Hey Ingo!
Q: Should I do my cardio before weights or after, how long, what type is best?
A.
Most of you reading this are indoctrinated in the philosophy that regular cardiovascular conditioning is important for your health and that such training reduces your risk of heart attack. If you do agree with this premise, you are also very likely to believe that to achieve cardiovascular conditioning, you must regularly perform cardiovascular exercises, such as running and biking or using a cardiovascular machine. But is this the case?
First, let’s look at the issue from a perspective of natural history. Our evolution into the human species from our ancestors is thought to have occurred some ....? million years ago. Spanning the duration of this vast period, it should strike you as interesting that the first reported heart attack in the U.S. occurred in 1920, only 12 years after the grain industry began hydrogenating plant and grain oils. Now, I personally find it interesting that there is such hype over cardiovascular exercise as necessary prevention for heart attack or even heart disease, when such diseases were relatively nonexistent less than 100 years ago. That’s but a flash in the pan of human evolution.
Our next logical question should be, did our ancestors regularly participate in cardiovascular exercise? Not likely. First of all, it would not be energy efficient to run around gathering berries, firewood and nuts in your target zone. Nor would it have been wise to run through the bush trying to get a workout while hunting, since any animal would hear you coming from hundreds of yards away and be long gone by the time you got there. If there was a cardiovascular stressor in our native environment, it was most likely when we had to send a messenger to a neighboring village or during times of battle, when you were either running or fighting for your life.
When you look at most sports played today, recreational activities, and work related tasks, the great majority of them place anaerobic demands on the body. Now, surely some of you grew up on a farm or have done hard labor before. When performing any intense work, you begin breathing faster and faster…in fact, you will go aerobic within a few minutes if the work efforts demand so much of your anaerobic energy systems that the demand for energy can’t be replaced by intermediate and anaerobic energy systems (fast glycolytic and aerobic).
I have many memories of bucking hay; the bails weigh 75-120 lb., yet you’ve got to keep up with the tractor as it moves through the field
When you have thousands of bails to haul in, and will be in the field for hours at a time, you will soon find that your anaerobic stimulus (the bails) produces a demand that the purely anaerobic phosphagen system can’t maintain on it’s own (it only lasts about 8-12 seconds), resulting in ATP production by anaerobic glycolysis and aerobic metabolism respectively. By this very mechanism, our anaerobic capacity is recharged during sports such as tennis, soccer, hockey, basketball, etc., that require explosive movement for prolonged periods of time.
I use hay-bucking because it is a real-world example of how we have maintained aerobic fitness from the beginning of human evolution. If you can follow my logic here, you should be wondering why we are so encouraged to offer aerobic exercise to our patients and clients by most every medical, physical therapy, chiropractic and personal training education program that exists. It’s simple actually. It’s the very same reason we are being told that we must eat a high carbohydrate diet for energy…why doctors tell people they must take this or that drug…BIG INDUSTRY INFLUENCE.
Quite simply, there’s not much money in the manufacture and sales of dumbbells, weight plates and Olympic bars, but there are huge amounts of money to be made if you can convince the masses that aerobic exercise is necessary for disease prevention. After all, have you priced a treadmill, step mill, spin bike, rowing machine, elliptical machine or any such equipment lately? They cost anywhere from several hundred, to several thousand dollars per unit! They often have hundreds of moving parts, which wear out, break and need to be replaced. How many Olympic bars or dumbbells have you replaced lately? It is not at all unusual for a gym or rehab clinic to spend $75,000-$100,000 on cardio equipment alone, and, they will need to be replaced every few years; the same facilities often don’t spend more than $15,000-$20,000 on free weight training equipment and it can last the life of the gym. Yes, I know they spend large sums of money on fixed axis resistance training machines, but that is but another sign of industry influence and professional passivity!
When you get several large equipment manufacturers with multi-million dollar investments in the production of aerobic exercise equipment, you can rest assured there will be a comparatively large commitment to creating an aerobic exercise consciousness. The proof is all around you, in your exercise and bodybuilding magazines, trade journals, on TV infomercials, in your training manuals from most educational institutions. Who do you think sponsors the educational institutions and pays for the supportive research?
So Who Needs It?
The issue is not one of prevention of cardiovascular disease by aerobic exercise, it is an issue of getting the right kind of exercise to benefit both your physiology and meet the demands of your work and sports environment. For example, aerobic conditioning is not general. If it were, any world-class marathon runner could jump on a bike and win the Tour De France, or even the Hawaii Iron Man! Strength training is also not general; there is a very finite amount of carryover from one lift or movement pattern to the other. Otherwise, the best squatter would be the best dead lifter too.
Everyone needs to build fitness, yet for fitness (aerobic or anaerobic) to last, it must be built upon foundation health principles. Proof of this premise can be seen when world-class marathon runners (Jim Fix) and champion bodybuilders (Lou Barry, a former Mr. Australia) die of a heart attack at an early age. When we eat correctly for our metabolic type, eat high quality organic foods, eat regularly to maintain our blood sugar levels in an optimal range, get to bed at a reasonable hour and learn to manage our stressors, the addition of an exercise program of any type becomes truly therapeutic and offers disease prevention. Aerobic fitness atop the standard American diet (SAD!) of Carbohydrates, Refined sugar, Additives and Preservatives (CRAP!) will not offer resistance to disease. In fact, it may well bring it on! Why? That’s simple…because exercise is a stress and if you add more stress to an already stressed system, it will crash.
You may think this is simple, logical, straightforward stuff, but it isn’t, because again, there is BIG money involved here. I will site one of hundreds, even thousands of examples; Scripps Hospital here in San Diego recently partnered with McDonalds. So now McDonalds feeds all those sick and dying people in the hospital their SAD CRAP, while they pedal away on bikes, pump pedals on stair masters, and about every other expensive aerobic machine you can imagine!
Functional Aerobic Fitness
I suggest you study the foundation principles presented in a book called How To Eat, Move and Be Healthy! and listen to the informative audio CD’s I use in my nutritional bootcamp program titled You Are What You Eat. While you are in the process of vitalizing your body from the inside out, I recommend that you choose movement patterns that offer injury prevention and improved performance in the environment where you work and play.
While exercising, all you need do is wear a heart rate monitor and determine your target heart rate zone. If you want a greater aerobic stimulus than your work or training environment is currently providing, simply shorten your rest periods. In short order, you will progressively get a greater aerobic response to the stress impinging upon the system via the activity you have chosen. If your heart rate begins to rise too high, simply take a little longer rest period or decrease the number of repetitions you are performing or the amount of time under load.
If you follow this simple guideline, you will learn to “eat, move and be healthy!” and, you will have the greatest form of prevention of heart disease you could ever have, HEALTH!
Q. What About Stress Ingo?
A. Dealing with stress is becoming an everyday part of modern living, with its information overload, long commutes and deadlines, let alone finding time for family and yourself. It’s no wonder most people cringe at the thought of trying to squeeze exercise into their busy schedules. Yet there are simple movements that you can do that actually increase your energy and vitality take only minutes a day and don’t require a trip to the gym.
Building energy and vitality in your body is a lot like investing. Just as it takes money to make money, it takes energy to make energy. Your body is a co-dependent, linked system of systems; your circulatory, digestive, hormonal and musculoskeletal systems are all examples. One system cannot function in isolation and all are energy dependent. Yet just like the heating and air conditioning system in your house, they not only use energy, they produce it. When you eat quality food, you spend energy to chew and digest it. Metabolized food molecules provide both chemical and electrical charges that help the body perform work, such as building hormones.
Expending energy to inhale brings air into your body. Your lungs take oxygen from the air you breathe and attach it to iron particles in your red blood cells to be delivered to all parts of your body by the circulatory system. The oxygen in the air you breathe carries a very strong positive charge, acting like the positive pole of a magnet, while your body tissues and the water in your body (about 75% of your body is water) act like the negative pole of a magnet. As you may remember from science class, wherever you find a positive and negative pole, there’s energy and work potential. Breathing oxygen into the body creates energy or work potential. This energy is called Prana by East Indian Yogis, or Chi or Qi by masters of Tai Chi, Qigong and the many martial arts.
Much of the energy produced by breathing and eating is used to run your muscles so you can move, have fun and produce more energy. Most people only associate muscle work with fatigue or loss of energy, but this results from excessive use of the muscles and body systems that support activity—particularly when there is an imbalance between the amount of work or exercise relative to the amount of rest time. Muscles help energize the body by producing electromagnetic energy and by acting as pumps to assist the action of the circulatory and digestive systems. By exercising the muscles in different parts of the body, we can deliver beneficial energy to the hormonal and organ systems, as well as to tissues related to the spinal segments in that particular area. There are seven different areas of the body, called Zones. This system is the foundation for yoga, Tai Chi, Qigong and the Zone Exercises that follow. to learn some of these exercises please contact me
Q. How Do I Get My Muffin Top To Dissapear?
A. From Muffin Top To Washtub to Washboard in Five Easy Steps
Today, there are more people than ever in pursuit of the elusive washboard stomach. This is quite a paradox when you consider the fact that we have more medical, exercise, and nutrition technology than ever, yet we have more obesity (washtubs!) than ever! How can it be that even among the people that regularly go to the gym and exercise - often doing a hundred or more sit-ups and crunches a day – that washboard abs are seemingly unattainable?
It’s quite simple really. Most people working for a washboard stomach are making one or more major mistakes in their application of the foundation principles that underlie success in any physical or athletic endeavor. For the body to reduce fat content enough to actually appreciate the muscles you’ve worked so hard to show off, it has to be absolutely convinced that you can safely get by with such a low body fat percentage. To see washboard abs of merit, the male will need to reduce body fat to approximately 9% or less and women will have to get to approximately 13% or less. This is not easy to do! After all, body fat serves as an energy reserve, thermogenesis, protection, a site for storage of toxic chemicals it can’t currently eliminate from the system safely, and much more!
The female body resists getting below 13% body fat because it is programmed to always have enough energy on board to feed a developing fetus and to maintain energy reserves necessary to stabilize hormonal production, which is threatened once she drops below 13%. In fact, a washboard abdomen is a sign of strength, of durability, and Mother Nature doesn’t support false advertising. Only those resorting to chemical tricks such as metabolic stimulants and drugs can develop a washboard in the presence of an otherwise unhealthy body, yet there is always a cost in the end…you lose it and it is even harder to regain each time you try.
How To Build Washboard Abs
I will lay it out straight and simple for you and can assure you that each time you break one of Mother Nature’s foundation principles, your chances of developing a washboard diminishes significantly.
Eat organic foods. Commercially farmed foods have high levels of pesticide residues, even in New Zealand. In the book, “How To Eat, Move and Be Healthy!” (p. 57), when scientists analyzed a child’s lunch right from the cafeteria line up in a New Zealand elementary school, they found 22 pesticide residues. Many were at levels several times the safe limit. Toxins are shuttled into your liver when you bring in more toxic chemicals from your food or environment than your liver can effectively process. No matter how hard you exercise, your chances of reducing the fat around your mid-section will be reduced in proportion to how toxic your body is. Reducing toxins is dependent upon proper hydration, optimal nutrition, adequate exercise, sound breathing mechanics, and a functional bowel.
Eat right for your metabolic type. This simply means that you must eat right for your racial and ethnic origins, which is a major influence on your genetics. For example, if you are a native of NZ, you will need a diet that is a mix of produce and flesh foods, such as fish and game in equal proportions because that is what the environment provided the natives for thousands of years. If you are an in-land aboriginal, you will do better on a diet of about 80-90% plant mater and only 10% flesh foods because that’s about what you have to live on in the desert so your body will have adapted to that. If you don’t know your metabolic type, there is an easy test you can do in my book (sited above). If you eat wrong for your metabolic type, your body thinks you are having an energy crisis and begins to accumulate fat; you may be eating plenty of calories, but, as Bill Wolcott says, “you don’t feed lions leaves and you don’t feed giraffes steak”. If you do, either will get sick and eventually die. You are no different. Eat right for your metabolic type and eat high quality organic foods, and soon, your washboard will begin to appear!
Keep well hydrated. To be properly hydrated you must drink water, not coffee, tea, juice or other commercial drinks. These are often dehydrating agents, or have a high enough solute content that they act as foods in the body. To determine how much water to drink in liters per day, take your body weight in Kg’s and multiply it by .033. Billions of chemical reactions each second in your body depend on water, and without it your body starts saving water in your tissues, making you look puffy, not healthy and vital! I also recommend that you drink only high quality filtered water, not tap water.
Use Big Exercises! There is NO such thing as spot reducing. This means that all the abdominal exercises in the world won’t improve your chances of seeing your abs! If you want a six pack, you need to focus on the big, high energy movements in the gym, like squatting, lunging, rowing, cable pushes, and some of the more challenging Swiss Ball exercises like push-ups, supine lateral ball rolls, supine hip extensions with knee flexion and many more, Kettle Bell Training is a body trasnformation just waiting to happen,
Blast the abs hard. Always END your workout with abdominal isolation exercises because they are very important stabilizers. If you fatigue them before training other key movements as suggested in #4 above, your chances of injury go way up! To have a washboard, I suggest using high intensity exercises on the abs. That means doing crunches while laying over a DuraBall (safe for weight lifting!) while holding a dumbbell on your chest. You will get better results if the load is heavy enough that you can’t do more than 12 reps per set. Build up to three sets and don’t do them again until the soreness is gone from the muscles.
Other helpful exercises are reverse Swiss ball crunches, cable wood-chops and cable pushing. Mixing in explosive medicine ball tosses also helps because the rectus abdominus muscle (the washboard muscle) has a predominance of fast twitch muscle fiber, which means it responds favorably to high intensity and high speed movements…and all this time you couldn’t figure out why 500 crunches a day was getting you no where!
Another important principle is that if you are going to train the upper, oblique and lower abs on the same day, always start with the lower first. The lower abs require much more coordination to train, and fatigue faster, followed by the obliques and finally the upper abs, which are real work-horses.
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Q: Which diet is better, Atkins or South Beach?
A: Ah, the dreaded “D” word. As far as diets go, whether you’re cutting out carbs, separating eating proteins from carbohydrates, eating a special cookie 5 times a day or doing the juice diet that all the celebs do, these diets all have one thing in common. They are temporary. If permanent fat loss is your goal, then a supportive nutrition plan is what you need to follow for the not just the next 12 weeks but the rest of your life. Your body’s preferred fuel source is carbohydrates and therefore you need them to perform daily metabolic functions such as keeping your heart beating, your lungs breathing as well as running after your kids or playing a game of pick-up basketball. Your body needs protein to help rebuild tissues from damage that may occur during activity, injury or stress. A decent protein level in your diet along with exercise can also help boost your immune system.
Low fat, non-fat marketing may be the worst thing to have happened to this country from a nutritional standpoint. The body needs fat for insulation of the organs but it also need dietary fat for proper nervous functioning. You should keep your dietary fat intake to about 20-30% of your overall calories and try to make sure that most of those fat calories are coming from healthy poly or mono-unsaturated fat sources. Eating a well balanced diet of good carbohydrates, lean proteins and healthy fats along with exercise is the true key to losing body fat and keeping it off forever.
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Q:
Now I am currently at 13% body fat, but I would like to drop down to around 8%. I try to eat healthy, lots of vegetables and lean meats along with my exercise but I don't have any specific plan as far as my eating habits. I just eat whenever I'm hungry(a lot of the time). I was wondering if you could help me with a nutrion plan to help me lower my body fat? Thank You, Serg
A: Serg,
Thanks for the question. This is a tricky one to answer as I don't know your age, current level of activity or previous nutritional habits. Also, as I am not board certified in Nutrition, I could never give you an exact eating plan. Don't be discouraged though, I have worked with hundereds of clients getting great results for all without giving them a specific diet.
First, at 13% body fat, you're already very lean. To make it to the single digits takes a specific goal and planning around that goal. You'll need to eat 5-6 times a day with lean protein, good sources of carbohydrates (such as sweet potatoes, oatmeal and brown rice) and fruits and vegetables making up your servings at each meal. Once you have this constant, you can fool around with it as you continue to exercise. Nutrition is 70% of the battle and you should be 90% compliant with your nutrition to make progress. That means out of 42 meals in a weak, you can cheat or miss 4 meals. This will give you the ability to have your treats here and there but you'll sabotage your efforts if you have desert every night or skip meals on a regular basis.
For your exercise...You'll need to cycle your weight training as well as your cardio. This means that every 3-4 weeks you need to change things up, shock the body and it will respond by building a little more musle and burning more fat.
Keep a diary, of everything. Many people who need to lose 20 or more pounds can get away with not doing this, those who are already lean need to track their progress very closely. As long as your nutrition is good, you can make changes to you're exercise to make more progress. When you see progress halt from changing exercise, that's when you'll need to look closer at your nutrition.
There are many techniques for pulling a little more body fat from your body. The most common one that I use is to wean off carbohydrates later in the day. Make sure you still get to plenty of vegetables though. DO NOT do this too soon. Losing body fat when you are already lean is hard. If you cut too many calories you could waste lean muscle mass which helps you to burn body fat, this would be a very bad thing. Like I said, keep track of your progress. You can expect to lose 1-2 pounds of body fat per week. Just make sure it it body fat you are losing, not just weight.
To conclude, schedule your meals. Eating when you are hungry means that your blood sugar is already low and your body can cannibalize your own muscle for fuel. Change your training program at least every 4 weeks. Cycle periods of heavy weight (4-8 reps), moderate weight (8-12 reps) and light weight (12-15 reps) along with your cardio (sprints, interval training and long bouts up to 50 or 60 minutes).
I hope this was helpful, if your have any other questions please feel free to ask. You can also give us a call at 760 200 4920
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Q:Ingo
I was just wodnering if you'd be able to help. My boyfriend is 6'4", and has a lean muscle build. He plays rugby (training 2x a week, match 1x week); however he's also a labourer and work' s long hours. Since he started he seems to have lost a lot of size, he's gone from a 36" waist to a 30" even thoguh he looks like a horse and to be honest if he ate any more protein his kidneys'd pack in. He's tried supplements such as creatine in the past (with success but bad effects with regards to high aggression); is there anything else you can suggest? He's aiming to gain around 3 stone. Thanks, Paula
A: Hi Paula,
Thanks for the question. I jsut want to make sure that I'm on the right page as you. 3 stone is 42 pounds, right?
It's funny, out of 100 questions, only about 1 or 2 are about how to gain weight instead of losing it. I LOVE IT! Let's clear up the supplements issue first. Try to remember that supplements are just that, supplements. Whole foods from good sources of protien, complex carbohydrates and fruits and vegetables should make up most of your diet. As for the creatine, it is a performance enhancer, but if you don't have the calories to go along with it, it won't do much to put on weight. Creatine shouldn't cause aggression, but some supplements effect some people differently than others.
Losing 6 inches in his waist is a lot and it sounds to me that your boyfriend needs to eat more, mostly in the form of complex carbohydrates (oatmeal, potatoes, corn, whole grain breads). As long as he has small amounts of protein at every meal, there is no reason to increase it. With his rugby playing and work, he is expending a lot of calories.
He'll need to eat 6 times a day. If you'd like to figure out how many calories he should be eating...take his ideal body weight (start in 20 pound increments, or you'll add too many calories at once) and multiply is by 15-17. Eat this way for 3-4 weeks, then evaluate again. He should be abale to gain up to 2 pounds a week (possibly more in the beginning) without putting on too much fat, if any at all.
Now six whole food meals can be tough. This is where supplements can come in. I try to eat at least 3 whole food meals a day and will supplement with meal replacements (shakes) for the others. Make sure the meals are spaced out every 2 and half to 3 hours. For the ultimate in weight gain, your boyfriend can get a weight gainer supplement (mix of protein and carbohydates and fat) and mix it with 32-64 ounces of milk and sip it all day long along with his meals.
So to conclude, have your boyfreind get to more food during the day. His occupation and sporting activities cause his body to burn a lot of calories. If he isn't eating more than he's burning, he'll remain the same or lose weight. As long as the calories are coming from good foods (nothing with a shelf life longer that 2 weeks) he'll put on the weight and keep muscular an lean.
I hope this helped, you can also check other articles on training and nutrition that are free and very helpful
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Q: Dear Ingo
I did wieght traning for almost 4 months sometime back and then I had to discontinue because of work. After few months of discontinuing the weight traning I started getting fat. Now there is a lot of fat in the waist and breast region. Please suggest what to do as I feel very bad about particularly the enlarged breast region. Thanks a lot in advance. Hope to hear from you.
Rajiv New Delhi, India
A: Rajiv,
Thank you for your question.
This often comes as a concern to many people who start weight training or know that they will have to stop at some time. Many people are concerned that the muscle that they gain form weight training will turn to fat once they stop. This is physiologically impossible. The muscle may get softer, but it will not morph into fat cells.
When you started to weight train your body's metabolism picked up and you probably started to eat more to compensate for the extra energy your body demanded. Once you stopped weight training, if you continued to eat the same as before, you would be taking in an excess of calories. Beacause you were not exercising, your body didn't use the calories for energy or repair, instead it stored as energy for use later on...body fat.
So how do you get rid of the body fat you now have. My best prescription is to monitor your diet making sure that you eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables as well as good grains and lean sources of protein. In addition, if you can get back to weight training this will help to reshape your body and increase your metabolism. Adding cardiovascular exercise will also help to strengthen your heart as well as put a turbo charger onto your fat burning machine supported by weight training and good nutrition.
Rajiv, as long as you start with a little bit of exercise and monitor your diet, you'll be able to see some changes in your body within a couple of weeks. Make sure you measure results by the way your clothes fit and what you see in the mirror, not by what a scale says.
I hope this helped. If you have more questions, please feel free to give me a call
in helath and happiness
Ingo Loge
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