Trainer's Blog

If this doesn't convince you......

So, I’ve made the argument for weight-lifting before, that it is the best way to look good while not taking up so much of your time that you become an anti-social recluse…but if that’s what you like to be, then recluse away. On the other hand, if you’d like to look and feel good, and, oh, I don’t know, have a life too, then here is an interesting study to attempt to bring you to the light.

In the book ‘The New Rules of Lifting’, by Lou Schuler, he talks about a study that was conducted between 1979 and 1997. The study followed 2,000 middle-aged men in the United Kingdom and it looked at their exercise patterns and physical activity. The results of the study were published in the journal ‘Heart’ in 2003 and found, among other things, that those who engaged in light to moderate physical activity (walking, gardening, playing golf, bowling) had no effect on heart disease, death from heart disease, or death from all causes, even if they did up to 90 minutes a day of those activities, they got no measurable protection from heart disease or any other terminal illness.

The ones who did get that protection were those who did “heavy” exercise (climbing stairs, playing vigorous start-stop sports like tennis, hiking, jogging, swimming, serious landscaping work). Also, they only needed to burn as little as 54 calories a day doing that heavy exercise.

If you weigh 150...

If you want results, yes. If not, then no.

This shouldn’t be the only thing you do with your treadmill...
In my article titled ‘Cardio’, I expounded on the many benefits of walking and said it was my preferred form of cardio. From an article by Tim Henriques (Director of the National Personal Training Institute of VA, I’ll just summarize the finer points of it.

Tim’s opinion and mine as well, is that walking on an inclined treadmill is the most effective and safest form of cardio if fat loss (without muscle loss) is the goal.

Tim’s Pros of walking:

• Walking does not over-stress the body, and in fact is restorative, you feel better after a walk, not worse.
• You can’t overtrain with walking. (Arnold Schwarzenegger once said that the body was built to walk 40 miles a day, so my guess is nobody is going to over-walk themselves)
• Walking is low intensity, thus it burns primarily fat for fuel, and walking briskly at an incline for 4-8 hours a week will burn a significant amount of fat.
• Walking burns almost no muscle, I won’t go into what’s going on with the glucose in your body when you do more intense cardio, just suffice it to say, it’s true.
• Helps the body recover from resistance training.
• Does not cause unwanted adaptation like more intense cardio does (it won’t make you lose lean mass or get weaker)
• Also, it’s great for stress relief, it’s functional, increases ability to...