Year: 2008

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Estimating Maintenance Calories

Question: If you would allow me a brief intro . . . my name is Leland Hammonds and I am a 29 year old Kinesiology professor here in San Antonio, Texas. I also own my own personal training business. For the last three years, I have spent approx three hours a day, six days a week studying nutrition and exercise research as they relate to fat loss. It consumes my every waking thought.

Although I do absolutely no marketing – I am booked solid Mon-Fri early mornings and late evenings (basically every second I am not at the college) with fat-loss clients. I believe this has more to do with my client selection/admission process and absolutely constant nagging about nutrition (I normally do not allow a client to continue training with me if they don’t get their nutrition right within the first few weeks of training). All my clients are referrals and almost all of them want fat loss.… Keep Reading

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Steady State vs. HIIT: Explaining The Disconnect

In this series of articles, I’ve been addressing some issues relating to the debate over steady state and interval training for fat loss.    In the last two posts, hopefully I’ve made the point that a lot of what the pro-interval crowd is resting the benefits of interval training on (namely EPOC, which is the post-exercise calorie burn) is a whole lot of nothing.

With any realistic amount of intervals, not only does the total calorie burn of the workout itself pale compared to longer moderate intensity steady state sessions, the EPOC simply doesn’t amount to anything. Certainly not enough to explain the rather rabid and myopic recommendation of that form of training.

Yet we seem to have something of a real-world problem, there is an apparent disconnect with the physiology that I’ve (so-far) looked at and the results of research (or the real world), many of which are showing greater fat loss with the interval versus steady state exercise mode.… Keep Reading

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Steady State vs. Intervals and EPOC: Practical Application

When I looked at EPOC,  I threw out a lot of data regarding the actual impact of exercise on the post-exercise calorie burn. Since that piece was on the long side to begin with, I decided to save some more concrete examples for today’s follow-up blog.

Semi-recapping from yesterday, the paper conclude that high intensity training can generate larger EPOC’s at least in terms of the percentage contribution. The paper suggested that values of a 7% EPOC for steady state work but 14% for interval work were approximately correct values so that’s what I’m going to use.

As I mentioned yesterday, and want to look at in more detail today, although 14% sounds impressively larger than 7%, this can be terribly misleading. 7% of a large number can still be more than 14% of a much smaller number even if the percentage contribution is higher in the second case. And no matter how you cut it, the majority of calories burned come during the workout, not afterwards.… Keep Reading

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EPOC: Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption After Exercise

One of the primary bases upon which the superiority of HIIT is based is the idea of the calorie afterburn that occurs after training.    Technically this is called the Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption or EPOC.   Since it relates to the topic of steady state vs. interval training, I want to examine it here.

LaForgia et al. Effects of exercise intensity and duration on the excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. J Sports Sci. 2006 24(12):1247-64

Recovery from a bout of exercise is associated with an elevation in metabolism referred to as the excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC). A number of investigators in the first half of the last century reported prolonged EPOC durations and that the EPOC was a major component of the thermic effect of activity. It was therefore thought that the EPOC was a major contributor to total daily energy expenditure and hence the maintenance of body mass.

Investigations conducted over the last two or three decades have improved the experimental protocols used in the pioneering studies and therefore have more accurately characterized the EPOC.… Keep Reading

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Steady State and HIIT

In recent years, there has been quite the over-popularization of the concept of high-intensity interval training (HIIT), along with a rather major backlash against traditional forms of aerobic training, for fat loss. It’s not uncommon to read how low intensity aerobics is useless for fat loss, everybody should just do intervals, regular aerobics makes you lose muscle, etc. I have seen it claimed that aerobics will make you fatter, stress the adrenals, and all manners of fascinating claims.

Nevermind that, over the decades, bodybuilders have gotten into contest shape with (often endless amounts of) cardio, runners, cyclists and swimmers are extremely lean, etc. Somehow, aerobic training has gotten a bad rap.

While I have written about this in a previous article series, I wanted to revisit the topic again since I see the same (usually incorrect) ideas being thrown about.

Where Did this Idea Come From?

I think what happened is that for about 2 decades, aerobic training has been (over) emphasized over all other kinds of activity.… Keep Reading