Probably one of the top 10 questions I get asked by new clients is,

“How long will it take before I start to see some results?”

Well, the answer to that question is a tough one, because a great deal of it relies on the client. It depends on:

• How motivated you are to create changes in your body
• How well you will adhere to nutritional and lifestyle changes
• Your age
• Your sex
• The amount of stress you have in your life
• Consistency

…and so on and so forth. Now, assuming that you follow my instructions and advice reasonably well (you strength train consistently, you eat mostly correctly, you get semi-adequate recovery) then you can expect to see real, tangible results at about the 4-6 week mark, maybe later if you aren’t particularly good with nutrition or if you miss workouts, etc.

This answer usually is met with some surprise. In this world of Hydroxycut and Trimspa, people are used to hearing things like, “Lose 40 lbs of fat in just 3 weeks!” and the like. But the reality is that real, lasting results take time. Programs that work don’t involve crash dieting or 4 hour long workouts that are unsustainable for prolonged periods of time. Programs that work involve lifestyle changes that force the body to adapt - this takes time. It takes time to get into the habit of eating for optimal leanness. It takes time to condition your body for truly beneficial (read: truly hard) exercise. It takes time to lose fat without sacrificing precious muscle along the way.

John Stone has a website that shows what a dedicated, young, out-of-shape person can achieve given the proper training, nutrition, and (most importantly) application. He has been kind enough to chronicle his transformation day by day. The pictures tell the story!

John Stone Fitness

Note that the greatest amount of change occurred in the first 4-5 months of his program, when he went from fat to lean. Note also that in the day-to-day pictures, you don’t start to see visible changes until…

…about 4-6 weeks.

Of course, if he had just taken Trimspa…(he would probably have washed out after 3 weeks).

Quick, what do you get when you cross a marketer with a psuedoscientist and a willing design team?

Answer: Dubious equipment!

I do have one good thing to say about The Ultimate Burn Machine - it sure is pretty. Someone had a good time designing it.

Clients often ask me about these various exercise contraptions, as some are in vogue, some have had their hey-days, and some just should never have made it off the drawing board. The problem with these machines is an issue of “half-truth.”

You see, most of the time, it’s not that the manufacturers are lying about what the machine does (ok, maybe they are), but that they take a physiological fact and divorce it from the bigger picture, making it only “kinda true.”

For example, a client asked me once about “Cortislim”, a fat-loss supplement that proposed to eliminate fat by reducing the amount of cortisol released in your bloodstream. Cortisol is your body’s main stress hormone, and chronic release of cortisol in the bloodstream is implicated in fat storage, especially around the belly. Cortislim, the ads promise, will help reduce belly fat by controlling the release of cortisol. Sounds reasonable…

…until you realize that in order for cortisol to mobilize fat to be stored in the belly, there has to be a source of all this excess fat - i.e., excess food calories from eating more than your body requires. Hence, you can’t just take Cortislim and lose belly fat; you have to control diet and (hopefully) exercise (*ahem strength train) to ensure there are no excess calories running around to be stored as fat. So while it is true that cortisol release does these bad things, you don’t get the whole picture.

Here are some gems I picked out to share with you all:

1.) “Regular weightlifting actually discourages use of the stabilizing muscles, tendons, and ligaments.”

…because lifting big, heavy, unwieldy barbells and dumbbells doesn’t require any stabilization whatsoever - of course! How could I have been so naive to think my rotator cuff muscles stabilize my shoulder under a heavy bench press?

2.) “By forcing the body to control the weight, without the added support of isolating the working muscle, you end up utilizing the deeper, harder to work, stabilizing and supporting muscles. What you end up with is functional, practical strength.”

The term “functional strength” is thrown around nowadays so much the mere sight of it makes me want to throw up. “Functional strength” used to mean “usable strength; strength that enhances ability to perform coordinated movement.” Its current definition, however, is something more like this:

Above: Circus, I mean, “functional training.”

3.) “By shifting the weight you can perform the same movements that you may do with regular weights, but by changing your center of gravity, you now force your body’s deep stabilizers to work to counter act the asymmetry in weight. If you know and understand your body’s weak side, you can actually strengthen it while not over strengthening the strong side.“(emphasis added)

Well, if you know and understand the body’s weak side, you can simply address this issue with weights. One can perform exercises with dumbbells only to the ability of the weaker side, therefore allowing the weaker side to catch up to the stronger side. On fixed bar (barbell) movements, one can emphasize pushing with the weaker side to create a greater stimulus for improvement for the weaker side. Point being, if you’re unaware of your body and it’s imbalances, having a nifty spinny machine isn’t going to help much.

When viewing the Burn Machine in motion, the counterweight swings around randomly. I don’t see how that’s providing for improving a weaker side while not overstrengthening the strong side. If anything, it would further exacerbate any preexisting imbalances (since your strong side would try to compensate for the weaker side and handle the majority of the randomly sliding asymmetric load). So what is this person talking about?

I still can’t figure it out either.

4.) “Whether you are a baseball player, golfer, tennis play, soccer player or ping pong player, all sport is asymmetrical.”

One of the tried and true arguments of “functional trainers” is “imbalances will inevitably cause injuries.” So if Maria Sharapova strengthens her right arm (her hitting arm) 200% more than her left, does that mean that her left arm is going to fall off or something when she volleys? Of course not. Muscular imbalances do not doom you to an early immobility (I’ve yet to hear of a “functional trainer” finding a client who wasn’t imbalanced, yet somehow, the client continues to get up and go to work in order to fund training sessions with said functional trainer). Muscular weakness, however, will result in impaired function.

Incidentally, Dr. Burn seems to have forgotten that the weightlifting she ranted about earlier is one of the few sports that is symmetrical. Whoops.

Here’s the bottom line: when presenting a new gadget, marketers often use a hint of the truth in order to legitimize the product to the customer. I say: Caveat emptor - let the buyer beware. Become educated in the world of fitness, or ask a professional you trust (or his colleagues, all of them) about products and services that seem too good to be true. Make sure you get the whole picture, because a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

From the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, April edition:

which suggest that vegetable and fruit consumption has risen slightly during the time studied in the NHANES surveys (someone else must’ve eaten my 127 pounds of fresh fruit for me last year, BTW).

Do statistics lie? No, not if the data is pure. But how you interpret that data can make all the difference in the world.

The NHANES survey analysis showed a slight decrease in the percentage of Americans who ate 2 or more servings of fruit as well as those who ate 3 or more servings of vegetables daily. The numbers are less than alarming: 28% down to 27% for fruit consumption, 35% down to 32% for vegetable consumption.

It doesn’t seem quite so incredulous, does it? The USDA data seems to indicate that, while Americans as a whole are not meeting USDA guidelines for fruit and vegetable consumption, they are, as a whole, making an effort and improving their overall fruit and vegetable consumption.

Statistical gymnastics aside, some interesting points:

1) The NHANES data counts fried potatoes (!) as a serving of vegetables. Yikes. Hopefully the USDA data showing that per capita potato consumption has decreased is evidence of decreasing fried potato intake.

2) Dried fruit and fruit juice both counted as a serving of fruit. Sounds like the survey results could more accurately be stated, “Americans eat fewer fruit, vegetables, and concentrated sources of sugar.”

3) The researchers bemoaned the fact that the survey respondents tended to eat several servings of the same type of vegetable, as opposed to a diverse menu of “multi-colored fruits and vegetables”, as is touted by health officials.

I say, “Who cares?” I would be quite pleased to have a previously non-compliant client of mine eat only blueberries, only broccoli, or only spinach and consume multiple servings of those, than going crazy trying to include purple carrots, blood oranges, spaghetti squash, or any of the other myriad number of vegetables (or not trying at all).

The bottom line: Nagging is still an ineffective strategy for long-term behavioral change (insert bad marriage joke here).

So I will admit it - I was wrong about one thing in my previous post about the Crossfit training the cast and crew of “300″ underwent. The workouts were not totally random. Instead, they closely followed typical Crossfit-style progressions, using work, time, intensity, and focus as variables. And the actual “300″ workout (which was outlined in Men’s Health) was not a WOD (workout of the day) but a benchmark “test” that only half of the trainees actually attempted (and completed).

I don’t blame them - any routine involving 300 reps to be performed in less than 20 minutes is an extremely fearsome one.

Mark Twight was so kind as to post an article about the training he did for the cast and crew of the movie “300″ on his again-functioning website:

“300″ - The So-Called Program.

Knowing he was a Crossfit guy, it’s no surprise that the so-called random workouts had an internal structure, which you can discern from the training schedule, accessible right here:

Gym Jones Schedule.

One thing that I do like a lot about Crossfit enthusiasts is that they keep their processes completely transparent. No hiding of “secret Russian workout magik tricks” or anything like that. The attitude is, “here, this is what I did, here’s what I’m doing today, this is what I’m doing tomorrow; now see if you can keep up, puny mortal.”

Men’s Health magazine did a story some time back about bad trainers, the shining example being a trainer who pushed his client so hard that he developed exertional rhabdomyolysis, a condition where so much muscle fiber is broken down that the myoglobin from the muscle tissue clogs up the kidneys, ultimately causing kidney failure if untreated. Symptoms include muscle soreness/pain, joint soreness, tea-colored urine, and a general feeling of having been in a fight with 10 UFC fighters all at the same time.

I remember learning about rhabdomyolysis during my Exercise Physiology classes in the context of marathon training. Dr. Zambraski so thoughtfully chose a picture of necrotizing tissue (similar to this one) as a way to burn into our young, impressionable, undergraduate heads that rhabdomyolysis is bad, bad, bad.

Flash forward years later, and enter the exercise philosophy of Crossfit:

Exercise-induced rhabdo.

I now get warm fuzzy feelings whenever someone mentions either rhabdomyolysis or hyponatremia. Thanks, Dr. Zambraski!

P.S. - BTW, statins can cause rhabdomyolysis. Just another reason not to take them (aside from the cholesterol not having a causal link to heart disease thing).