10,000 steps... really?

I know you've heard it: You need to do 10,000 steps a day.

But is it true?

Basically, no.

Here's why...

Firstly, the "10,000 steps a day" was a number pulled out of thin air as an advertising campaign to sell pedometers back in the 60's.

No science to back it up. Just a clever marketing tactic.

Secondly, everyone is different. 10,000 steps for someone who's overweight and struggles to walk is not the same as 10,000 steps for a skinny teenager. And the fitter you get, the easier it becomes and the more efficient you get at it.

Thirdly, not all steps are equal. This ties in with point 2 really. 10,000 steps carrying extra weight (be it bodyweight or an external load) is MUCH harder than walking unencumbered.

In the same way walking uphill is much harder than walking on the flat.

So how many steps should you be doing?

Really, it's a range not an exact number target, but actual research suggests there's a lower limit of around 7,000 steps a day.

That's enough activity to lower the risk of all-cause mortality.

Humans are meant to be moving for the majority of the day, not sedentary, so the more active you are, the better your health, and for most people and those who don't "train" recording your steps is the most obvious measure of activity levels.

Is there an upper limit?

Yes.

You see, there's only so much energy your body can produce each day and that energy is needed for recovery, repair and immune function as well as activity. So if you're using it all up on excessive amounts of activity, those other processes will suffer as there's not enough energy to go around.

You'll end up feeling exhausted, even just from walking.

The Metabolic Ceiling

It's been shown that there's a limit to how much energy your body can produce in a day, and when studied, those who did more activity didn't actually burn significantly more energy.

So you can overdo it.

The limit of how much energy you can burn in a day is actually around 2.5x your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate).

You can obviously exceed this if you do more activity than the upper limit, you won't just grind to a halt like a car that's run out of petrol, but it'll have a knock-on effect to your recovery and health.

It's hard to figure out your upper limit "steps"-wise, but you can use HRV to monitor your recovery levels and base your daily activity on that.

Essentially, if you feel tired and lethargic, and lacking in energy, or are getting ill more frequently, you're probably overdoing it.

It's a good idea to simply alternate between your lower and upper limits on a day to day basis (and ideally, base it on your recovery each day).

Also remember that it's not just steps that count (and that not all steps are equal).

Your best bet is to track your energy expenditure across all modalities ("steps", strength training, general movement and/or whatever other activities you do each day).

So, basically, you don't need to do 10,000 steps a day, however, that can be a good target to begin with if you're not doing any other training.

But as I've said before, given the choice between 30 minutes of walking or 30 minutes of meaningful exercise (resistance training), I'd almost always opt for the latter.

Don't sacrifice gym time in order to "get more steps in!"

Sign up at MoveBetter.Club for MY preferred training styles, especially if you hate the idea of hitting the gym and lifting weights like a bodybuilder!

Reach out if you want more help :)

Mark

Weight Loss 101

In their attempts to lose weight and get fit people often turn to the latest “Diets” to solve their problems for them.

From the most recent trends and Instagram gurus to the well-known weight loss clubs that have been around for years. These multi-million pound businesses have a vested interest. While it is in their interest to get people results, the efficacy of their programs is irrelevant once they’ve sold you their product, so clever marketing is their number one concern.

Before your health and successful weight loss, comes your money.

People buy into things based on what they believe from the marketing and word of mouth/popularity.

Before and after pictures bombard every advertisement for these products because they’re convincing and people want the results they see on the ad, but here’s the thing – no one diet works for everyone!

If 1,000 people follow a diet, it WILL work for a proportion of them, maybe 10%; maybe more, maybe less, but it will work for some.

10% of those 1,000 people is 100 success stories and THOSE are the stories/pictures they’ll use for the advertising. The ads wouldn’t be so convincing if under the fantastic transformations it said “you have a 10% chance of achieving these results”.

I’m not saying that all of the diet plans out there are bad, in fact most of them are very good… for some people.

But how do you figure out which plan is right for you?

The key here is not to follow a specific plan.

While this may sound illogical, let me explain…

A “Diet plan” is set, minimal room for variation or flexibility. Since everybody is different, and what works for you won’t necessarily work for the next person, any plan set out in writing will fail the majority of people.

Instead, you need to look for the common factors in all of the successful diet plans. Trends and patterns, guidelines and rules of thumb.

The most successful diets (and I don’t mean for short-term results, but for lasting, “keep the weight off” results) have a few things in common, they:

● get people preparing their own meals

● get people eating fresh, whole foods as opposed to pre-packed ready meals

● help people build healthy habits into their lifestyle rather than tell them “you can’t have this”

● help people establish their own eating rules and guidelines suited to them specifically

● help people determine how much they should be eating, how often, and when

● look at exercise as a form of calorie reduction rather than just cutting down food intake

● improve the HEALTH of the person, instead of simply looking at their weight

If the main focus is purely on weight loss, you’ll likely do your body harm and end up, long-term, with a failed attempt.

If you make HEALTH the main goal, weight loss will follow and you’ll feel fantastic for it. Long-term success is much more likely.

In order to have success in dieting, you need to look at many factors and create your very own diet plan that works for YOU (and no-one else).

No-one looks the same, no-one acts the same, no-one has the exact same problems; everyone is individual. Your diet needs to be too.

The above listed rules and guidelines do apply across the board, but to tailor a diet to suit YOU, you need to figure out exactly how to integrate all of these things into YOUR lifestyle; kind of like your very own “Owner’s Manual”.

The bare bones of weight loss (or weight gain if that’s your goal) is energy balance, or calories if you will.

While I hate the whole process of counting calories (or allocating points to calories), there’s no escaping the fact that you cannot create energy from nothing.

…meaning you cannot gain weight without eating more than your body needs, and you cannot lose weight if you’re eating more than your body needs.

What your body needs is unique to you and there is no equation or formula that can tell you specifically what you need. There are formulas that will give you a ballpark figure of what someone your height, weight, size needs, but it doesn’t take into account the myriad other factors, like stress, diet history, hormones etc., therefore it needs refining to suit you.

If you’ve slowed your metabolism by following a low-calorie diet for a long period of time, your daily calorie goal according to the calculations will likely be much higher than your actual need (since your body has become more efficient and shut down anything that requires energy that it deems non-essential to survival).

So following a diet that uses these calculations will mean you’ll gain weight.

As an example,

A 35-year old female, weighing 80kg (176lb, or 12 ½ stone), and 162cm (5’4”) tall, who exercises 3 times a week would require 2,030 calories per day to maintain that weight, and any reduction in that number should see her lose weight.

But if our example has been following a low-calorie diet, say 1,200 calories per day for a long period, chances are weight loss has stopped despite being 800 calories below her daily maintenance level.

What’s happened? Her body has stopped all non-essential energy consuming activities and slowed things down to survive on 1,200 calories per day (which is far too low for this individual anyway).

So if, having “failed” at her current weight loss attempts (now it’s stopped working) she started a new diet that used the standard formulas and said that to lose weight she needs to eat 1,800 calories per day (a reasonable assumption given that her maintenance level is 2,030 calories), she would gain weight; because her body has adjusted to burn only 1,200 calories per day. So we now have a 600 calorie surplus!

This is why the standard calculations don’t work. They do not take into account diet history and current eating habits.

For long term success, you need to start your nutrition plan right where you are. Assess your current eating habits and make adjustments from there.

Anyone who is overweight due to over-eating will have success using these formulas because their body is burning as much energy as the calculations would suggest (maybe even a bit more if they’ve been over-eating for a long time). So for them, a simple cut in calories will result in weight loss.

But for anyone who’s been dieting, not over-eating, and has cut calories already, the equation will fail you every time.

As a coach, I rarely see food diaries with excessive amounts of food on them, but regularly see food diaries where people are under-eating yet still not losing weight.

In order to achieve successful and healthy weight loss (or gain), you need to establish what you’re eating now and what results it brings i.e. if you’re gaining, losing, or maintaining your weight.

Once you’ve established your current calorie intake and its results, you can make adjustments from there to get the required outcome.

Be aware though that if you’re already below your daily calorie intake (i.e. maintaining weight at a calorie count below your BMR as in our example before), further reducing calories is NOT the way to go.

You’ll need to find a way to increase calories without gaining weight to get back to a healthy calorie intake and to increase your metabolism to burn more.

This is the real basics of weight loss/gain, and it can’t be cheated. There is no shortcut and there are no supplements that enable you to bypass this simple fact. Energy cannot be created out of nothing, or burned without the required effort – a pill will not burn fat!

The pyramid below shows the order of importance for weight loss (or gain). 

There is a hierarchy here, and trying to utilise any of the sections before you’ve mastered the section below will result in failure.

This, if you read between the lines, tells you exactly what you need to do.

Anyone, be they a trainer in the gym or on the internet, a fitness “guru”, or a huge trusted company, selling you supplements for weight loss without first covering all of the other factors involved are either after your money, or lacking the knowledge to help you. Be VERY cautious who you listen to.

I’ve mentioned in previous articles to be careful who you listen to, and if something doesn’t make sense, it’s probably not right. Find someone who speaks sense and you trust, and follow their advice over hearsay.

There are many “Diets” out there to choose from, but finding your own will be the best move you ever make. It won’t be one you can find online or buy in a book, or one you can share with someone else once you’ve found it, because it will be YOUR diet, and yours alone.

It will also never be static and will change as you do. As your body changes, so will your dietary needs. If you change your exercise habits, lifestyle habits, or even your job, your nutritional requirements will change too.

So before you choose your next ‘Diet’, think about these things and look over the proposed Diet. Does it tick all the right boxes and does it make sense? Or does it sound easy and too good to be true?

And perhaps most importantly, does it start with you establishing your baseline and work from there (most likely through either a food diary or a number of questionnaires, or both)? Or just ask for your basic details (gender/age/height/weight/goal weight) so it can punch them into an online calculator and generate a program from that.

Or even worse, does it not even ask for any of those and simply give you healthy recipes to eat?! (Which is great – but is just a cook book, not a diet)

Tread carefully and think through your decisions when making dietary choices as they will affect not only your weight, but your health and your sanity too!

www.DartfordBootcamps.com

www.MarkOneFitness.co.uk

Should you be counting calories?

I've often told people that it's not so much the calories that matter, but where they're coming from.

Obviously 1,000 calories of chocolate has pretty much no nutritional value, whereas 1,000 calories of broccoli or vegetables has a lot to offer.

I still stick to my guns on this, but you can't argue the science. At the end of the day, calories in vs. calories out is the most basic rule to weight loss/gain/maintenance.

If you want to lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you eat, to gain weight, eat more than you burn, and to maintain, eat as many as you burn.

Although it does get more complex than this, and hormones come into play, as well as (like I said) where these calories are coming from, you can't escape this one, simple rule.

The benefit if getting these calories from nutrient-rich foods is that you will have to eat much higher quantities to get the same number of calories (so you'll be full, and not starved); and that by giving your body all the nutrients it needs, your brain won't be sending you the "eat" signal, so you won't get hungry as often.

So back to the calories...

Any diet that says you need to be eating X number of calories is one to steer well clear of.

Everyone is different, and for a diet to tell everyone, regardless of shape, size, age, physical condition etc, to eat the same number of calories is just nonsense.

So how many calories should you be eating, and how much do you need to cut back to lose weight safely and permanently?

There are a number of calculations used to workout your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate - i.e. how many calories you need just to stay alive - this would be how many calories you'd burn if you slept all day).

BMR is responsible for burning about 70% of your daily calories, so it stands to reason that the higher this is the better (more muscle, more activity, smaller more frequent meals all increase metabolic rate).

My preferred method of working this out is the Katch-McArdle formula, as it takes into account lean mass, rather than just total body weight (which doesn't tell you how much of the weight is calorie-burning muscle, and how much is fat).

Since this formula uses lean body mass, it's the same formula for men and women. But you WILL need to find out your lean body mass to work it out - just ask an instructor at your gym to measure your body fat %, and you can work out your lean mass from that (Total weight - fat weight = Lean Body Mass).

So now let's work out YOUR BMR...

BMR = 370 + (21.6 X lean mass in kg)

Example:

Female

120lbs (54.5kg)

Body Fat = 20% (24lbs)

Lean Mass = 96lbs (43.6kg)

BMR = 370 + (21.6 X 43.6) = 1312 calories

(remember, this is what's required simply to keep you alive! So you still need more, and cutting calories below this amount will only end badly)

Now you need to calculate your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure).

To do this, you take your BMR and multiply it by the appropriate value from the activity multiplier, which is as follows:

Sedentary = BMR X 1.2 (little or no exercise, desk job)

Lightly active = BMR X 1.375 (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/wk)

Moderately active = BMR X 1.55 (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/wk)

Very active = BMR X 1.725 (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days/wk)

Extra active - BMR X 1.9 (hard daily exercise/sports & physical job, or 2x day training)

So for our example above, assuming moderate activity (work out 3-5 days/wk),

BMR = 1312

Activity factor = 1.55

so TDEE = 1312 X 1.55 = 2033 calories

This is the most accurate method you can (easily) use. (There are others, but they're expensive, and for the sake of a hundred calories or so accuracy, this will do just fine!)

Going back to the example, to maintain weight, this woman would need to consume 2033 calories per day.

What if you want to lose weight?

Well we need that calorie deficit we talked about earlier. But the reason for going to all this trouble to work out the TDEE is so that you know how many calories YOU need to cut out to lose weight safely.

This is obviously different for everyone depending on their TDEE. So diets telling you to stick to X calories are just plain lying to you!

To lose weight, without sending your body into the starvation response, cut calories by no more than 20%. So for the 2033 calories/day example, she would need to drop the calories to no less than 1,626.

NEVER CUT CALORIES BY MORE THAN 20%max.!!!

If you want to increase the weight loss further, work on the calorie deficit from the other end; exercise.

Burn more calories by increasing your activity levels to increase the deficit and lose weight faster, but safely.

So hopefully from this post you can see that what works for someone else, won't necessarily work for you. Work out what YOU need to do, and stick to the rules. No more than a 20% cut in calories, and increase activity levels.

Persevere and be patient. A body that took 10 years to acquire won't go in 2 weeks. Don't rush it or you'll end up depressed, frustrated, and right back where you started (or worse).

As I mentioned at the beginning where your calories come from is also key in unlocking weight loss. So check out my other blog posts to find out what you should be eating, and what you should avoid at all costs if weight loss, or indeed health, is your goal.

You can also work with me personally to figure out a diet suited to you and your specific goals by contacting me through my Personal Training website www.MarkOneFitness.co.uk