2 Hours on Treadmill??

[Bdubedub]

I walked out of my house yesterday & had girls whistle & yell at me... man it felt great! Even tho I know I'm not very good looking & know they were probably messing with me, it felt WONDERFUL! And it gave that much needed boost I needed to continue my weight loss goal!! *THUMBS UP*

 

[summer123]

I think exercise has pretty much limitless potential for dropping weight, you can run 10 hours a day if you want and lose pounds every single day the way the Tour de France guys do while eating 8000 calories a day during the race.

I have to say, I disagree with this, the body will always manage to find a way to conserve the calories required for survival and if it feels your exercising too much too often, I believe it will find a way to conserve the calories you eat in the way of fat and instead leech calories from your muscle over your body fat. Muscle wastage is common in people who are on starvation diets, they are often "skinny-fat" which means their body has infact alot of fat in proportion to their size but they are skinny. They also have bone problems where the body has started to leech calories from the bones.... its a form of anorexia and over exercising can lead to the same problems. But these effects only happen when calories are strictly limited as well.

I'd say exercise is done best, (just like everything else) if you do it in plain old simple moderation. Over exercising wont get you the weight loss you require, if you spent all day working out, your body would find a way to adjust. Its main reason? to keep you alive. It will slow itself down in order to conserve calories. If you tried to exercise for hours and hours every day in a way to burn every calorie you consumed, you would run out of steam and find it nigh impossible to do so.

 

[summer123]

I walked out of my house yesterday & had girls whistle & yell at me... man it felt great! Even tho I know I'm not very good looking & know they were probably messing with me, it felt WONDERFUL! And it gave that much needed boost I needed to continue my weight loss goal!! *THUMBS UP*

Haha- most people would have swung for them and labelled them sexist- hope you manage to get to the point where you can believe they are genuine though!

 

[Bdubedub]

I have just struggled with my weight my whole life.... getting made fun of and teased as an adult & child... it has come to a point that this is the TIME! I will NOT fail! Im still sticking with my 5 days a week working out for at least an hour a day. Ive also been walking/running the bike trail by my house which is 6-20 miles depending on what I want to do.

 

[biggestloser105]

I have to say, I disagree with this, the body will always manage to find a way to conserve the calories required for survival and if it feels your exercising too much too often, I believe it will find a way to conserve the calories you eat in the way of fat and instead leech calories from your muscle over your body fat. Muscle wastage is common in people who are on starvation diets, they are often "skinny-fat" which means their body has infact alot of fat in proportion to their size but they are skinny. They also have bone problems where the body has started to leech calories from the bones.... its a form of anorexia and over exercising can lead to the same problems. But these effects only happen when calories are strictly limited as well.

I agree with most of what you say, but I don't think the body will always manage to find a way to conserve calories for survival. It is limited by having to breathe, replace cells, maintain body temperature. All that requires calories that if aren't eaten will be coming from the body. The body can slow down the metabolism, but not indefinitely. And when your body does work, the energy has to come from somewhere.

I would never recommend people actually work out for 10 hours a day, it's definitely not healthy with the exception of people like the Tour de France athletes who train extensively for the event.


I think diet is more limiting than exercise though. I personally need to eat at least 1200 calories to get nurtrients/stay out of starvation mode. This gives me about a 700 caloric deficit a day from diet. Hypothetically I could run for 2 hours and lose nearly 1500 calories every day for much faster weight loss. (3 pounds a week from running alone even if I went ahead and ate the full 1900 calories!)

Eating 1200 calories a day is also challenging, more challenging in my opinion than running for 2 hours (which I can't do because of health issues, but for a person who could run it would be a great boost to weight loss). If I start eating less than 1200, my body is going to start going into starvation mode and needing less than 1900 which wouldn't give me a larger deficit.

That's why I feel exercise is a much more powerful method than diet when it comes to weight loss, but the caveat is it's only thus for people healthy enough to do a lot of intense exercise. Someone very heavy wouldn't be able to pull off anything like that.

 

[allcdnboy1]

Emailed from Leigh:

OP, think about it this way:

Resistance training will help your body resist losing muscle while you're losing weight.

When your body is losing weight, it is losing a combo of water, fat AND muscle. However, if you perform resistance training, you're telling your body that you still need your current muscle mass (making your muscles work hard tells the body that you need to maintain your muscle to continue performing at your current strength, therefore, your body will focus on rebuilding the muscle mass you currently have so that muscle loss during weight loss is minimal). By telling your body you still need that muscle, you can count on maintaining the highest metabolism you can given your caloric deficit.

Also, something worth mentioning, when you are losing weight without resistance training, about half the weight you're losing is fat, whereas with resistance training, I've heard upwards of 75% of the weight your losing is fat. Wouldn't you rather lose a higher percentage of fat during your weight loss? I've seen the difference in my own weight loss, believe me, the difference is dramatic and worth it.

Lizabell

 

[o0knight0o]

if your goal is fat loss, cardio is the worst way (outside of doing nothing).. So adding more is really just spending more time at inefficient exercise..

The best fat burners are the exercises that are a lot more intense. The ones that make use of the bodies ATP-CP and Lactic acid energy systems. By FAR utilizing exercises in your workout that mainly consist of those energy systems gives you the best bang for the buck.. Resistance training, sprints, jumps, anything thats power based, etc etc would be examples. Things that you can't do for more than 20-30 seconds before you're at utter failure..

Unless you're completely out of shape, cardio is best used at improving your cardio. But for fat loss, ditch the treadmill..

I know this is a old thread but when I saw this I had to responde. for one cardio is a great way to loose waight so in my opinion your wrong. You have to dig in to see how your body actually burns calories. Just because you burn 1000 colories dont mean you burn all fat. When exercising you body has two main sources for fule the fat stores (Which is what you want to target) and carbs (Primary source of energy). It is true that two many carbs can lead to fat gain so you have to balence your workout for best results.

If your workout intisensity is too high you will burn more carbs and if its not high enough you will not burn many calories at all. The best way to figure out what intensity your workout should be is to use a hart rate monitor and try to keep your heart rate between zone 2 and 3 this will give you the most fat burn while at the same time burning excess carbs. I completely disagree with the statment above that cardio is the worst way to to burn fat (as fare as exercise gose). Take body builders for example when they are beafing up and not doing a competition they want to bulk up their fat % increases during this phase they do no cardio its all strength training however, when they start getting ready for a competion what do they do to tone up? Cardio and eat much healthyier.

Now more mucle mass dose allow you to burn more calories faster so its a good idea to add some strenght training to your plan because cardio by itself will cause your muscle mass to shrink and they will slow down your motablisim. So a better idea would be to keep your treadmill workout the same instead of adding another hour a day to the treadmill add strength training 2 or 3 days a week to help increase your muscle mass. the workouts your currently doing on the treadmill should not increase in physicle intensity but the intensity should stay the same. What I mean by this is if your running a hour at 6MHP 1% include and you can keep your HR In the upper part of zone 2 thats where you need to have your heart rate always. At some point your HR will start to drop for the same workout at this point you need to increase either the speed of the workout or the incline either one will elevate the HR back to where it needs to be (Keeping the intensity of the workout the same). So even though you have increased an aspect of the workout the intensity of the workout still feels the same.

Diet is a key factor just like somelse else pointed out. At some point you will reach your genetic limit and will have to push really hard to break it. Alot of people would just give up at this point because exercise just dont seem to help. A good healthy diet is a must to add on to a good active lifestile. Your diet should consist of no less then 3 health meals a day and even a small low calorie health snack in between meals. Your meals should not be within 2 hours before you go to bed and should be not longer then 4 hours a part with the snack being dead in the middle. Alot of people have a problem with this because they will eat either just one or two meals a day. If you weight to long between meals your body will go into a starvation mode and to. what dose a bear use to keep it statified all winter? Fat would be the correct answer. A human body is the same way if you go to long without food your body will take alot of whats in that food and store it a fat knowing it may be some time before it can get more food. If you keep your body fed it knows food will come and use the nurtients ant the food for what it needs and dispose of the rest. Another thing to take out of this your metabolism don't fire up till you eat your first meal so if you like to skip breakfest not a good idea!

The human body is very smart it will do what It needs to in order to stay functioning.

 

[o0knight0o]

That has been true for me as well. When I was doing 2-3 hours cardio a day, I was very hungry. But at the same time I was eating plenty and still losing weight.

I think exercise has pretty much limitless potential for dropping weight, you can run 10 hours a day if you want and lose pounds every single day the way the Tour de France guys do while eating 8000 calories a day during the race.

Of course to be able to pull those kinds of hours you have to have no life and you have to be in decent enough shape to be able to do something hardcore and not injure yourself.

It's kind of like what they do on the Biggest Loser to drop 10-15 pounds every week. But I just can't see how someone can go form a high weight to losing 10 pounds every week and not end up with bags of skin on their body, which would be the main reason why I wouldn't do this even if I had the time and the health for it.

I think this may be true to an extent but I have trained up for 3 marathons and currently training for my 4th and honestly the amount of running I have to do to prepare for these events actually make me eat less then when I don't run at all. I find that after alot of my more intense runs I'm not hungry for hours afterwards. I make myself eat a protien bar ans suck down some carbs for recovery purposes but my meals are much smaller. My rest days seem to be the days I have to watch because those are the days I am the hungriest.

 

[afpc80]

Its important to be specific when talking about results. What are you trying to achieve? If you want to lose body fat, you want to be performing activities at which your body is inefficient. By repeating the same exercise and duration every day, you will become better at it and decrease the energy required to perform it, and less body fat will be used overall. You should be varying duration, activity and intensity as a general rule.