As someone who is passionate about health and fitness it’s frustrating to sit idly by while articles are written about improving fitness and changing body shapes. Similar to seagulls, they swoop in, making a mess all around them, and fly off to pastures new while everyone is left to tidy up.

Perhaps due to the advancement of the internet, people who previously had limited knowledge of a subject, such as health, can now peddle false claims, such as how to accomplish fat loss. This can lead to disillusioned readers.

The readers of such articles will fail to achieve the results because the claims being made are false. After all, you can’t learn to be rich from someone who is poor and you can’t learn to get in shape from someone who has never been in shape themselves.

One particularly annoying article was published in a national newspaper called ‘Exercise those brain cells and get rid of the fat.‘ The author stated that changing your body shape was as simple as going for a walk and that personal trainers were, without doubt, “one of the most irritating and pretentious manifestations of life under the Celtic Tiger” and that eating vegetables and walking to the shop instead of taking the car would solve everyone’s fitness and weight problems.

The author’s lack of knowledge of how the human body functions just exacerbates the frustrations felt from so many people who cannot tone or sculpt their body, even though they may walk four miles every day.

Walking as a form of weight loss is a walk on the road to nowhere! When you read a column such as this, you must understand that there are differences in the intensities of training methods and that there is a difference between cardio and aerobic training.

If you are elevating your heart rate you are performing cardiovascular work. This can be performed in many ways, for example sprints or weight training. Aerobic training, meaning ‘with oxygen’, is walking or jogging in a relatively low-intensity state of exercise, that can be maintained indefinitely as long as oxygen is supplied to the working muscles.

Aerobic training makes muscles more efficient at using fat as energy; but hold back that excitement because if your car was more efficient at using fuel you would use less of it. It is the total energy burned that we should be interested in.

Muscle is the only tissue that burns fat, and aerobic training makes muscle smaller and more efficient at burning fat, so essentially you become a smaller, more efficient fat-burning machine. That’s not effective.

If you think about a real world example, a sprinter that runs 10-20 second intervals carries less body fat and a larger muscle mass than a marathon runner who runs for three hours. This is because working at higher intensities burns more total calories than working at low intensities.

The body literally adapts to anything we attempt to do by responding in the reverse manner. Don’t drink any water and your body will attempt to retain water. Performing regular weight training causes muscle to break down and so the body responds by building muscle to burn fat.

But in walking or aerobic training, even if you burn a tonne of calories doing aerobic training, that same body adapts by slowing down your metabolism and allowing your body to store more fat. Same body, same system.

The biggest problem with aerobic training is that you get better. The work that was required to run five miles becomes less and less as you get better. Now you have to run for 35 minutes to burn the calories you used to burn in 25 minutes.

So since we have walked since we were babies, it becomes less and less challenging and our body becomes fuel efficient.

When we do the same things often enough, our body adapts to become more fuel efficient unless we progressively overload it. In weight training, if you get better, you can either add more weight or increase the repetitions and there is literally no finishing line in sight but there is an end to aerobic training.

We lose muscle as we get older if we are not weight training and 1lb of muscle is responsible for burning at least 50 calories a day at rest to maintain. If you are serious about changing your body shape and you lack the knowledge, seek assistance from those people who are skilled to give it.

This is what you would do if your car broke down; you wouldn’t attempt to fix it yourself.

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