Dr. Eades had a nice post today on his blog about the Gina Kolata article I blogged on last week.  What was Dr. Eades’ summary statement?

Exercise because it’s good for you: it builds muscle mass, it makes you stronger, it improves bone density, etc. But eat fewer carbs to lose weight.

Does this sound familiar?  Like perhaps you’ve heard this recommendation somewhere before?

It’s amazing that this myth has persisted so long, so the truth bears repeating: Don’t exercise to lose fat.  Exercise to maintain (or increase) your muscle mass, and eat better to lose fat.

(Image Credit: Julielohre.com)

It’s been a longstanding tradition (well, longstanding from a bodybuilder’s perspective, anyway) that each individual muscle group has to be blitzed, bombed, and blasted in order to get the most out of it. In other words, there’s no way for you to really work a given muscle group unless you devote an entire training day to it. And there’s no other muscle group where this effect is seen moreso than abdominals.

Everyone loves training abdominals. Even people who downright hate exercise love to train abs. The reason, of course, being that we’re all walking around with The Bodybuilder’s Creed firmly entrenched in our heads: If I burn the heck out of a muscle, I will literally etch out the muscle shape I desire, and torch off the fat that obscures it.

Ah, if that were only true.

Here is the unbiased Truth about abdominal muscles: They become visible when the overlying fat covering them disappears (as in, you diet sufficiently to lose the required body fat), and they are best worked heavy and hard, not for countless reps of mere bodyweight.

Here’s a Corollary to the Truth: You don’t even need to work the abs directly for significant muscular stimulation.

Go ahead, read that again. Yes, you read correctly - you don’t need to work the abs directly to get a six-pack; what’s important is that you carry sufficiently low bodyfat levels and that the ab muscles get worked somehow. As in, say, supporting a heavy load in a full-body exercise, like the squat or deadlift; or in supporting and stabilizing the rest of the body as it strains against a load, as in chinups or pulldowns.

You don’t have to take it on faith. Here’s a study that states just that (and I quote):

The results of the present study indicate that the use of moderately high (80% 1RM) intensity resistance while performing dynamic exercises, such as the squat and deadlift, can provide greater dorsal trunk activation than similar exercises without external resistance or calisthenic-style instability activities. (emphasis added)

Translated into English: Lifting heavy things works the core plenty. Plenty.

So, you may ask: Why work the abs at all? Is it merely superfluous? All for show (and naught)?

Here are some valid reasons to perform specific, targeted work for the trunk muscles:

1. Teaching or learning muscular activation (”talking” to the muscle).

Hard as it may be to believe, there are individuals in this world who don’t communicate well with their muscles. Not in the sense of whispering, “Grow…grow…grow…” to their biceps, but in identifying and contracting specific muscles. Want to know if you’re one of them?

Here’s a test: Take a gallon of milk and lift it over your head. What muscles did you use? What areas did you feel working? Did you sway around back and forth? If your answer to any of these questions is, “Gee, I don’t know”, then you may be a candidate!

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this, by the way. If your exercise form is good, you can chug right along and get decent results from your efforts. But learning how to effectively contract, feel, and activate specific muscles in a movement will definitely improve both your performance and your results.

2. Correcting a weak link.

Keep failing on that deadlift and don’t know why? Do your abs fatigue before your arms or back when you do pullups? You, my friend, may be in serious need of some abdominal specialization work. If you find that proportionally your abdominals are not as strong as the rest of your body or you prematurely fatigue on exercises due to ab weakness, then doing specific ab work not only a great idea, it’s mandatory.

3. Additional strength needed in a sports/performance related context.
(Also implied: 3b. To prevent injury.)

Does your sport/avocation require unusually high levels of ab strength?

Hint: If your chosen sport is jiujitsu, golf, or tennis, the answer is yes.

Specific abdominal work is also useful in order to improve athletes’ abdominal force output (i.e., increase ab strength) and to protect athletes against injury.

Yes, even amateur ones, like you and me.

So there you have it. In summary:

• Most casual exercisers don’t need direct ab work and are better off spending that time learning to work hard on the exercises that do matter (and deliver results): squats, chins, deadlift, presses, etc.
• To see your abs, attain and sustain low body fat levels.
• Working the abs directly is warranted if you’re looking to teach someone how to communicate with their abs, to correct biomechanical “weak links” in exercises, and if you need specific abdominal strength to perform at high levels or prevent injury.

To all, I wish you a happy holiday, whatever that holiday may be.

You can either take this day to rest, feed, and be merry with your loved ones, or take a cue from Santa and get a few reps in before tucking into that Figgy Pudding (I know which one I’ll be doing.  Dinner table, here I come):

(Santa Automaton by dugnorth.com)

Today’s New York Times:

Putting Very Little Weight in Calorie Counting Methods.

Gina Kolata goes on to describe how the so-called science of assessing your caloric expenditure (or more precisely, how the hamster wheels at your local New York Sports Club calculate calories burned) is far from scientific.

From my days as an undergrad in the Exercise Science department at Rutgers and Temple, I knew this to be true (”That 12 minute test burned 157 calories? Fat chance.”). Now, with years of experience, application, and practice behind me, I not only know that trying to estimate your expenditure by looking at the little window of the Precor machine is nonsense, trying to exercise to lose fat (independently of changing diet) is worse than useless.

In the time I’ve been a personal trainer, I’ve personally had reported to me:

• at least 10 cases of Morton’s neuroma
• 3 Spinning accidents (where people fell off of their bikes for whatever reason)
• 8 ankle sprains from running
• at least 100 reported “tweaked my knee doing (insert cardiovascular/Aerobics activity here).”
• 50 hurt lower backs from sporting activities over the weekend

and so on and so forth (it’s time to stop when I can’t remember exact figures and start guesstimating).

The point is that all of these reported injuries occurred as a direct result of the person performing too much cardio (Example: Morton’s neuroma often occurs when a person does excessive exercise on an elliptical machine. If you push through the balls of your feet when striding, over time the fat pad overlying the connective tissue of the foot squishes outwards, like what happens when you squeeze a slightly deflated balloon. The now exposed soft structures of the foot take the full brunt of each step, irritating the nerve. The resulting pain and inflammation can be bad enough as to require surgery to alleviate.) The reason they were doing all this exercise? 9 times out of 10: “I need to lose weight.”

If you need to lose weight, eat in a manner that provides for a proper hormonal environment for fat-burning, and strength train to increase muscle mass and prevent muscle loss. Stop doing all that cardio; it’s hurting you and isn’t doing you much good anyway.

Articles like this one are useful in helping to dispel this nonsense that losing fat is a simple matter of hopping onto an exercise bike and cranking away. It’s far simpler (and yet, seemingly more difficult) than using the gym to undo the damage done in the dining room.

Some selections from the article:

1. “There also is a seldom mentioned complication in calculating calories burned during exercise: you should subtract off the number of calories you would be using if you did nothing. Almost no one does that, Dr. Bouchard said.”

In other words, how many more calories will you have burned running for 30 minutes above and beyond someone settling in and enjoying an episode of Ninjawarrior? The answer: Not that many. Will this dissuade some folks from exercising altogether? Probably - and if it saves them from overuse injury, then all the better.

Bottom line: Exercise (in the form of strength training) is important to fat loss as it prevents utilization of proteins for energy (conversion to glucose). But generalized exercise (in the form of running, ballroom dancing, archery, kickboxing, etc.) doesn’t really bring that much to the table in terms of burning extra calories. The saving grace? Exercise of all kinds improves insulin sensitivity (which is good for your health, as well as your waistline). And which form of exercise imparts the greatest improvement in insulin sensitivity? Strength training.

2. “My husband and I will never forget a mathematician at a meeting we attended when we were graduate students. He proudly announced that he could eat a piece of pie because he had just run a quarter-mile on the track.”

This is exactly the kind of idiocy that needs to stop. First, while it helps to think of it in these terms for ease of understanding concepts, the body isn’t a simple ATM machine based on a calories in/calories out model - hormonal factors muddy up the waters a great deal. Secondly, if you’re looking to lose fat, it takes far less time to not eat the pie than to run the quarter-mile (and it saves a great deal of wear and tear on the joints as well). Lastly, exercising to lose weight just doesn’t work. It doesn’t. Many have tried (you probably know some of them), and most have failed. Even Dr. Stephen Blair, whose life’s work is studying the benefits of exercise, can’t seem to make it work. In those lucky individuals who have been successful by controlling weight “through exercise”, two things are usually true:

a. They are insulin sensitive, and so the exercise serves to amplify that effect, and

b. They have changed their diets as well.

Mostly b.

3. “But for most people, calories burned should not matter, Dr. Clifford said.”

Agreed, 100%. Do the activity because you enjoy it, not because you think you have to (because you don’t). Attend to fat loss mainly through dietary means, since that’s the path with greatest success anyway.

From today’s NY Times:

Another Study Finds Heart Risks in a Diabetes Drug.

Too bad “Just eat less sugar” isn’t easily patentable or easily commodified and sold.

In the interest of fair and balanced reporting, it is true that meta-analyses suck pretty badly as far as quality goes (when speaking of scientific studies).  The main problem with meta-analyses is that all the data points are thrown together and treated with equal weight, with complete disregard of the quality of the study that it came from.  In other words, if you picked poorly constructed studies, then your conclusions from the meta-analysis will be flawed (you see this effect prominently with the Rhea et al “Multiple vs. single set” meta-analysis).  So in all fairness to Glaxosmith Kline, it is possible that Dr. Nissen’s meta-analysis is highly flawed.

Of course, you could just eat less sugar and not become insulin resistant, develop diabetes, and have to go on the drug…

[I'm all for better living through chemistry, by the way.  But if you're taking an asprin everyday because you hit your head with a mallet each morning, I think you're probably barking up the wrong tree.]