Fitness: Why bother?

Good levels of fitness benefits everything from how you feel in the morning, how well you can perform sexually, to how long you’re going to live disease-free.

Since fitness only relates to how efficiently we use oxygen, a skinny person can be unfit whilst a fat person may be very fit.

Wait… why should I care about fitness if it doesn’t automatically mean being skinny?

Let’s look at what happens when you get fitter. As you slide up the fitness scale, one of the first things you’ll notice is that everything just feels easier. Hooray! 

Climbing stairs no longer puffs you out! Running to catch the bus feels like a breeze. For the same activity or sport after getting fit, you don’t need to breathe as hard nor your heart to beat as hard.

You’ll also be able to run faster, cycle harder or row further with a newer fitter body.

On the inside, you do some great things:

• Capillaries grow to deliver more blood to working muscles; 
• Heart health and strength improves; 
• Fat burning and blood sugar control get a boost.

Take a step back and you notice even better things. Large scientific studies show clearly that the fitter you are:

• The longer you live; and 
• The less likely you are to develop: 
• Cardiovascular disease 
• Diabetes 
• Kidney disease 
• Erectile dysfunction; and 
• Some mental health disorders. 
• You get lower blood pressure, reduced cholesterol, triglycerides and systemic inflammation.

So get fitter, even without losing weight and you can do more, feel better, have more energy, look better, feel more confident, last longer, reach more places, achieve more goals, live longer and enjoy life more. Why the hell wouldn’t you?

Fitness: Guess what? It has NOTHING to do with how much or little you weigh…

Fitness measures your ability to use oxygen, whilst weight management depends on calorie balance (calories in and out). In the body these are very different concepts. 

In actual fact:

• you can get fitter and actually gain weight: if you do lots of cardio & still overeat;
• you can lose weight and decrease fitness: if you stop exercising whilst dieting; 

OR

• you can happily lose weight and get fitter: with diet and exercise.

AND

• A fitter person has a much greater capacity to burn calories during exercise: like having a V12 engine compared to a 4-cylinder; BUT
• Has little advantage if they don’t use that capacity: like only driving your V12 to the shops on Sunday.
• Fitter doesn’t mean having a higher metabolism either.

A crap diet isn’t helping anybody’s weight, fit or not. You can still use fitness though to help you lose weight. Let’s put this in perspective: a very fit person may burn 1200 calories / hour running, compared to a very unfit person shuffling at 400 cal /hr.

They will feel the same sense of effort, and the fit person needs to only do one third the exercise time as the unfit person. Imagine how that could impact your weight loss goals!
 
How fitness affects your ability to burn fat
Apart from not burning as many calories during exercise, people with low levels of fitness have poor fat burning capacity, with their bodies choosing to burn more carbs instead. Boosting fitness changes the way cells work, allowing a person to burn a much higher proportion of fat both in exercise and at rest.

In my next post, We’ll explore more of the many benefits of being fit.

Fitness: You know you want it.

Did you know…

Being fat and fit is better than being skinny and unfit?

Being fit does not always equal being a buff and lean god or goddess?

So… what exactly is fitness? What does it mean, and why do we really want it?

Like staring at an everyday word on a page for too long until it stops making sense, in the next several blog posts I’m going to define the elusive concept of fitness and give you a heads up on just why it’s a gift everyone deserves, far from using it just in the search for the body beautiful.

So, what is it?

Fitness describes a characteristic of the human body. Like size, weight or height, it’s really just a scale. Where you sit on the scale comes down to one, slightly abstract, concept: “How well your body can use oxygen and fuels to produce energy.”

Fitness actually has little to do with weight management or appearance – two things we usually associate with being “fit”.

How it’s measured – a little bit of science

Like grams are to weight, fitness has a unit of measure too. Testing can let you work out your own fitness score: VO2max. This stands for “the maximum rate of oxygen (O2) Volume your body can use each minute.”

Your body needs oxygen to produce energy, by burning fuels like carbohydrates and fat (and less so, protein and alcohol).

In this day and age we don’t really ever run out of fuels so the limit to how much energy we produce is how much oxygen we can use.

It goes to say then that the fitter you are (higher VO2max) >> the more oxygen your body can use >> the more energy you can produce to move faster, go further, work harder or just feel more energetic!

On the flip side, very low fitness levels mean you can’t produce much energy at all - even simple physical tasks like climbing stairs puff you out easily.

How to measure your fitness

Fitness testing can be done at most gyms, health centres or even some GPs, with either maximal tests where you reach your hardest effort (VO2max testing) or a prediction (VO2peak) based on a few submaximal tests.

There are details of fitness tests you can do yourself too, available online – have a look at my website www.lifeactive.com.au for a few options.

Push Ups for Charity Wrap Up

What a great morning it was last Saturday 7th May when the Push Ups for Charity event finally got underway in the quest to raise money and awareness for Make A Wish foundation! 

We had a talk by Woolhara deputy mayor Peter Cavanagh, an inspiring message from Caz Lederman from Make A Wish Australia - and of course a whole bunch of enthusiastic participants psyched to bust out as many push ups as they could in 90 sec!

There were a standout number of pushups per person this time around with some obviously very fit and in shape participants. Special mentions to David Balassa and Pei-Ling Kong who took out the most number of push ups for a male and female respectively, at 109 and 94. Outstanding!

So far we have over $1300 raised so all in all a great effort :)

Push Ups for Charity - Results

Results for all participants:

• David Balassa - 109  ** top # pushups male
• Pei-Ling Kong - 94  ** top # pushups female
• Ianthea Connelly - 80
• Mark Inwood - 105
• Mike Kelly - 71
• Jason Miles - 58
• Martin Warren - 82
• Andrew Fletcher - 57
• Jamie Olsen - 86
• Andrew Greig - 84

Hip Hip Hooray

For those who train with me I imagine it's often an odd experience when getting to work with the lower body. From the swinging legs, hip and knee circles and back rolls during dynamic warm ups, to curtsy lunges and kettlebell squats - the affair can be multidirectional and unusual to say the least.

But there is good rhyme to my reasoning. 

The traditional way of working out the lower body are the Big 4 - squats, deadlifts, lunges and step ups. Whilst lunges and step ups at least simulate one-legged movements, all 4 tend to work with simple mono-planar movements (ie moving a resistance straight up and down). And look, that's a great thing when you're :

a) trying to build lots of muscle fast, and

b) don't tend to walk, run or move in more than one plane (ie only ever walk forwards, not sideways or with rapid changes in direction) 

It's this last point that stands out to me. Granted, the majority of our days and movement time is spent moving forwards in generally straight lines. It's not regularly that you see others on the street shuffling sideways or spinning routinely on one foot to get through their day. 

But circumstances in life aren't always routine - and it's best to have the capacity to overcome whatever comes your way, rather than assume nothing will ever deviate from the normal straight lines of daily existence. You may have to quickly sidestep an oncoming bicycle; or break into a run to catch a bus; or misbalance or trip on unstable ground and promptly feel yourself starting to fall. Not to mention the odd chance to run and play around in a park, swim, dance or do anything fun - which by general rule is hardly ever done with legs moving in straight lines!

Yes that's why it's important to get your hips moving and strengthened in as many different directions as possible: because they can and will move in those directions at some point consciously or not!

Keep up with your squats, deadlifts and step ups - but take additional steps to include:

* side lunges

* cross-over lunges

* TRX lunges with twist (opposite hand to the outside of the supporting foot)

* knee raises (or TRX mountain climbers)

* hip abduction and hip adduction movements

* speed skaters