Free the Animal

Overtraining

One thing I should always mention about my results like I posted yesterday is that in addition to the real food and intermittent fasting, my workouts consist of only two 30-minute sessions per week, both of which I always do hungry, i.e., at least 12 hours since last food intake, and sometimes as much as 24-30 hours (I'm still in fat-loss mode). And regardless of how long it was that I hadn't eaten, I don't eat immediately after the workout either, for at least two hours.

If that seems totally crazy to you, does that sense come from actual experience, first-hand knowledge, or are you doing what so many do, which is to just run with the crowd? As I've come to learn being around the gym, trainers, and cardioholics: the fitness industry is dominated by a herd mentality. It's very faddish, and if you watch closely you'll begin to notice all sorts of contradictory diet, exercise, nutritional and supplement advice.

But stop to consider this: do mammals typically hunt in a fed or a hungry (fasted) state? If the latter, doesn't it seem logical, and also, doesn't it make sense that evolved physiology would be highly adapted to such behavior? Remember, we didn't evolve with refrigerators, so food storage was rather difficult.

And I do no cardio. I walk every weekday morning (low level aerobic), and now and then I do all out sprints, 3-6 at 30-40 seconds with a couple of minutes rest in-between.

I've been going trough all my past EvFit posts over the last year and a half and am re-categorizing for better granularity. But I came across something I wanted to highlight. Remember Mark Sisson? Who is he?

I excelled at cross-country and distance track events in high school and at Williams College, where I was a pre-med candidate and received my degree in Biology.

In fact, the running was going so well after college that I decided to forgo medical school for a few years (it’s at 31 years now) and concentrate on a running career. I trained seriously as a marathoner for another five years, racking up well over 100 miles each week in training. The effort culminated in a top 5 finish in the 1980 US National Marathon Championships and a qualifying spot for the 1980 US Olympic Trials. Unfortunately, by then the inhuman amount of training and weekly racing was taking its toll and I found myself constantly sick or injured. (Note to self: too much exercise is not a good thing). In fact, in my last year of competition, as a world class, extremely “fit” athlete, I experienced eight upper respiratory infections! Clearly I was ruining my immune system and my joints doing too much exercise. That’s when I started exploring nutrition and supplementation as a way to enhance my performance and to support my damaged body and bolster my immune system.

The running injuries - osteoarthritis and tendonitis - precluded ever racing at a high level again, but that was just about the time that the new sport of Triathlon was starting to emerge, and I was immediately hooked. While I couldn’t run much anymore, I could certainly cycle and swim to my heart’s content…and I did. I spent a few more years racing triathlons, including finishing 4th place at the Hawaii Ironman, the biggest in the world at the time.

I finally retired from competition in 1988 and decided I would do whatever I could to help others avoid making the kinds of health mistakes that I had made. I figured I could use my pre-medical background, my degree in biology and an intense desire to unlock the health secrets that I knew were out there - answers to questions about health, wellness, anti-aging, safe weight-loss, nutrition and supplementation - to find the natural ways of achieving good health.

I wrote several books, including Maximum Results, The Fat Control System, The Anti-aging Report and The Lean Lifestyle Program (over 400,000 copies distributed). I edited the Optimum Health national health newsletter (circ. 90,000) from 1994 through 1996.

Now, take a look at him at 54.

If anyone ought to know about the ill effects of chronic cardio, Mark should. See this post, and this one.

And rejoice! You don't need to do slow, boring "cardio" to get awesome results.

And why wouldn’t anyone want to hear that real exercise doesn’t mean endless hours on that torturously boring treadmill? News like this is like sunlight bursting in, choirs of children singing, shackles collapsing open and crashing to the ground. Hordes of celebratory folk parade through the gym, penny whistles and fiddles playing, ale mugs in hand, goats and cows in the merry mix. Get off that treadmill and join us, for the love!

The Cario and Aerobic Myth

Now that I'm a regular at the gym, coming up on a year, I am quite comfortable concluding that the "cardio craze" is complete bunk. It's of virtually no value whatsoever, and the downsides far outweigh any advantages. I'd love it if my gym -- which is a 5-minute walk, so I'm not about to switch -- would dump all but a few of the cardio machines that take up enormous space, and use the space for crossfit training.

How did I come to this conclusion? Well, Art's essay on Evolutionary Fitness (PDF) clued me in and made me aware, so it was in my field of view and I've observed.

The adaptive and variable energy demands of our ancestral existence are gone. We live a low energy flux and metabolically unvaried existence in bodies designed for another lifeway. We are hunter/gatherers in pin-stripe suits, living a sedentary life and it is killing us in ways our ancestors never experienced. Virtually all the degenerative diseases–atherosclerosis, diabetes, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, declining muscle mass–of modern civilization are unheard of among hunter-gatherers and were not part of our ancestral experience. Most modern fitness prescriptions are static and agricultural. These programs model the body as a machine, not as an adaptive organism. Consequently, they prescribe a regime in which the body is under-fed and over-trained. They are not based on adaptation, but on steady state analysis. These models assume the body is a linear process that maintains a steady state. In fact, all bodily processes are highly non-linear and these non-linearities must be exploited in any effective fitness program. The key to exploiting the highly non-linear and dynamic adaptive metabolic processes of the human body is to achieve the right mixture of intensity and variety of activities.

Here is an example of the Zen-like twists that adaptive, non-linear systems like human metabolism follow that confound mechanistic thinking. The body uses fat in the aerobic (ST and lower IT) zone. So, linear thinking suggests that to burn fat you should operate in that zone. It would not surprise someone trained to understand the adaptive capabilities of the human body that if you burn more fat the body will find a way to produce more. And this is just what happens when you energy flows over the aerobic pathway—your body releases hormone messengers that signal higher fat production.

You do burn a higher proportion of calories as fat in the aerobic zone, but that is no reason to stay there. You burn more calories and more fat in total when you train at high intensity. And you do not open the metabolic pathways that cause your body to make more fat. Energy that flows over the anaerobic pathway signals your body to make more muscle and to burn fat.

You incur an oxygen depth that raises metabolism for days after a high intensity session. Above all, you bring adaptations that burn fat. As the body remodels in response to the adaptive challenge presented by a brief, high-intensity session, it preferentially burns fat. In addition, you put on lean muscle mass that burns energy continuously. From 60 to 70 per cent of the energy you burn is at your basal metabolic rate. If you gain lean muscle mass you raise your basal metabolic rate and, thus, burn more energy 24 hours a day.

(I know I've mentioned and linked to this essay before, but presuming your interest, if you haven't taken the time to to read it, you should -- and I'm reading it for the third time.)

Anyway, long story short, I've seen amazing things in the gym. I see these same people, toiling away on the treadmill, day after day, week after week, month after month and they look like zombies to me. Far from the picture of health, they look highly stressed, swollen from body-wide inflammation, pale -- awful. And they make no noticeable gains. On the other hand, a number of people have come up to me and complimented me on the gains I've made and they've noticed. I work out, high intensity, for a total of one hour per week -- some do that every day on the treadmill or elliptical.

All that, to get to this: here's a couple of posts my Mark Sisson, a former long-distance runner, covering the cardio-aerobic myth.

Dear Mark: Chronic Cardio

More Chronic Cardio Talk

As Art says he feels like saying when he sees joggers on the street: "slow down and live longer."

Aerobics: Stop Killing Yourself

As I've been saying, my own experience bears this out, and in different ways. Competitive runner and personal trainer finds out the hard way. Take a look.