, and it also gives feedback to the nervous system. It sends the message: I'd like to get better at these.

If you've read anything else I have written you might have seen this before. The brain is clever. All brains are extraordinarily clever. They are a self-taught, self-organising improvement machine. All they require is information in the form of sensory and mechanical feedback from the body and an idea (a program to enhance). A one-inch pull-up spontaneously becomes a two inch pull-up with persistence.

Jump stretch bands can be used to easily assist range of motion, and then scaled back as you get stronger.

Main points:

• Pull-ups comprehensively strengthen the torso regardless of how far you pull provided you work hard.
• Regular hardwork creates feedback for the nervous system to grow the movement.
• It is not necessary to get your chin over the bar. Just work hard for whatever you can do.
• Jump stretch bands can be used to easily assist range of motion, and then scaled back as you get stronger.

What is strategy in sport? This is.

The terms tactics and strategy are commonly mixed up. Strategy, loosely speaking, are your ideas for success before competition begins, while your tactics are the adjustments you make during performance. You could think of tactics as the practical application of your strategy, taking into account the variations that (almost) always play out.

Here's a clip that exemplifies strategy. It's both wonderfully simple and fantastically successful. 

With that in mind, here's a question for you: does strategy need to be simple to be effective? 

In defence of the humble push-up.

I won't hold you for long. The humble push-up is a fabulous exercise for building shoulder and tricep strength and your core as well! 

Set your feet at least shoulder width apart to support your stability. More stability in any movement allows the bigger, stronger muscles to devote more of their performance to the target movement (instability causes these muscles to be coopted into supporting the smaller, stabilisers).

Next comes hand position. There is no one, right position. Closer together and you will load the triceps more, further apart and the chest and anterior shoulders will have a greater proportion of the work. For what it's worth, I am a big fan of treating the triceps like the most important muscle in pressing movements.

There is a single biomechanical pre-requisite for pressing movements, which is the path and stability of the elbow. At all costs, we need to avoid the shoulders blades elevating and rolling the shoulders up and over when we press. To this end, the elbows need to remain slightly tucked throughout the movement, i.e. they shouldn't flare upwards. 

Pressing is punching, essentially. The elbows come from a relatively low position. The second, important effect of a low and controlled elbow position is that we can lower our bodies using our lats for support. This stabilises the shoulder blades and puts us in a good position to éfficiently 'punch' our bodies back up.

One thing that is not important at all is how low we go. One inch with good control will grow the press over time.

Five sets of 5 reps or 3 sets of as many as you can do with 60s rest between.

The humble press-up, complimented by pull-ups, will develop a strong and muscular upper body. It's also a fabulous bridging exercise and hits the core superbly!!

The main points:

• The push-up will develop a strong and muscular upper body and strengthen your core.
• Don't sweat depth.
• Set feet shoulder width apart to aid stability and support the shoulders.
• Hands can be narrow to favour the triceps or wider for more chest/ shoulder.
• The only mechanical necessity is that the elbows remain slightly tucked and don't flare up because this put the triceps and lats in an excellent position to support the push. It also ensures we avoid rolling the shoulders up and over, which we don't want!
• Five sets of 5 reps or 3 sets of as many as you can do with 60s rest between.

 

Running as an adult: the perspectives I wish someone had shared with me.

I'm in my 14th year of running after taking much of my early adult years off. I ran as a teenager and though I loved it, I gave it up for the lifestyle of a typical young adult in which cardio or endurance exercise had no place. Twenty years later, my body was not the same and I paid a big price for refusing to consider this.

Depending on your point of view, running has been extraordinarily generous or tragically unkind to me. I have experienced most of the common injuries, including an early and nasty bout of compartment syndrome (shin splints), and even discovered I have an unusual reaction to electrolytes - where for most they reduce symptoms of fatigue and discomfort, they actually cause them in my body. Running is never easy for me and, occasionally, it's brutally hard. One particular event has broken me every time. I have only ever ambled under considerable duress over the finishing line. So, why bother?

Why is the most important question, and my first bit of advice is to take time to carefully consider your answer. When I started out, my 'why' was performance related. For me, that was a big mistake because, as it has transpired, my body wasn't up for that. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to compete but your capability needs to match your expectation or there will be nothing but disappointment and frustration. There is also a risk of an imbalance between internal (instrinsic) and external (extrinsic) motivations. 

External motivations are those set of ideas or values that involve value judgements in relation to others and they typically play out as feelings before and afterwards. Internal motivations, in contrast, centre on how something makes use feel in the performance of the task. An experience that makes you laugh or cry is an internal effect. Internal motivations reflect how our minds and bodies connect with the task. A basic rule of thumb is that the stronger our internal motivations, the stronger our connection to the task. Not surprisingly, we are more likely to participate for longer and with greater interest or engagement.

In my case, the difference between what my body was capable of and my running ambition caused problems that impacted my enthusiasm and my understanding of how my body operated. Too much external motivation drowned out what my body was trying to tell me. If I had taken the time to consider what my internal motivations were or could have been, I may have put myself in a state of mind to hear the feedback and make changes that would have improved the experience. 

This provides the basic answer to the question of why I participate in an activity that hurts as often as it does. Because the discomfort and pain is balanced by many moments of enjoyment, and this is only possible because of the changes I made to my plan. These changes, that were designed to improve how I felt when I run, led also to a better understanding of how to engineer greater levels of fitness and overall capacity.

In the early days, I felt frustrated and trapped by the physical experiences. I tinkered endlessly with the training equation for little reward. It wasn't until I got out of my own way by examining my motivations, that things began to improve. What I learned was that my sport was not primarily a physical challenge but a psychological one. 

We have to be able to listen and hear what happening within us. We also have to put ourselves in a position to enjoy and be grateful for what we have. It also helps to know that signals of fatigue and discomfort are not absolutes. They are experienced through the lens of how we feel, emotionally and generally speaking. Physical discomfort after an emotionally taxing experiencing registers far above what it does when we feel good. 

The true extent of what we're physically and athletically capable of has to be discovered through experience. We have to learn that not only are we ok when our bodies are sending us messages that its uncomfortable, but there can be a big difference between our perceptions, informed as they are by how our bodies feel when we're exercising, and the limits of what we can cope with and adapt to.

I need to add an important disclaimer at this point. Know your body! Endurance exercise and physically challenging events are fatigueing and will make you feel uncomfortable. That is their nature. There is an importance difference, however, between a healthy level of duress and acute physical distress. If you are unsure of the health of your body please consult your GP. Even then, time is needed to learn the meaning of the signals associated with fatigue and significant physical exertion. The reality is that adaptation is a very slow biological process. The only way you're gonna climb that really big mountain is slowly. Patience is also one of the best friends of long-term participation.

For the first few years in the resumption of my running, I boxed on with a poor understanding of my physical needs engendered by unhelpful expectations. The basic difference between the early and later years was progress. Hard work and duress are not side effects of the endurance training formula - feelings to be tolerated regardless. They must have the correct meaning. My training plan was not a match for my body, so the fatigue did not produce meaningful adaptations.

I'm getting at two things here: there is a difference between learning to live with the discomfort of hard work, and operating a bad plan. Fortunately - I wish someone had given me this information at the start! - endurance training plans are comparatively straight forward and only really involve an understanding of the responses in a single tissue: the heart. What's very useful about the heart is that it informs us immediately about changes in cardiovascular demand by increasing or lowering heart rate. 

My early plans had me running too fast and my heart rate was, as a consequence, too high to efficiently stimulate and grow my cardiovascular capacity (and my VO2max by extension). The improvements started when I discovered polarised training. The term was made popular by an American physiologist: Stephen Seiler. Seiler profiled Norwegian skiers, the most successful endurance athletes in the history of the Winter Olympics, and he discovered and then confirmed in his laboratory that there are essentially only two critical heart rate zones for endurance training: 

• A low HR zone, termed Zone2, of between 60 and 70% of our max heart rate, and 
• Zone4 in which your HR is at about 90% of its maximum. 

Seiler's critical discovery was the training time required to be in these zones. 80-85% of total training time or volume should be in Zone2 and about 10% in Zone4. The remainder is what's termed, drift. Your heart rate will naturally drift upwards as your body fatigues. Some drift up and out of Zone2 is permissible and actually impossible to avoid. What Seiler says about endurance training in general is that it's not slow enough on the slow days or fast enough on the fast days.

A short note about the difference between endurance plans for high performing athletes and the rest of us. Endurance athletes very often have a third training zone: tempo work in Zone3. As far as I am concerned, these sets are much less about stimulating physiological gains and are primarily 'psychological' sets. They condition the mind to coping (and ideally thriving) under the duress the body will experience on race day. 

The key for athletes is to understand the balance of the work required to meet their physiologic and psychologic needs. For us nonathletes, Zone3 represents 'junk' mileage. It is not a match for event day as we're not racing in this zone and it's a weak stimulus of cardiovascular capacity.

My final piece of advice is to fully appreciate what the human body gains from being really fit. In short, high cardiovascular capacity is number 1 on the list of effect sizes for therapies that improve health and extend human life. I run (and gym) to give myself the best chance to participate in life's awesome events as I age. Naturally, this wasn't something I thought about when I was younger but it certainly is now. 

Here's a summary of the ideas:

• cardio is good!
• endurance exercise is sustained hard work. this is it's nature.
• the nature of endurance exercise also makes it a psychological challenge.
• know your body and learn to listen to and intrepret the signals correctly.
• your training plan needs to match your body. Polarisation is an excellent, evidence based methodology, that can be easily adapted to all bodies.
• be patient as you have almost nothing to gain by rushing and potentially everything to lose.
• I have intentionally stayed away from talking about the tissues of the lower legs and how running affects them. Get in touch if you have any concerns or questions about this.