Last night I was talking with my wife about the current state of the virus in Nevada. I was feeling optimistic because the current 14-day trend of cases was experiencing a substantial decline in Clark County, Nevada. She was more pessimistic citing the current death rate she read from the WHO report. I guess what we should both probably pay attention to is the percentage of deaths of those infected along with the overall daily infection rate. What the numbers don’t tell us is how the vaccination is affecting these numbers. That’s hard to measure. This is like when someone looks at their calorie burn from a workout at the studio. The calorie burn does not tell you if you have gotten stronger. It does not quantify if you’re moving better. It does not tell you if you’ve increased your basal metabolic rate (BMR). The BMR is the number of calories required to perform basic, life-sustaining functions. These basal functions include circulation, breathing, cell production, nutrient processing, protein synthesis, and ion transport. This number improves with exercise. So why do we wear heart monitors at all?
When I decided to open, I had to create a workout that would appeal to most people. That’s challenging to do. This is where years of experience helped. The common request I get from people is that they want to lose 15-25 pounds, get stronger, and have more muscle definition. I like to provide the example of you want to be in line at Starbucks (pre-COVID) and have someone ask you, “Where do you work-out?” Taking this into consideration, I determined a workout that centered on using the principals of high intensity interval training (HITT) would be ideal. Mixing in solid strength training protocols and mobility drills, I would be able to check a lot of boxes of what people wanted and needed.
In 2013- 2014, all the talk was about HIIT. It became a buzz topic. I started to observe gyms that promoted that they offered HIIT workouts to see just how they offered it. To do this justice, I should review the research paper from 1996 that started the whole craze. Researcher Dr. Izumi Tabata had been publishing work on aerobic and anaerobic systems prior to his revolutionary paper. He researched how different sprinting protocols put various demands on the body and used different energy systems. In the 1990s, he partnered with Irisawa Kiochi, the Japanese speed skating coach, who had created a protocol of short bursts of sprints followed by brief rest intervals. This workout was able to maintain elite fitness levels in his athletes. This inspired the study.
They took two groups of male athletes. The first group pedaled on an ergometer for sixty minutes at moderate intensity (70% of VO2 max). Similar to a long jogging session. The second group pedaled for 20 seconds, followed by 10 seconds of rest, for 4 minutes (completing 7 to 8 sets total) at maximal effort.
The key phrase is maximal effort, as each interval was expected to be a sprint. This is where the heart monitor comes in later. If athletes could not keep up the speed requirements, they were stopped at 7 sets. Both groups worked out for 5 days a week for a grand total of 5 hours a week or 20 minutes. The protocol lasted for 6 weeks.
What they found is that both groups improved aerobically. What was of interest was that the group performing the 4-minute workouts lost more bodyfat. A better outcome was gained from 20 minutes compared to 5 hours. In later studies, pedaling on the ergometer was replaced with resistance training and similar outcomes were achieved. Now you can probably guess what happened next.
This research hit the mainstream and people took the approach that they would work a little harder and magnify their results. The problem is that “a little harder” was not going to provide the results they were expecting. Being out of breath or breaking a sweat does not mean you are doing a Tabata workout. I decided the best way to monitor heart rate intensity in a fat burning workout was to have people wear a monitor where we can watch if we are following a variance of the protocol. Did I mention that the original study used Olympic level athletes? Assuming you can generate the same level of intensity of an Olympic athlete is another part of the formula commonly overlooked.
Here’s the good news. Will you drop bodyfat from incorporating interval workouts from strength training working at an elevated heart rate intensity of 20-30%? Yes. Will you speed up your BMR from these workouts? Yes. Will you increase lean muscle mass while dropping body-fat? Yes. If that’s your goal, stick with the workouts and stop studying the calories burned. The numbers don’t tell you everything.