I found another video that I had stashed which is great for this thread. It’s only 5 minutes long and is definitely worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXTiiz99p9oOne of the key points is at 1:35 where it says that one study found that if a 200 pound man ran for an hour, 4 days a week, for a month, he’d lose about 5 pounds at most, assuming everything else (namely his diet and amount of “non-running physical activity”) stayed the same.
If we take this month (June 2019) as an example, that would take 16 hours of running (assuming he runs for an hour every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday for all 4 weeks of the month) to lose 5 pounds. Could you be bothered to do that for such a small payoff? The return on investment is awful.
Don’t think you’re the exception to the rule because you do something else instead of running. If you’re a swimmer, a cyclist, a rower, a dancer, or you do CrossFit, triathlons, aerobics, boxercise, boxing, martial arts of any kind or sport of any kind, it’s the same for you. General physical activity is useless for burning enough calories to lose weight.
At 2:25 the video mentions metabolic compensation as a factor that causes a slowdown in weight loss.
There are a number of ways this happens.
Firstly, if you’re lighter, you will burn fewer calories when you move around than someone who is heavier. The body has less weight to move, and it takes less energy to do that.
Secondly, if you do a lot of running, cycling, swimming or rowing, your body (nervous system) refines these movements in very subtle ways that over time. Subtle enough that they can’t be seen with the naked eye. Basically, your body becomes extremely efficient at whatever your frequently practiced movement is. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing burpees, jumping jacks, skipping, punching a heavy bag, ten pin bowling, squats, deadlifts, power cleans, roundhouse kicks, moving furniture, even walking, whatever.
If you practice something over and over and over and over again for months, years or decades, your nervous system is going to fine tune the shit out of that movement or sequence of movements to ensure that you can do it as efficiently as possible in terms of energy expenditure (calorie burn). That means, someone who has been doing ballroom dancing for 10 years will burn fewer calories doing it than a total novice (all other things being equal).
This is supported by what the video shows at 2:38 – the study on the Hadza tribe in Tanzania, Africa. Despite being much more active, the tribe who lead an active lifestyle out on the savanna didn’t actually burn any more calories than test subjects from America and Europe who lead a traditional, relative inactive, modern Western lifestyle.
The difference? Food intake. The Hadza simply don’t have access to any high calorie foods. Nothing artificial. Nothing processed. They either grow it, rear it or hunt it. If the calorie burn of Westerners and African tribes people is the same, why then do sedentary Western office workers get so fat? Answer - because they spend all day shovelling calories into their faces whilst they sit at their desks. Nothing more scientific than that. The Hadza don’t have that choice of mindlessly eating loads of calories. Yes, it’s a fucking choice. We Westerners don't HAVE to do it either.
As far as exercise is concerned, resistance training is king. Firstly if it protects you against sarcopenia, osteopenia and osteoporosis as I described in my previous post on this thread. In that respect it's the closest thing we have to a fountain of youth. It really is physical medicine. Secondly, he main aim of resistance training on a diet is to preserve muscle mass and keep that resting metabolic rate from dropping (the yellow bar in the video above won’t shrink when you lose weight). Muscle is far more metabolically active than any other tissue in your body. It takes something like 2 calories per day to maintain a pound of fat. With muscle, the figure is higher. How much higher, is the source of much debate, but it's estimated to be somewhere in the region of 6 to 20 calories per pound of muscle. At a minimum, that's 3 times more metabolically active than fat.
Here’s a great study to illustrate what resistance training can do for you when dieting.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10487375PURPOSE:
The purpose of this study was to examine the physiological effects of a weight-loss dietary regimen with or without exercise.
METHODS:
Thirty-five overweight men were matched and randomly placed into either a control group or one of three dietary groups.
There were 6 men in the control group.
There were 8 men in the diet-only group.
There were 11 men in a diet group that performed aerobic exercise three times per week
There were 10 men in a diet group that performed both aerobic exercise and strength training three times per week
RESULTS:
After 12 weeks,
Diet only group lost 9.64kg (69% was fat = 6.65kg)
Diet and aerobics group lost 8.99kg (78% was fat = 7.01kg)
Diet, aerobics and strength training group lost 9.90kg (97% was fat = 9.60kg)
Aerobics on its own, 3 times a week, whatever format it took, lost an extra 0.36kg of fat over 12 weeks compared to diet accompanied by no exercise at all.
This is more evidence that aerobics are just dreadful for weight loss. Is it really worth the effort? Whilst it doesn't say how long they were doing aerobics for in each session, or how intense it was regardless, it's massively inefficient, yielding only 360 grams greater fat loss than if you didn't do it at all.
That said, aerobics seemed to spare an extra 1kg of muscle. It is however blown away by those who also did strength training.
Diet Only = 2.99kg of muscle lost.
Aerobics = 1.98kg of muscle lost.
Aerobics and Strength = 0.3kg of muscle lost.
The diet-only group also demonstrated a significant reduction in fat-free mass, not just muscle, but also bone tissue and organ tissue etc.
Sadly I couldn't find any details on exactly what aerobics or strength training programs these people undertook. I would love to see the results of the study if it were conducted again with the addition of a 4th group who did only diet and strength training, but no aerobics. Chances are they would come out on top as they would obtain all the benefits of diet and strength training, but wouldn't have aerobics needlessly eating into their ability to recover from the strength training sessions, meaning they would gain more muscle and strength and possibly lose even more fat.