Why your workout isn’t working
Finally the press are starting to put wrongs to right! Dan Roberts, journalist for The Independent, has written a great piece titled Why your workout isn’t working, a much-awaited clear-cut article tackling recent chants that “exercise makes you fat”. Roberts presents his findings with logic and rationale…and best of all, he actually has consulted with a variety of professionals on the subject, ranging from leading researcher, Dr Edward Melanson, to the EIS performance nutritionist, Jeni Pearce. Dan Roberts’ message is simple – “look behind the sensational headlines and grasp what at the research is really telling us”.
Roberts quotes Dr Melanson, “It all comes down to energy balance. It’s not that exercise doesn’t burn fat – it’s just that we replace the calories” and too, begins to realise our flawed outlook on weight loss and exercise. We all know the endless health benefits that an active lifestyle has to offer, but on a more shallow level, we tend to exercise to lose weight or keep in shape. Recent research has shown that weight loss success is remarkably small when exercise is used as a single intervention, however it was ignorant to assume that exercise “makes us fat”. Nutrition intervention (diet) alone definitely is more successful at promoting weight loss, however all the professionals consulted by Roberts agree that exercise AND diet are the best combination. There are 4 main take-home messages from this article:
Higher-intensity workouts expend more calories than lower-intensity workouts, which ultimately is more effective for weight loss – it’s more about total calorie burn than how we burn the calories
Body composition is important for calorie burn – muscle burns more calories than fat and is important for sustained weight loss and overall resting metabolic rate boost
We over-estimate the calories burned during exercise and over-reward ourselves with food after exercise! Essentially, we tend consume more calories than we expended which counters any weight loss effort.
Weight loss takes time and effort! A consistent effort will result in more sustainable weight loss.
There is one short-coming in Dan Roberts’ article, and that is he has been led to believe that there is “difficulty in accurately measuring calorie expenditure”. It is clearer now than ever before that it is ALL ABOUT ENERGY BALANCE. The Ki Fit system is the missing link in this article, and would definitely have given Roberts the closure he needed in his message to the masses.
