Fighting Flab

In my last post, I underwent a scientific ramble upon the subject of fat, going into a little of the basic chemistry and biology of the whole business. However, what I did not touch so much on is the giant elephant in the room that surrounds all talk of fat in our modern world, and looks poised to become one of the defining issues of the twenty-first century- that of obesity and overweightness.

I am not, however, about to analyse obesity as a whole in this post, but instead intend to consider why attempting to counteract this, and the slimming industry in general, have become such major bones of contention for so many people. There’s no denying that the slimming industry is worth a veritable fortune- one analyst I saw on TV the other day estimated that a simple cure-all for the world’s obesity problem could be worth up to four trillion dollars, particularly given the boom in public obesity in countries like Brazil and China. However, this doesn’t mean that slimming is popular or that everyone goes in for it- if slimming down weren’t such a problem for so many people, there wouldn’t be an obesity problem worth speaking of, and it’s an open secret that around 99.9% people attempting a new diet fail to keep any weight off in the long term.

To begin, let us consult the very basics. For practical purposes in terms of losing weight, fat is basically energy stored by your body in physical form; the formation of the triglyceride molecules that make up fat requires energy, ‘using up’ any excess energy your body may have, and breaking them apart (the leftover ‘bits’ of the broken-down triglyceride molecules are effectively waste products that are transported to the kidneys via the bloodstream, and are later eliminated from the body in urine) releases this stored energy for your body to use, in order to keep your various bodily functions going and allowing you to move around and do things. Thus, any difference between the amount of energy your body consumes (in food, mainly; a ‘calorie’ is nothing more than an old unit of energy, just like the ‘joule’ unit used in modern science) and uses is offset by your fat reserves- if you put in more than you get out, your fat stores increases, and vice-versa. Thus, the only real challenge facing a slimmer wanting to shed their excess fat is to expend more energy than they consume (leaving to one side for this post various claims that certain foods make you fatter than equivalents of a similar calorific value). Just so we’re all clear on this.

The first concern to raise its ugly head when considering this problem is the simple question of ‘how much energy do we actually expend per day?’. Many people will look to the little table of government-issued Guideline Daily Amounts of various nutrients that you find on the side of most food packaging, but it must be remembered that these are only ‘Guidelines’ after all and a more personal evaluation may be of use. The amount of energy your body uses per day is known as your Metabolic Rate, and a good starting point for an aspiring slimmer would be to calculate your Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR). One’s RMR is a measure of how much energy a person of your gender, age, height and weight would normally (some people may have unusually fast or slow metabolisms, but these people are rare and ‘I have a slow metabolism’ is more often an exuse than reality) expend per day were they utterly at rest; not moving, not doing anything, this is the minimum amount of energy your body needs in order to function. RMR calculators such as this one are freely available online, and that one also features a separate calculator (under ‘Calorie Calculator) that allows you to (very roughly) estimate your total calorie consumption per day. The final number you get out of this latter process is a very useful guideline to the aspiring slimmer.

However, simply aiming to eat less than that number is no guarantee of long-term weight loss. For one thing, many people give up on diets because they can see no immediate results, but this is because ‘burning’ fat is an inherently slow progress. Depending on your source, fat stores between 7500 and 9000 calories per kilogram, meaning that if you are on a diet in which you eat 500 calories less than you expend (and I’m being generous here; a 500 calorie shortfall will leave you feeling very hungry), you can only expect to lose a kilogram of fat every 2-3 weeks. Even this may be  masked if our hypothetical slimmer decides to exercise a bit more too; regular exercise will cause a person to put on muscle (which weighs more than fat) and thus make the loss of weight seem less impressive- but we’ll come onto exercise in a minute.

The other major issue facing those who try to lose weight by dieting is the fact that diets are really, really unpleasant. For one thing, the constant calorie-counting provides unwanted mental strain for many (hence the popularity of points-based diets and similar that do the calculations for you), and this mental fatigue can serve to only exacerbate the gnawing hunger in our empty bellies at the end of a day when we’ve eaten enough calories but not enough to satisfy our stomach. Not only do dieters frequently feel hungry, they also have to deal with a bland diet of lettuce and cottage cheese- and however much we can pretend that we find these delicate things delicious, they don’t quite compare to the stomach-filling satisfaction of a thick, fatty, meaty burger.

The problem is that our hunger is not dictated by how many calories we have consumed, but by how physically full our stomach is, and whilst there are a few tricks that can be used to try and counteract this (a personal favourite is to down a pint of water when feeling peckish, just to give my stomach a large physical amount of stuff to process) none of them really compare to everyone’s dream of being able to eat as much as they like and still not get thin. So, if attempting to limit our intake of energy alone isn’t enough (although diet is most certainly a vital part of keeping our weight down), our only remaining option is to increase the amount of energy we expend, and that means exercise.

The benefits of exercise in relation to weight loss are generally poorly understood by most people; whilst the very act of getting our bodies moving does expend energy, as the little calorie meter on an exercise regime may show, the actual amount of excess energy expended by this process is usually very little; a half-hour run may only expend a cupcake’s worth of energy. No, the real benefits to exercise concern the metabolism; exercise and leading a generally active lifestyle causes your overall metabolic rate to rise, which is why relatively short but regular bouts of exercise (which constantly ‘top up’ one’s metabolic rate) are generally more productive than a four hour long weekend blowout that only boosts the metabolic rate for a small portion of one’s week. This is why the oft-quoted adage instructing people to do 10,000 steps per day has hung around for so long; I honestly believe that were everyone to follow this advice, there would not be a serious obesity problem. Not only that, but as mentioned before exercise, particularly intense exercise such as sprinting or weight training, will build muscle- muscle whose cells will need to be constantly provided with energy in order to stay alive, thus increasing one’s metabolic rate in the long- as well as short-term.

One final pitfall to be noted with attempting to lose weight in this fashion involves attempting to keep it off. It must be borne in mind that people of a lower weight have a lower RMR and thus need less energy, meaning that if a successful dieter reverts to their pre-diet practices they will be eating too much and will just balloon back to the weight they were. Thus, when one makes a commitment to exercise or better eating it has got to be a genuine change in lifestyle (something very few people are willing to commit to) in order to work for the long-term.

That’s one of two reasons why an unpleasant diet of celery sticks probably isn’t a great weight loss solution; the other reason concerns the other benefit of exercise. Someone who regularly exercises isn’t just likely to be slimmer than a similar person who doesn’t, but to be healthier as well- their heart will be healthier, their muscles more able to perform practical real-world tasks, and their body is generally less likely to suffer from the ravages of time and disease. A lot of the stated health problems that come from being overweight or obese are merely symptomatic of people who eat bad food and don’t exercise sufficiently, rather than being directly caused by being overweight. That’s why very few people worry after the cardiovascular health of Jonny Wilkinson, World Cup-winning rugby star and shining light of Toulon RC: a man whose BMI classes him as morbidly obese.

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Blubber

Fat is a much-maligned substance in the twenty-first century world we find ourselves in; exhortations for it to be burnt or exhumed from one’s diet abound from all sides, and indeed entire industries are now founded on dealing with the unwanted stuff in one form or another. However, fat is not, in fact, some demonic hate figure designed specifically to kill all that is good and beautiful about our world, and since it is at least relatively interesting I thought it might be worth investigating a few bits and pieces surrounding it over the course of a post.

All fats are based upon a molecule called glycerol, or propan-1,2,3-triol to give it its technical IUPAC name. Glycerol is a very interesting substance used for a wide range of purposes both in the body and commercially; it can be broken down to form sugar, can be used as a laxative, is an effective antifreeze, a useful solvent, a sweetener, is a key ingredient in the production of dynamite and, of course, can be used to store energy in fatty form. Glycerol is, technically speaking, an alcohol, but unlike most everyday alcohols (such as the ethanol upon which many of our favourite drinks are based) each glycerol molecule contains not one but three alcohol functional groups. In a fat, these alcohol groups act like sticking points, allowing three different long-chain carboxylic acid molecules known as ‘fatty acids’ to attach to each glycerol molecule. For this reason, fats are also known as ‘triglycerides’, and precisely which fat is formed from this structure depends on the structure of these fatty acids.

Fatty acids consisting of shorter chains of carbon atoms have less atoms with which to interact with their surroundings,  and thus the intermolecular forces between the fatty acid chains and other molecules are weaker for shorter-chain acids. This has a number of effects on the properties of the final product, but one of the most obvious concerns its melting point; shorter-chain fatty acids generally result in a product that is liquid at room temperature, and such products are designated as ‘oils’ rather than fats. Thus, not all triglycerides are, technically speaking, fats, and even triglycerides are part of a larger chemical family of fat-like substances known as ‘lipids’ (organic chemistry can be confusing). As a general rule, plants tend to produce oils and animals produce fats (presumably for reasons of storage), which is why you get stuff like duck fat and olive oil rather than the reverse.

The structure of the fatty acids is also important in an important dietary consideration surrounding fats; whether they are saturated or unsaturated. In chemistry, carbon atoms are bonded to one another by covalent bonds, consisting of a shared pair of electrons (each atom providing one electron of the pair) that keeps the two atoms bonded together. Most of the time, only one pair of electrons forms the bond (known as a single bond), but sometimes the relevant carbon atoms have a surfeit of electrons and will create another shared pair, forming a double covalent bond. The nature of double bonds means that the carbon atoms involved can accept more hydrogen atoms (or other electrophiles such as bromine; bromine water is a good test for double bonds) whereas a molecule made up entirely of singly-bonded atoms couldn’t accept any more and would be said to be saturated with hydrogen. Thus, molecules (including fats and fatty acids) with only single bonds are described as saturated, whilst those with double bonds are known as unsaturated*. A mixture of the food industry and chemical fraternity has developed a whole host of more specific descriptive terms that give you more detail as to the chemical structure of your fats (stuff like monounsaturated and such), and has also subdivided unsaturated fats into two more categories, cis- and trans-fats (the names refer to the molecules’ arrangement in space about the double bond, not their gender orientation).

With all these different labels, it’s no wonder people have so much trouble remembering, much less identifying, which fats they are ‘supposed to avoid’. Saturated and trans-unsaturated fats (which occur rarely in nature due to enzyme structure and are usually manufactured artificially) are apparently bad, mono-unsaturated (cis-) fats are good, and poly-unsaturated (cis-) fats good in moderation.

The extent to which these fats are ‘good’ and ‘healthy’ does not refer to the effect they will have on your waistline; all fats you eat are first broken down by your digestive process, and the resulting calories produced are then either used to power your body or turned into other sorts of fat that take up belly space. This process is the same for all types of energy-containing food and I shall come onto a few details about it in a paragraph or two. No, the relative health risk of these different fat types refers instead to the production of another type of lipid; cholesterol, which has such a complex, confusing structure and synthesis that I’m not even going to try to describe it. Cholesterol is a substance produced intentionally by the body and is very useful; it is used in the production of all sorts of hormones and vitamins, is a key ingredient of bile and is used in helping cells rebuild themselves. It is transported through the body by two different substances known as LDL (low-density lipoprotein) and HDL (take a wild guess) that carry it via the bloodstream; and this is where problems arise. The precise mechanism behind it is not known, but an increased consumption of trans-fats and other ‘bad’ triglycerides leads to an increase in the amount of cholesterol and LDL in the bloodstream. If this stuff is allowed to build up, cholesterol can start to ‘stick’ to the sides of one’s blood vessels, slowly reducing the effective size of the blood vessel until it is almost completely shut. This greatly reduces the flow of blood through these vessels, and this can have particularly dramatic consequences if the large, important blood vessels close to or supplying the heart are affected, leading to coronary heart disease and a greatly increased risk of heart attacks. HDL, for some reason, doesn’t apparently contribute to this affect, leading HDL to be (misleadingly, since it’s not actually cholesterol) dubbed ‘good cholesterol’ and LDL as ‘bad cholesterol’.

Clearly, then, having too much of these ‘bad fats’ can have some pretty serious consequences, but public realisation of this has lead all fat to be considered as a disgusting thing to be shunned. Frankly, this is just plain old not true, and it is far easier to live a healthy life with a bit of meat** on the bones than to go down the super-skinny angle. Fat is a vital body tissue, required for insulation, vitamin transport, to store energy, to prevent the disease and provides many essential nutrients; omega-3, the ‘essential oil’ (meaning it is not produced by the body) found in fish that is thought  to play a role in brain development and other bodily functions, is nothing more than an unusual fatty acid.

If you want further evidence as to the importance fat plays in one’s body, I refer you to a condition known as lipodystrophy, in which one’s body cannot produce or store fat properly. In some cases this is localised and relatively harmless, but in incredibly rare cases it manifests itself as a hereditary condition that causes abnormal bone and muscle growth, facial disfigurement and requires an incredibly strict diet (in direct contravention of the massive appetite the condition gives you) in order to control one’s levels of cholesterol and carbohydrate intake. In many cases, sufferers of this horrible condition will not live past twenty, if they even get that far.

*Vegetable oils tend to be more frequently unsaturated than fats, as this is another factor that reduces their melting point and makes them liquid. A key process involved in producing margarine involves taking these vegetable oils and adding hydrogen to these double bonds, a process known as hydrogenation, in order to raise their melting point and make the margarine solid and spreadable. Chemistry!

**Although, as anyone who likes their bacon skinny will tell you, fat is most certainly not meat. In fact, it’s not even alive.

3500 calories per pound

This looks set to be the concluding post in this particular little series on the subject of obesity and overweightness. So, to summarise where we’ve been so far- post 1: that there are a lot of slightly chubby people present in the western world leading to statistics supporting a massive obesity problem, and that even this mediocre degree of fatness can be seriously damaging to your health. Post 2: why we have spent recent history getting slightly chubby. And for today, post 3: how one can try to do your bit, especially following the Christmas excesses and the soon-broken promises of New Year, to lose some of that excess poundage.

It was Albert Einstein who first demonstrated that mass was nothing more than stored energy, and although the theory behind that precise idea doesn’t really correlate with biology the principle still stands; fat is your body’s way of storing energy. It’s also a vital body tissue, and is not a 100% bad and evil thing to ingest, but if you want to lose it then the aim should simply be one of ensuring that one’s energy output, in the form of exercise  exceeds one’s energy input, in the form of food. The body’s response to this is to use up some of its fat stores to replace this lost energy (although this process can take up to a week to run its full course; the body is a complicated thing), meaning that the amount of fat in/on your body will gradually decrease over time. Therefore, slimming down is a process that is best approached from two directions; restricting what’s going in, and increasing what’s going out (both at the same time is infinitely more effective than an either/or process). I’ll deal with what’s going in first.

The most important point to make about improving one’s diet, and when considering weight loss generally, is that there are no cheats. There are no wonder pills that will shed 20lb of body fat in a week, and no super-foods or nutritional supplements that will slim you down in a matter of months. Losing weight is always going to be a messy business that will take several months at a minimum (the title of this post refers to the calorie content of body fat, meaning that to lose one pound you must expend 3500 more calories than you ingest over a given period of time), and unfortunately prevention is better than cure; but moping won’t help anyone, so let’s just gather our resolve and move on.

There is currently a huge debate going on concerning the nation’s diet problems of amount versus content; whether people are eating too much, or just the wrong stuff. In most cases it’s probably going to be a mixture of the two, but I tend to favour the latter answer; and in any case, there’s not much I can say about the former beyond ‘eat less stuff’. I am not a good enough cook to offer any great advice on what foods you should or shouldn’t be avoiding, particularly since the consensus appears to change every fortnight, so instead I will concentrate on the one solid piece of advice that I can champion; cook your own stuff.

This is a piece of advice that many people find hard to cope with- as I said in my last post, our body doesn’t want to waste time cooking when it could be eating. When faced with the unknown product of one’s efforts in an hours time, and the surety of a ready meal or fast food within five minutes, the latter option and all the crap that goes in it starts to seem a lot more attractive. The trick is, therefore, to learn how to cook quickly- the best meals should either take less than 10-15 minutes of actual effort to prepare and make, or be able to be made in large amounts and last for a week or more. Or, even better, both. Skilled chefs achieve this by having their skills honed to a fine art and working at a furious rate, but then again they’re getting paid for it; for the layman, a better solution is to know the right dishes. I’m not going to include a full recipe list, but there are thousands online, and there is a skill to reading recipes; it can get easy to get lost between a long list of numbers and a complicated ordering system, but reading between the lines one can often identify which recipes mean ‘chop it all up and chuck in some water for half an hour’.

That’s a very brief touch on the issue, but now I want to move on and look at energy going out; exercise. I personally would recommend sport, particularly team sport, as the most reliably fun way to get fit and enjoy oneself on a weekend- rugby has always done me right. If you’re looking in the right place, age shouldn’t be an issue (I’ve seen a 50 year old play alongside a 19 year old student at a club rugby match near me), and neither should skill so long as you are willing to give it a decent go; but, sport’s not for everyone and can present injury issues so I’ll also look elsewhere.

The traditional form of fat-burning exercise is jogging, but that’s an idea to be taken with a large pinch of salt and caution. Regular joggers will lose weight it’s true, but jogging places an awful lot of stress on one’s joints (swimming, cycling and rowing are all good forms of ‘low-impact exercise’ that avoid this issue), and suffers the crowning flaw of being boring as hell. To me, anyway- it takes up a good chunk of time, during which one’s mind is so filled with the thump of footfalls and aching limbs that one is forced to endure the experience rather than enjoy it. I’ll put up with that for strength exercises, but not for weight loss when two far better techniques present themselves; intensity sessions and walking.

Intensity sessions is just a posh name for doing very, very tiring exercise for a short period of time; they’re great for burning fat & building fitness, but I’ll warn you now that they are not pleasant. As the name suggest, these involve very high-intensity exercise (as a general rule, you not be able to talk throughout high-intensity work) performed either continuously or next to continuously for relatively short periods of time- an 8 minute session a few times a week should be plenty. This exercise can take many forms; shuttle runs (sprinting back and forth as fast as possible between two marked points or lines), suicides (doing shuttle runs between one ‘base’ line and a number of different lines at different distances from the base, such that one’s runs change in length after each set) and tabata sets (picking an easily repeatable exercise, such as squats, performing them as fast as possible for 20 seconds, followed by 10 seconds of rest, then another 20 seconds of exercise, and so on for 4-8 minute) are just three examples. Effective though these are, it’s difficult to find an area of empty space to perform them without getting awkward looks and the odd spot of abuse from passers-by or neighbours, so they may not be ideal for many people (tabata sets or other exercises such as press ups are an exception, and can generally be done in a bedroom; Mark Lauren’s excellent ‘You Are Your Own Gym’ is a great place to start for anyone interested in pursuing this route to lose weight & build muscle). This leaves us with one more option; walking.

To my mind, if everyone ate properly and walked 10,000 steps per day, the scare stats behind the media’s obesity fix would disappear within a matter of months. 10,000 steps may seem a lot, and for many holding office jobs it may seem impossible, but walking is a wonderful form of exercise since it allows you to lose oneself in thought or music, whichever takes your fancy. Even if you don’t have time for a separate walk, with a pedometer in hand (they are built into many modern iPods, and free pedometer apps are available for both iPhone and Android) and a target in mind (10k is the standard) then after a couple of weeks it’s not unusual to find yourself subtly changing the tiny aspects of your day (stairs instead of lift, that sort of thing) to try and hit your target; and the results will follow. As car ownership, an office economy and lack of free time have all grown in the last few decades, we as a nation do not walk as much as we used to. It’s high time that changed.

The Slightly Chubby Brigade

As the news will tell you at every single available opportunity, we are living through an obesity crisis. Across the western world (USA being the worst and Britain coming in second) our average national BMI is increasing and the number of obese and overweight people, and children especially, looks to be soaring across the board. Only the other day I saw a statistic that said nearly a third of children are now leaving primary school (ie one third of eleven year-olds) overweight, and such solemn numbers frequently make headlines.

This is a huge issue, encompassing several different issues and topics that I will attempt to consider over my next few posts (yeah, ‘nother multi-parter coming up), but for many of us it seems hideously exaggerated. I mean yes, we’ve all seen the kind of super-flabby people, the kind the news footage always cuts to when we hear some obesity health scare, the kind who are wider than they are tall and need a mobility scooter just to get around most of the time. We look at these pictures and we tut, and we might consider our own shape- but we’re basically fine, aren’t we. Sure, there’s a bit of a belly showing, but that’s normal- a good energy store and piece of insulation, in fact, and we would like to have a life beyond the weight-obsessed calorie counters that hardcore slimmers all seem to be. We don’t need to worry, do we?

Well, according to the numbers, actually we do. The average height of a Briton… actually, if you’re stumbling across this at home and you consider yourself normal, go and weigh yourself and, if you can, measure your height as well. Write those numbers down, and now continue reading. The average height of a Briton at the moment is 1.75m, or around 5’9″ in old money, and we might consider a normal weight for that height to be around 80 kilos, or 170 pounds. That might seem normal enough; a bit of a paunch, but able to get around and walk, and certainly no one would call you fat. Except perhaps your doctor, because according to the BMI chart I’ve got pulled up a 5 foot 9, 80 kilo human is deemed clinically overweight. Not by much, but you’d still weigh more than is healthy- in fact, one stat I heard a while ago puts the average Briton at this BMI. Try it with your measurements; BMI charts are freely available over the web.

This, to me, is one of the real underlying causes of ‘the obesity epidemic’- a fundamental misunderstanding of what ‘overweight’ consists of. Whenever our hideously awful everyone-dead-from-McDonalds-overdose etc. etc. diet is brought up on the news, it is always annotated by pictures of hanging bellies and bouncing flab, the kind of bodies that make one almost physically sick to look at. But, whilst these people certainly exist, there are not enough of them for the obesity issue to be even worth mentioning in everyday society; whilst the proportion of morbidly obese people is significant, it’s not seriously worth thought for most of us.

No, the real cause for all the chilling statistics we hear on the news is all the people who don’t look to be overweight. The kind whose diet isn’t appalling (no 24/7 McDonaldses), who are quite capable of exercise when it suits them, and who might take a rough glance at the dietary information of the stuff they buy in the supermarket. But these people are nonetheless hovering on the overweight borderline, pulling up the national average, despite the fact that they don’t consider anything to be wrong; in fact, some women who are according to the evil numbers overweight, may consider it almost dutiful to not become obsessed over shedding every pound and to maintain their curves. Having a bit of excess weight is, after all, still better than being underweight and anorexic, and the body image pressures some young women are coming under are just as much of an issue as national obesity. Even for those who don’t have such opinions, many of the slightly overweight feel that they don’t have any weight issues and that there’s surely no significant health risk associated with a ‘bit of meat on your bones’ (it’s actually muscle, rather than fat, that technically forms meat, but ho hum); as such, they have absolutely no motivation to get their weight down, as they don’t think they need to.

I won’t waste much of my time on all the reasons for this statement, but unfortunately even this slight degree of overweight-ness will significantly increase your risk of major health problems somewhere down the line, particularly that of heart disease (which is going through the roof at the moment); diabetes isn’t likely to be a risk for the overweight unless they’re really overdoing things, but that’s also a potential, and very serious, health hazard. The trouble is that many of us find it hard to make this connection if we basically feel healthy. Despite what the doctor says and no matter how much we trust them, if we are capable of going for a nice walk and generally getting about without getting out of breath or feeling bad then we probably feel justified in thinking of ourselves as healthy. Our heart doesn’t seem about to give out, so why worry about it.

The thing to remember is that the heart is just a muscle, so if it isn’t stressed it will degrade just like any other. You know those triceps that haven’t done a press up in five years? Feel how small and weak they are? Yeah, that kind of thing can quite easily happen to the muscles that are responsible for keeping you alive. Your heart might be pumping all day long and be a different type of muscle, so the process will be slower, but give it twenty years and you might start to see the effects.

But anyway, I’m not here to lecture you about your health; that’s far too depressing and dull for my liking- the only point I was trying to make is that many of the accidental contributors to ‘the obesity epidemic’ are probably unaware that their health is in any way a problem, and not really through fault of their own. So whose fault is it then? Well, that one can wait until next time…

So… why did I publish those posts?

So, here I (finally come)- the conclusion of my current theme of sport and fitness. Today I will, once again, return to the world of the gym, but the idea is actually almost as applicable to sport and fitness exercises generally.

Every year, towards the end of December, after the Christmas rush has subsided a little and the chocolates are running low, the western world embarks on the year’s final bizarre annual ritual- New Year’s Resolutions. These vary depending on geography (in Mexico, for example, they list not their new goals for the year ahead, but rather a list of things they hope will happen, generating a similar spirit of soon-to-be-crushed optimism), but there are a few cliched responses. Cut down on food x or y, get to know so and so better, finally sort out whatever you promise to deal with every year, perhaps even write a novel (for the more cocky and adventurous). However, perhaps the biggest cliched New Year’s Resolution is the vague “to exercise more”, or its (often accompanied) counterpart “to start going to the gym”.

Clearly, the world would be a very different place if we all stuck to our resolutions- there’d be a lot more mediocre books out there for starters. But perhaps the gym example is the most amusing, and obvious, example of our collective failure to stick to our own commitments. Every January, without fail, every gym in the land will be offering discounted taster sessions and membership deals, eager to entice their fresh crop of the budding gymgoer. All are quickly swamped with a fresh wave of enthusiasm and flab ready to burn, but by February many will lie practically empty, perhaps 90% of those new recruits having decided to bow out gracefully against the prospect of a lifetime’s slavery to the dumbbell.

So, back to my favourite question- why? What is it about the gym that can so quickly put people off- in essence, why don’t more people use the gym?

One important point to consider is practicality- to use the gym requires a quite significant commitment, and while 2-3 hours (ish) a week of actual exercise might not sound like much, given travelling time, getting changed, kit sorted and trying to fit it around a schedule such a commitment can quickly begin to take over one’s life. The gym atmosphere can also be very off-putting, as I know from personal experience. I am not a superlatively good rugby player, but I have my club membership and am entitled to use their gym for free. The reason I don’t is because trying to concentrate on my own (rather modest) personal aims and achievements can become both difficult and embarrassing when faced with first-teamers who use the gym religiously to bench press 150-odd kilos. All of them are resolutely nice guys, but it’s still an issue of personal embarrassment. It’s even worse if you have the dreaded ‘one-upmanship’ gym atmosphere, with everyone’s condescending smirks keeping the newbies firmly away. Then of course, there’s the long-term commitment to gym work. Some (admittedly naively) will first attend a gym expecting to see recognisable improvement immediately- but improvement takes a long time to notice, especially for the uninitiated and the young, who are likely to not have quite the same level of commitment and technique as the more experienced. The length of time it takes to see any improvement can be frustrating for many who feel like they’re wasting their time, and that can be as good an incentive as any to quit, disillusioned by the experienced.

However, by far the biggest (and ultimately overriding) cause is simply down to laziness- in fact most of the reasons or excuses given by someone dropping their gym routine (including perhaps that last one mentioned) can be traced back to a root cause of simply not wanting to put in the effort. It’s kinda easy to see why- gym work is (and should be) incredibly hard work, and busting a gut to lift a mediocre weight is perhaps not the most satisfying feeling for many, especially if they’re already feeling in a poor mood and/or they’re training alone (that’s a training tip- always train with a friend and encourage one another, but stick to rigid time constraints to ensure you don’t spend all the time nattering). But, this comes despite the fact that everyone (rationally) knows that going to the gym is good for you, and that if we weren’t lazy then we could probably achieve more and do more with ourselves. So, this in and of itself raises another question- why are humans lazy?

Actually, this question is a little bit of a misnomer, simply because of the ‘humans’ part- almost anyone who has a pet knows of their frequent struggles for the ‘most time spent lazing around in bed doing nothing all day’ award (to which I will nominate my own terrier). A similar competition is also often seen, to the disappointment of many a small child, in zoos across the land. It’s a trend seen throughout nature that, give an animal what he needs in a convenient space, he will quite happily enjoy such a bounty without any desire to get up & do more than necessary to get them- which is why zoo keepers often have problems with keeping their charges fit. This is, again, odd, since it seems like an evolutionary disadvantage to not want to do stuff.

However, despite being naturally lazy, this does not mean that people (and animals) don’t want to do stuff. In fact, laziness actually acts as a vital incentive in the progression of the human race. For an answer, ask yourself- why did we invent the wheel? Answer- because it was a lot easier than having to carry stuff around everywhere, and meant stuff took less work, allowing the inventor (and subsequently the human race) to become more and more lazy. The same pattern is replicated in just about every single thing the human race has ever invented (especially anything made by Apple)- laziness acts as a catalyst for innovation and discovery.

Basically, if more people went to the gym, then Thomas Edison wouldn’t have invented the lightbulb. Maybe.

Who needs a gym?

This is a post I’ve been trying not to resort to in a while- not because I think the content’s going to be bad or anything, just that it’s a bit of a leap from my usual stuff and because it’s actually going to be a bit too easy. However, given the fact that a) the Euros, Wimbledon and the Olympics are all on over the next month or so, b) my last few posts have been of a sporting persuasion, c) I vaguely know what I’m talking about here and d) I keep forgetting my other ideas, I thought I’d bite the bullet and go for it. So here it is, my first ever advice column for this blog: how to get fit and strong without the use of any gym equipment.

Fitness can be broadly (and fairly inadequately) split into three separate fields: aerobic & cardiovascular, muscular and flexibility. I’ll deal with all three of these separately, and am almost certainly going to have to add another post to fit all of the ‘muscular’ area into, but I’ll start with flexibility.

Some would argue that flexibility is not really part of fitness, and it’s true that, on the surface, it doesn’t appear to fit into our typical classification of the subject. However, it is just as much a matter of our physical ability to perform as any other, and thus probably has the right to be included as part of this list. The main reason I have misgivings about talking about it is simply personal knowledge- I don’t really know any exercises designed to improve flexibility.

However, that doesn’t mean I can’t offer advice on the matter. The first, and simplest, way to improve general flexibility and range of motion is just to get active. Every movement of the joints, be they legs, arms, back or wherever, makes them that tiny bit freer to move over that range and thus a little bit more supple- running, cycling, whatever. It is partly for this reason too that it is important to warm up and stretch prior to exercise- by extending the muscles longer than they are naturally used to, then they are prepared for that greater range of movement and are thus capable of easily moving across the more limited range that general exercise demands. Perhaps the easiest ‘flexibility exercise’ one can do is tree climbing  (which also happens to be endlessly entertaining if you can find some good trees), but stuff like yoga can be learnt without too much difficulty from the internet if you’re serious about improving your flexibility. Otherwise, I would suggest joining an appropriate club. Doesn’t have to be yoga or gymnastics or anything quite so extensive- martial arts (my personal preference, and a superb full-body endurance exercise) and rock climbing (which will build forearms and biceps the size of Mercury) are great for teaching your body a whole new way of moving, and are also a lot more fun for the casual enthusiast.

OK, now onto something I can actually talk about with some authority: aerobic and cardiovascular fitness. The goal when training cardio is simply to get the heart pumping- cardiac muscle works like any other muscle in that it can be built by straining it, breaking muscle fibres and having the body re-knit them into a bigger, stronger structure capable of doing more. Cardiovascular training should ideally be done at a rate upwards of 160 bpm (heartbeats per minute), but if you’re struggling to get into exercising then it’s best to start off with a more casual workout. Regular walking can quickly burn off excess fat and build up at least preliminary fitness (although be warned- to be most effective one should aim for a rate of around 120 steps per minute, or less if you’re struggling to keep that pace up, for at least 20 minutes. Bring an iPod too stave off boredom). The average resting heart rate of a person is somewhere around 70bpm- if yours is anything below 80 or so (measure it at home by counting the number of thumps on the left of one’s chest over the space of a minute) and you’re relatively serious about getting fit, then it’s best to step up a gear.

Just about any activity that gets the heart racing (remember- 160bpm minimum, 180 as a target) is suitable for increasing cardio fitness, be it running, cycling, swimming, rowing, football, rugby or whatever else you can think of- the only important thing is to try and keep the motion fast. Running or cycling on a machine (if you have access to one) will make it easier to keep up a pace (since air resistance is decreased), but reduces your workload, meaning less muscle is built on the legs and the effectiveness of the exercise is reduced, meaning you have to work out for longer. Rowing is an especially good exercise for both you muscles and your cardio, but access to a machine can be problematic. Oh, and a word of warning about swimming- whilst it’s a great full-body workout and can really improve your speed, it’s only going to be as effective as a good run or cycle if done at a fast pace, for quite a long time; moderate speeds won’t cut it.

You don’t have to judge one’s activity by heartbeat, as this can be understandably tricky if you’re pounding along a road, but learn to get a feel for your intensity levels. A low intensity, when you’re still able to comfortably breathe and speak (so about up to a fast walk), is a little too slow for proper aerobic work- moderate, where you can feel the breath coming hard but can still speak about normally, is fine for aerobic work over sets of about 20 minutes or longer- but keep going for as long as you can/have the time for. High-intensity work is you going flat out, where speaking becomes next to impossible. It’s probably best left until you’ve achieved a good level of fitness, but if you can manage it then just short bursts of less than 8 minutes (which is about how long you should be able to keep it up) just a few times a week can reap rewards.

A final thing about cardio, before I devote Wednesday’s post to the nitty gritty of muscular workouts- it’s at its most enjoyable when done as part of a sport. Pounding round the roads on a daily jog is almost certainly going to be a more effective workout, and if you’re really looking to seriously improve your fitness then it’s probably more the way to go- but the attraction can quickly fall away in the face of a damp Wednesday when you’re nursing a calf strain. But sport is without a doubt the best way to build up a good level of fitness and strength, make a few mates and have some fun in the process. Some are better than others- boxing is the single best activity for anyone after a cardiovascular workout, whilst something like golf doesn’t really count as exercise- but there’s something for everyone out there, if you know where to look.

Now, to plan a muscular workout for next time…