Fit Communications

Here’s an old post, resurrected because I need it and my fitness buddy needs it.

I know I sound like a broken record when I rave on about Tom Venuto’s e-book book Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle. But at the moment I’m especially gung-ho about Tom because I’m liking the zig-zag calorie rotation he describes in chapter 6 of the book. For one thing, it makes the whole calorie-counting thing more interesting and tolerable.

Here’s how it goes:

First you figure out your basal metabolic rate–how many calories you need just to sustain life. If you know your lean body mass (LBM), the Katch-McArdle formula is best and works for both men and women:

BMR - 370 + (21.6 x lean mass in kilograms)

Hint: divide your LBM in pounds by 2.2 to get kilograms.

If you don’t know your LBM, use the Harris-Benedict formula, based on body weight:

Men: BMR - 66 + (13.7 x body weight in kg) + (5 x height in centimeters) - (6.8 x age in years)

Women: BMR - 655 + (9.6 x body weight in kg) + (1.8 x height in centimeters) - (4.7 x age in years)

Once you’ve got an estimate of your baseline calories, below which you should never go when counting calories, multiply the number by an activity factor:

Sedentary: use 1.2
Lightly active: use 1.375
Moderately active: use 1.55
Very active: use 1.725
Extremely active: use 1.9

So, given my LBM of 109 pounds (49.5 kg), my BMR, using the Katch-McArdle formula is 1,440 calories.

I use the activity factor 1.55. Multiplying it by 1,440, I get 2,232 calories per day.

I suspect I probably burn a few more than that, but I’m being conservative.

Okay, so what’s the zig-zag rotation all about? The idea is to spend three days on a moderately reduced-calorie diet (15 to 20 percent below maintenance), then one day at maintenance level.

Why zig-zag? To prevent the body from reducing metabolic rate in response to reduced intake. By eating at maintenance level a couple of days a week, so Tom says, you help prevent the body from thinking you’re starving. The other plus, of course, is that not every day is a restricted day. Nice.

The key reason to zig-zag is that it works. In 30-plus years of caring about this sort of thing, the ZZ is the fastest, most-effective, most muscle-preserving method of fat loss I’ve ever seen.

And I’ve seen it work wonders for people I know as well. Usually women who tell me, “Well, I’m eating right, but nothing is happening.” Sad but true: if nothing is happening, you need to change the equation. Alter the food plan. Increase the activity. Try the ZZ.

You’ve got to see this presentation on msn.com. It depicts a map of the United States and shows, from 1986 to the present, how the percentage of obese people changed, state by state, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control.

Folks, this is amazing and horrifying. At the end you can click on any state to see what efforts are being made there to combat obesity.

I keep thinking I’m obesity-obsessed, but the fact that “everybody’s fat” now (OK, slight exaggeration) is not my imagination. The numbers don’t lie.

The May 2006 issue of Fitness magazine offers a one-page article called “Fast-track your strength training.” I was pleased to see that the five tips offered reflect the strategy I use in my workouts and in my trainee’s workouts.

Here goes:

1. “Move quickly from upper to lower body.”

This tip alone can save tons of time. Why sit around between sets with your muscles getting cold, your energy draining away, and your butt preventing others from using gym equipment? Do a set of pushups, then move right to lunges. When you’re done with the lunges, do some lat pulldowns, then some calf raises. You get the picture.

When I’m working out my trainee, I also change the order of the exercises so that no two workouts are the same. As she finishes a movement, I’ll announce the next movement, and we go right to it.

2. “Drop the weight.”

This tip is about performing drop sets, which I also like to call “down the rack.” It’s easy to do with machines that have weight stacks, and easy to do if you have room to line up a set of dumbbells. Do your first set (post warm-up) with the heaviest weight you’ll use for that movement that day. Do as many reps as you can with good form. Immediately drop the weight and do as many reps as you can with good form. Drop the weight again and go for it. You get the picture.

A single drop set is often all I need of a particular movement. It’s fast, and it’s effective.

3. “Work two muscle groups at once.”

This is about doing movements that involve more than one muscle group. I’m not a big fan of these exercises, but I do believe in supersetting nearby muscle groups–for example, performing a set of dumbbell front raises for the anterior deltoids, then immediately switching to bicep curls or hammer curls.

4. “Balance on one leg.”

I ought to be doing this, especially as we need exercise to maintain balance as we get older.

5. “Team up on one muscle.”

Supersets again, but this time doing multiple movements back to back for the same bodypart–say, leg presses followed by lunges.

Bottom line: by increasing intensity and refusing to waste time sitting on your duff, you can get the weight portion of your workout done in 30 to 45 minutes tops. Unless you’re a powerlifter or preparing for a bodybuilding or figure competition, you don’t need more time than that to increase strength and build muscle.

What do you do with your time between sets?

Here’s what I usually see: people sitting on a piece of equipment between sets, zoning out, or chatting with people. The sitting around part can be a pain because in a crowded gym, chances are good someone else would like to be using the bench or machine you’re perched on.

Now I’m going to sound like an old crank. But when I first started working out in gyms, in the early 1980s, it was common gym etiquette to allow others to “work in” with you. The person using the bench, machine, whatever, might ask someone standing nearby, “Did you want to work in?” And nobody took offense if you approached someone and asked whether you could work in. That’s a phrase I rarely hear these days.

The other problem with sitting around, as I see it, is that you’re losing focus and losing an opportunity to keep your heart rate up.

What I like to do upon finishing a set: immediately move to another exercise for the same or a different bodypart or immediately begin a few laps (40 seconds each) around the indoor track. I find that staying in motion keeps my energy up, and if I’m walking, I start thinking about the next set and what I hope to accomplish with it.

If I just sit and wait, I can almost feel my energy level draining.

And although I don’t want to be antisocial in the gym, there’s only so much time I’ll devote to chatting with people unless the workout is over. Talking about something other than what I’m doing at the moment also causes me to lose focus and energy.

So what do you do between sets? And are you happy with the energy level of your workout?

Many months ago I posted a question about creatine use to a popular bodybuilding forum. Specifically, I was wondering whether it might be helpful for a friend who was working hard in the gym but needed to lose quite a lot of weight. I made the mistake of waxing eloquent about the stuff and commenting that I thought creatine was “almost magic.”

The young person who responded let me know that she thought that was a ridiculous thing to say.

But here’s why I said it. I’ve been in and out of gyms since my first weight-training experience in, like, 1976 or ‘77. Back in those days and in my heyday, the mid-1980s, we didn’t have supplements that accomplished jack. Our protein powder was unbelievably nasty stuff (made from soybeans, and I don’t even want to tell you what that does to a person’s digestive system), and the supplements the magazine ads touted were more or less snake oil.

Creatine really works–and in my book, that translates to “almost magic.” Whey protein works too. These are the good old days of supplementation, no question.

It’s just so cool to do a creatine cycle and see one’s muscles getting fuller.

I’ll toss two scant teaspoons into a shaker with 8 ounces of Parmalat (sugar-sweetened, vanilla-flavored milk with extra protein) after a workout, and on a non-workout day, I combine creatine with a glass of milk and sugar-free Nestle’s Quik before bed. Mmmmm-good.

I haven’t felt very talkative (should that be blogative?) lately. My apologies.

Workouts are going well, bodyfat is going down, and I feel generally terrific. I keep getting comments about how much “energy” I have–from various sources. So I must be doing something energetic-looking. Fidgeting? Wiggling? Jumping up and down?

The enhanced energy level is making me want to add–though cautiously, very cautiously–more exercise. I’m already occasionally adding an additional day of cardio (the intense kind–not the routine 30 minutes’ walk through the neighborhood with dogs at 5 a.m.), and I’m thinking of adding a fourth weight workout per week. If I do, the number of sets will be ridiculously low: maybe eight to 10. On a typical weights day I’m currently doing only 12 to 14 sets. Not many by volume-training standards.

In the past I’ve slipped into overtraining when I went great guns, but I hope now I’m old enough to figure out what’s happening if I do get excessive.

I’m intrigued by Ian King’s book Get Buffed (yes, silly title but a boatload of information) and his take on the number of sets one should perform. There’s no easy answer, but many factors influence the decision, e.g., one’s age, how active or sedentary one’s job is, how much life stress one has, and how much rest one is getting.

Well, this one has a sedentary desk job, but she has a fair amount of life stress, is no longer a spring chicken, and doesn’t always get as much sleep as she wants. I can do 20+ sets per workout, but within a week or two, my mood is crap and my motivation is gone. When I do a dozen sets per workout, I improve or maintain my strength levels and am eager to get to the gym. That seems to be the magic number for me at this stage of life, with a full-time job, commitments to four separate singing groups, half a dozen dogs, and so on.

The moral of the story is, when you’re losing interest in the gym and think you ought to be doing more, you might need to take a weeklong layoff, then come back to the gym and start doing less.

No, this isn’t about one of those ludicrous diets that proclaims “Eat all you want of your favorite foods and still lose weight!”

U.S. News & World Report’s cover story for March 7 is about “Volumetrics”–the eating plan developed by Dr. Barbara Rolls of Penn State. In a nutshell, Rolls discovered that people tend to eat about the same weight of food every day, and that equal weights of food tend to produce equal satiety. In other words, eating a certain volume of, say, potato chips, produces about the same satiety as eating an equal volume of fruit, vegetables, whatever. But as you already know, the portion of chips has a whole lot more calories and many fewer nutrients than the fruit.

Foods can be categorized by their energy density–calories divided by weight. Water and fiber reduce density, so, for instance, 100 calories’ worth of raisins (a dry food) is much more dense than 100 calories’ worth of grapes. The portion of grapes is also much larger, hence producing greater satiety.

The concept is simple but explaining it is tough. Read the article.

I read Rolls’s original book, The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan, several months ago and thought it made a great deal of sense. I’ve tried to incorporate her principles, which merge nicely with my other dietary goal of eating more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.

The funny part is that the aforementioned book was published in 2000 to–as far as I can tell–little or no fanfare. It certainly never reached the levels of publicity enjoyed by Atkins or the Zone or the South Beach diet books. I suspect it wasn’t well publicized. When I borrowed the hardcover from the library, I almost didn’t open the book because (embarrassing confession here) the cover was so ugly. Obviously, not much effort was put into marketing the book.

Just recently Volumetrics has begin getting lots of publicity because Rolls’s second book, The Volumetrics Eating Plan: Techniques and Recipes for Feeling Full on Fewer Calories, was just published. I’ll buy it. And I highly recommend the first one.

Had an interesting conversation at the office this week with our talented 20-something photojournalism intern. Somehow we got on the subject of workouts. This 20-something is very tall and lean, and he wants to add some muscle.

I asked him whether he did squats and praised the squat as the king, the queen, the No. 1 builder of strong bodies and big muscles. I leapt from my chair and said, “Now, not like this,” demonstrating a half-squat, “but like this” demonstrating a slow, controlled deep squat.

“Then if you really want a burn, try this,” I said, demonstrating what my old workout pal from 20 years ago used to call oscillations–the movement from the bottom of a deep squat to just above parallel, then back to deep, then just above parallel, etc., until you can’t stand it any more. “Those’ll burn your butt,” said I.

“How do you know about all this?” said he. “I mean, I could understand it if Name Withheld [my male assistant editor, who does not train with weights, who has never trained with weights] came out with it.”

Sigh.

Are there still people, young people, who assume weights are for men? Apparently so. Aren’t there young women, I wonder, who lift in the university facility where our intern trains?

I vividly remember young women worrying about “getting too big” in the weight-training activity course I took in college back in the late ’70s–and in the women’s weight-training class I taught at the YMCA in the mid-’80s.

But sheesh. Don’t young guys and gals know that iron is an equal-opportunity employer, as much for women as for men?

Much commentary has greeted the fed’s newly released Dietary Guidelines for Americans. What intrigues me is the response that the new recommendations for physical activity are “unrealistic.”

Here are the recommendations, taken directly from the executive summary:

Engage in regular physical activity and reduce sedentary activities to promote health, psychological well-being, and a healthy body weight.

To reduce the risk of chronic disease in adulthood: Engage in at least 30 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity, above usual activity, at work or home on most days of the week.

For most people, greater health benefits can be obtained by engaging in physical activity of more vigorous intensity or longer duration.

To help manage body weight and prevent gradual, unhealthy body weight gain in adulthood: Engage in approximately 60 minutes of moderate- to vigorous-intensity activity on most days of the week while not exceeding caloric intake requirements.

To sustain weight loss in adulthood: Participate in at least 60 to 90 minutes of daily moderate-intensity physical activity while not exceeding caloric intake requirements. Some people may need to consult with a healthcare provider before participating in this level of activity.

Achieve physical fitness by including cardiovascular conditioning, stretching exercises for flexibility, and resistance exercises or calisthenics for muscle strength and endurance.

Some people are riled up at the idea that managing body weight might take an hour to 90 minutes of physical activity four to six days a week.

I have several responses, first of all that the guidelines weren’t constructed for convenience’ sake. Their point is to explain what it will take to achieve or maintain optimal health. They wouldn’t be worth much if scientists got together, figured out what people wanted to hear, and then fed it back to them.

Certainly some people don’t have 60 to 90 minutes to spare on an average day, particularly people with heavy responsibilities for others–small children, dependents with disabilities, etc.

But if it’s true that the average American spends a couple of hours with television each day, it follows that the average American does have the time. Certainly other factors may get in the way–e.g., unsafe neighborhoods unsuitable for walking, lack of money for gym memberships, and so on.

To me it makes sense to take the recommendations in the spirit in which they were given: they’re recommendations. They’re outlining what we need to do to help make up for all the physical labor we no longer do in the course of our day (plowing, churning butter, scrubbing floors by hand, chopping wood, carrying water, washing dishes, walking to school or to church or to the store).

They’re a challenge. And challenge, to quote our incarcerated cultural icon Martha Stewart, is a good thing.