S
Scorpion_
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Would like to know all of your opinions on this 
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The body adapts to everything you throw at it and storing fat is good for survival, so there is definate merit here.
Weight loss, gain or maintainance comes down to simple formulae with lots of complications, many of them due to the body still being set up for a life of hunter gatherer. Like it or not that is what we have, evolution is not quick on an animal our size so the diet of big mac and fries and life on the sofa will take a few million years to adapt to.
Those in doubt consider we are one of the only animals able to consume lactose as an adult, something we started adapting to around 2 million years ago, and there are still plenty of lactose intolerant people out there.
The one thing I do not like with a lot of this research is the rarely cite all of the details. There will be many who will remember research that eating late in the day made you fat. It was later found that they had been giving two sets of people the same meals, and one an additional bit of food late in the day, surprisingly the one eating more food increased in weight on average, shocking. Never dismiss research, but always ask what factors they have not included. I have produced data for various purposes and the higher level the results the more you need to ask about detail.
There will be many jumping to defend the long duration aerobic work, and to some extent I will be among them but if your training is for pure weight loss or asthetics, look at variety of styles not just one.
One of the questions asked there was how many fat marathon runners do you see. I have known a few, they drank like fish and ate junk. However I also know having run marathons that if it is your main sport and you have plenty of time to dedicate to it, I am talking years here, the training is varied in intensity, style and duration, there is plenty of plodding around of course but that isn't it. There is also the fact that most serious marathon runners really couldn't care less how they look, they just want to run quicker marathons. I knew I was a pathetic scrawny weed that hardly any women found physically appealing when I did it but I could run at 10mph for as long as I wanted and have a 'sprint kick' for the last mile, less said about my sprint the better, suffice to say some liked using me to keep their pace through the rest knowing if they were with me at mile 25 they'd beat me. I was always sub 10% body fat, ate loads but never gained an ounce, I took my training very seriously.
In defence of the plodding around, if you do some of this with other activities it will help you lose weight, but you have to continuously overload and shock your body to get continous results. Going on a machine for an hour a day doing roughly the same will not give you the body of a god or goddess, but it will make you good at that activity.
It is also safe to do for short to mid duration, and this can be incredibly important.
If you have someone carrying immense amounts of excess weight and hypertension then ask them to do HIIT, you will kill them, simple fact. Give that person gentle activity for a few months and it will get their body ready for other activities.
If someone wants to do something like a long swim, cycle or run that they have never done before and has allowed themselves a few months to prepare it is better to get them used to doing this for long duration so they finish than try giving them more intense work as if going for record times.
The idea of using the long low intensity in both these cases isn't to set them up for years to come it is a means to get them ready to do other workouts.l
The most important things in training are to enjoy it, always priority 1 and to know what you want. If the mirror is god, don't copy me and others who only care about ability. If you want to be a world class weightlifter, running 10 miles a day is not going to help much, in the same way as being a marathon runner will not be helped by doing a year of varied 555 training in the gym.
Set your targets, consider timescales and priorities then set up your routines. For lunatics like me who want to be good at everything and am happy to be an ugly mishapen freak, that's easy to set up, not so easy to actually do.
Weight loss, gain or maintainance comes down to simple formulae with lots of complications, many of them due to the body still being set up for a life of hunter gatherer. Like it or not that is what we have, evolution is not quick on an animal our size so the diet of big mac and fries and life on the sofa will take a few million years to adapt to.
Those in doubt consider we are one of the only animals able to consume lactose as an adult, something we started adapting to around 2 million years ago, and there are still plenty of lactose intolerant people out there.
The one thing I do not like with a lot of this research is the rarely cite all of the details. There will be many who will remember research that eating late in the day made you fat. It was later found that they had been giving two sets of people the same meals, and one an additional bit of food late in the day, surprisingly the one eating more food increased in weight on average, shocking. Never dismiss research, but always ask what factors they have not included. I have produced data for various purposes and the higher level the results the more you need to ask about detail.
There will be many jumping to defend the long duration aerobic work, and to some extent I will be among them but if your training is for pure weight loss or asthetics, look at variety of styles not just one.
One of the questions asked there was how many fat marathon runners do you see. I have known a few, they drank like fish and ate junk. However I also know having run marathons that if it is your main sport and you have plenty of time to dedicate to it, I am talking years here, the training is varied in intensity, style and duration, there is plenty of plodding around of course but that isn't it. There is also the fact that most serious marathon runners really couldn't care less how they look, they just want to run quicker marathons. I knew I was a pathetic scrawny weed that hardly any women found physically appealing when I did it but I could run at 10mph for as long as I wanted and have a 'sprint kick' for the last mile, less said about my sprint the better, suffice to say some liked using me to keep their pace through the rest knowing if they were with me at mile 25 they'd beat me. I was always sub 10% body fat, ate loads but never gained an ounce, I took my training very seriously.
In defence of the plodding around, if you do some of this with other activities it will help you lose weight, but you have to continuously overload and shock your body to get continous results. Going on a machine for an hour a day doing roughly the same will not give you the body of a god or goddess, but it will make you good at that activity.
It is also safe to do for short to mid duration, and this can be incredibly important.
If you have someone carrying immense amounts of excess weight and hypertension then ask them to do HIIT, you will kill them, simple fact. Give that person gentle activity for a few months and it will get their body ready for other activities.
If someone wants to do something like a long swim, cycle or run that they have never done before and has allowed themselves a few months to prepare it is better to get them used to doing this for long duration so they finish than try giving them more intense work as if going for record times.
The idea of using the long low intensity in both these cases isn't to set them up for years to come it is a means to get them ready to do other workouts.l
The most important things in training are to enjoy it, always priority 1 and to know what you want. If the mirror is god, don't copy me and others who only care about ability. If you want to be a world class weightlifter, running 10 miles a day is not going to help much, in the same way as being a marathon runner will not be helped by doing a year of varied 555 training in the gym.
Set your targets, consider timescales and priorities then set up your routines. For lunatics like me who want to be good at everything and am happy to be an ugly mishapen freak, that's easy to set up, not so easy to actually do.
I accumulate roughly 30min of "cardio" most days, in the form of walking from point A to point B. I'll count any distance or hill or luggage great enough to make me breathe heavier or increase my heart rate for 5min or more to be part of this equation; anything less than that is too small, varied and (in)frequent for me to keep any mental track of. I'm also excluding strength and conditioning, which makes up my actual training; however it's realistically inaccurate to exclude such activity, because both strength work and conditioning work does put a demand on the cardiovascular, pulmonary and metabolic systems.
Just yesterday I was watching some of Layne Norton's videos, and he talked about consistent long duration low intensity exercise teaching the body to minimise energy expenditure during said activity. He asserted that marathon runners can't possibly consume enough calories to meet their needs based on what you'd expect their expenditure to be, but I'd take that statement with a grain of salt -- I know a guy who's managed a 9,000kcal/day diet, so I'd hold back on saying that about marathon runners. However, in the primary context that he was discussing, he did give a point that's worth paying attention to. The longer and more drastically you try to lose weight, the more your metabolic rate decreases. According to him, however long your spend cutting, it'll take about that same amount of time to get your metabolism back up to standard.
Layne Norton works with bodybuilding competitors, and finds that (before they come to him) they'll spend 16 weeks cutting for competition, then put back on half the fat they lost in a week after competition. In that time, they haven't recovered their metabolic. This excessive increase in weight causes them to freak out (especially amongst female clients), and so they go straight back to calorie restriction, trying to get rid of the new 10lb of fat, while they still have a repressed metabolism. As they cut, their metabolism continues to diminish. They increase cardio and their body adapts to become more energy efficient with that workload, and eventually people come to him eating 800kcal/day, doing 2 hours of cardio a day and not losing any weight. In the videos he recommended removing the cardio and VERY slowly increasing carbohydrate intake: roughly +5g CHO/day/week. He stressed that this isn't a quick fix, but that you could be spending well over a year gradually building back up your metabolic rate. If you are going to do cardio, his recommendation (like a lot of trainers) is that it's probably better to do high intensity cardio rather than low intensity cardio, although he doesn't rule out low intensity cardio altogether.
Just yesterday I was watching some of Layne Norton's videos, and he talked about consistent long duration low intensity exercise teaching the body to minimise energy expenditure during said activity. He asserted that marathon runners can't possibly consume enough calories to meet their needs based on what you'd expect their expenditure to be, but I'd take that statement with a grain of salt -- I know a guy who's managed a 9,000kcal/day diet, so I'd hold back on saying that about marathon runners. However, in the primary context that he was discussing, he did give a point that's worth paying attention to. The longer and more drastically you try to lose weight, the more your metabolic rate decreases. According to him, however long your spend cutting, it'll take about that same amount of time to get your metabolism back up to standard.
Layne Norton works with bodybuilding competitors, and finds that (before they come to him) they'll spend 16 weeks cutting for competition, then put back on half the fat they lost in a week after competition. In that time, they haven't recovered their metabolic. This excessive increase in weight causes them to freak out (especially amongst female clients), and so they go straight back to calorie restriction, trying to get rid of the new 10lb of fat, while they still have a repressed metabolism. As they cut, their metabolism continues to diminish. They increase cardio and their body adapts to become more energy efficient with that workload, and eventually people come to him eating 800kcal/day, doing 2 hours of cardio a day and not losing any weight. In the videos he recommended removing the cardio and VERY slowly increasing carbohydrate intake: roughly +5g CHO/day/week. He stressed that this isn't a quick fix, but that you could be spending well over a year gradually building back up your metabolic rate. If you are going to do cardio, his recommendation (like a lot of trainers) is that it's probably better to do high intensity cardio rather than low intensity cardio, although he doesn't rule out low intensity cardio altogether.
further to this last post... The co presenter of the Muscle College Radio program with Dr Lane Norton Phd, Dr Jacob Wilson Phd is actually one of the researchers that studied this phenom of low intensity cardio. It turns out that the "fat burning zone" on the cardio machines is the worst zone to be working out in when trying to lose fat...
Regarding HIIT training... go listen to muscle college radio to get a real description of this very effective form of stripping fat from your body...
Just because a gym fills its space with a multitude of cardio machines doesn't make cardio the best form of fat loss... all these machines are in the gym for the benefit of the establishment NOT the members. Hasn't anyone noticed and wondered why there are more and more cardio machines and fitness programs out there than there has been ever and yet the nation is getting fatter... A congressional inquiry declared more than 12 years ago that better than 90 percent of all people that go on a diet, including ALL the big weight loss programs, end up fatter than when they started within 2 years... hence the disclaimer on all weight loss adds... you've seen them "individual results may vary" "results not typical" "when used in conjunction with an exercise program" la la al... We have empirical evidence that DIETS don't work and now we have and are getting more evIdence that "steady state cardio" DOES NOT WORK FOR CONTINUED AND SUSTAINED FAT LOSS... read the science, it doesn 't lie...
Regarding HIIT training... go listen to muscle college radio to get a real description of this very effective form of stripping fat from your body...
Just because a gym fills its space with a multitude of cardio machines doesn't make cardio the best form of fat loss... all these machines are in the gym for the benefit of the establishment NOT the members. Hasn't anyone noticed and wondered why there are more and more cardio machines and fitness programs out there than there has been ever and yet the nation is getting fatter... A congressional inquiry declared more than 12 years ago that better than 90 percent of all people that go on a diet, including ALL the big weight loss programs, end up fatter than when they started within 2 years... hence the disclaimer on all weight loss adds... you've seen them "individual results may vary" "results not typical" "when used in conjunction with an exercise program" la la al... We have empirical evidence that DIETS don't work and now we have and are getting more evIdence that "steady state cardio" DOES NOT WORK FOR CONTINUED AND SUSTAINED FAT LOSS... read the science, it doesn 't lie...