So I recently had an unfortunate and rather annoying conversation with someone regarding their fitness. Unfortunate, because in the end I will not be able to help them and annoying because in the end I will not be able to help them.

But it did bring up an interesting point that all coaches face depending on what their passions are – is one type or form of exercise better than another for, say.. fat loss? Or are they all created equal as long as you are moving.

Of course if you scour the interwebs you are going to find a case for either side of any exercise – and usually they are right, to a certain degree and with caveats. The tough part for coaches is trying to teach the hows and whys of what they do in the seven seconds they have your attention before you move on to the next big headline in a magazine.

So today I want to break something down. It’s the actual conversation I had regarding.. spinning.

Let me start by saying – DO ANYTHING YOU WANT TO THAT YOU LOVE AND THAT MOVES YOU. I’m a coach – it’s my goal to get you moving and happy.

Let me continue by saying that if you have particular goals like fat loss or building muscle, it does serve you to find out what type of exercise is best for that. If for no other reason it’ll save you time and tremendous effort.

The conversation went something like this – not word-for-word mind you:

I was talking about what inspires someone to workout and how for some the intrinsic motivation (that one that comes from right inside of us) to focus and achieve a goal comes naturally because they are hyper-aware of WHY they want something, and HOW to get it. For others, they depend on extrinsic motivation (motivation from the outside) to keep them going and keep them plodding away – and everyone has their own reasons for needing this. Perhaps it’s lack of knowledge or a belief that their goals aren’t attainable anyway. Either way my point was that if you are feeling desperate for change and can’t find that intrinsic motivation to get there on your own, that perhaps it is a good idea to exploit the external motivation until it fires you up enough that one day you start to notice you DO feel it from the inside.

Then I said this – wait for it –

“So go to your spin class if you love it, although it’ll likely make you bigger.”

HOLD. UP.

What? What did I just say?

And how could I have possibly said it?

Well, I tell you it was met with some extreme feelings.

“You can’t just say something about an entire class, I lost xyz pounds doing this before, etc etc etc.“

Clearly I hadn’t realized I was chatting to spinning’s biggest fan, but what would have been nice following this statement was to be able to chat about why I said it in the first place and also reiterate that IF YOU LOVE SOMETHING DO IT.

But conversations like this remind me that there is so much ‘noise’ out there that people don’t know where to start. In that vein, I’m going to breakdown exactly what I meant.

The next thing I said was something like this: well let’s have a look at this then, when did you loose this weight because you’ve recently told me you are the biggest you have ever been. Which, if you just lost the weight and then gained it back and more that sort of proves my point.

But why why why? (Ask you guys, not the person I was talking to because they were clearly outta there already.)

Well, here’s the breakdown:

If you haven’t been moving and have been eating poorly for an extended period of time, then all of a sudden decide to start moving, you could be walking and loose weight. Right? Because all of a sudden you’ve shaken things up and are moving!

But eventually, walking just isn’t going to cut it anymore because our bodies are super efficient. Then you’ll have to step up your game.

So let’s look at spinning specifically.

Spinning is a crazy workout right?

I’ve done it a handful of times and usually feel like I’m about to die.

So you go in there, and do this repetitive motion over and over and over and over again and it hurts so it must be working. But try this for me: put your arms up over your head and then angel-wing them down to your sides and then up again and down for 1 minute.

..don’t worry, I’ll wait until you’re done.

Done?

How do your shoulders feel? Are they dying? Because that’s what happens when you move one thing over and over and over again. It starts to die (not literally). How many calories do you think you burned doing the angel wings? Probably not a lot right, even though it felt like death? Can you translate that to spinning? Where you are moving one thing over and over and over, and it feels like a lot, but in the end may not be quite as much as you think? A soccer coach of mine once took us all to a spin class to change up a practice and we all died within minutes. High-level soccer players will still feel this burn because we keep hitting the part of our muscle responsible for the rapid-fire action needed to peddle over and over again and we think we are more tired than we are.

Don’t get me wrong here – it DOES burn and does require energy.

The take-home is that it’s just not as effective as some things I’ll mention later.

The downside of this burn is pretty waaa waaaaa as well. Because you are only using say, your thighs and hip flexors (which is what most people – not all, but most) seem to use, then you need a lot of immediate energy right there in your thighs to sustain it. This means your body gets really good at storing fat there so that when you hop (or do an intricate dance of awkwardness like I do because I’m the height of a six year old and can’t figure those bikes out!) onto your bike, it’s ready to provide the fuel you need ASAP. What does that mean for you? Sure it may mean muscle there – so YAY! – but also means muscle marbled with fat. Yep. And when one of the biggest issues women have is lower-body fat storage (because of poor estrogen detoxification and also that when we prep for babies the body likes to maintain at least 90,000 calories – or the amount needed to sustain a growing babes for nine months and does it here.)

Now – here’s the thing. Some people will say they have been cycling for years and never got big legs. But my answer to that is – do you ever get big anything? You may just have a body type that doesn’t get big. We are talking averages here. I used to LOVE cycling around the city because it was so efficient and earth-friendly, until my legs stopped fitting into my TIGHTS. Tights! They are stretchy! I’d given up on jeans long ago.

Back to my point.

Let’s look at how you could stop loosing weight and even start gaining it through cardio. And before you start thinking, “I thought spinning was more intervals?” Let’s take a moment to realize – most people will not hit the resistance they need to in a spin class to truly create the reaction in the body that makes intervals so effective. Here’s the thing: women burn more carbs at rest then man. Did you know that? So for us, we need to elicit a reaction from our bodies during training that turns on our fat burning STUFF. How we do that is by upping the intensity of our work and cutting the rest periods. So, heavy resistance, short rest.

If I was actually hitting the levels of resistance required for this during a one hour spin class I think I actually WOULD be dead. I don’t think that’s possible for an hour. (Not to mention the whole TIGHTS issue.) When I do (or coach) intervals, for example sprint training or HIIT-style workouts, it will generally last for 20 minutes max – and many times is as little as eight or 12 minutes. But the real bonus is the elevation and then recovery of the heart and relevant energy systems of the body. This up and down creates the right physiological environment for our bodies to jump into more fat burning POST exercise, instead of our natural carb-burning system. In a spin class there isn’t much recovery time which means you loose the benefit of this type of exercise or you simply are too pouched to keep your work at the level required to get the benefit.

And why do intervals work so well when you can burn a ton more calories just spinning/running/ellipticalling for an hour?

Well, one reason is stress. Yes – stress. When you run or cycle for an hour it stresses your muscles out. When we get stressed we release stress hormones. These hormones are responsible for finding energy in times of distress. For example if you run into a polar bear and need to run away? You need a lot of energy immediately. Stress hormones get released, your body pulls energy from everywhere, including your muscles which contributes to muscle breakdown, and pumps this energy into your blood to get shuttled where it is needed so you can avoid said polar bear.

Which is cool when you are SPRINTING away from a giant bear, right? But not so cool if you are just doing an activity that you’ve become pretty efficient at like running at one pace or gliding away on an elliptical. Because while you did burn xyz calories during your cardio, all this excess sugar will still just get stored as fat afterwards. You won’t really continue to burn calories at the heightened level you had during your session, and with each new session you’d have to keep pushing yourself harder and faster to make up for your body’s amazing ability to adapt and make your energy expenditure as efficient as possible.

Now – I’m all for being self-competitive, but at a certain point it’s just too freaking hard to out do yourself. Then subsequent sessions are just not as effective after a while and all of that hard work doesn’t truly pay off in the end.

Are you with me so far?

That’s fatty thigh muscles..

Muscle breakdown..

And fat storage over time..

With no additional benefit besides burning the calories you do during the hour.

In addition to this, spinning creates extremely tight hip flexors doesn’t it? Because of the way you are sitting there’s a lot demanded of your hips – and consequently nothing really demanded of your butt because you can’t really expect your glutes to be firing when the opposite side of the body is. This means you are further aggravating a tight hips issue so many of us have from sitting too much PLUS creating a big pouffy butt!

GOOD GRACIOUS.

BUT. Like I said, if you love it, do it!

Just be open to the idea that some exercises won’t serve your goals as well as you had hoped, because I wouldn’t want you spinning your wheels (in this case literally) and not getting what you want.

Instead?

Prioritize building and/or maintaining your muscle mass. The reason you want this is because unlike a cardio session, where you burn your 300 calories and call it a day, your body will respond to a weight training session by rebuilding the muscle you’ve rocked during your session and with the proper nutrition and rest, GROWING the muscles you have used. What’s so awesome about this is that our muscles require energy to exist. Meaning your muscles need FOOD just to BE. They use a significant amount of the food you eat just to stop from breaking down. This is way it is said that strength training pumps up your metabolism – because building that muscle means you burn more just lounging at the roof-top pool (because I do that ALL the time…. no I don’t.).

This is the opposite effect of an exercise which breaks down muscle.

Start with the big lifts that use lots of muscles like squats, deadlifts, rows, and presses. And please! Get some help if you are new – or if this is not something you know a lot about! In the same way that I wouldn’t attempt to perform ear surgery on myself in order to heal my ear, don’t just wish real hard that you will know what to do in order to heal your body in this way.

Next, use sprints and interval training as a means to drop fat. These are going to be short workouts, where you work HARD for anywhere from 10-40 seconds, then rest for 10-90 seconds. An ‘optimal’ suggestion is a 30 seconds all-out sprint, with four minutes of recovery done four times total. You work your way up to six sprints. The key is to make sure that the HARD part? It must be ridiculously HARD. If you want to really increase your crazy-fat-burn try doing TWO of these workouts a day and lemme know how it goes;) If you are fairly lean already or feel you are already REALLY stressed out in life in general, try your sprints just short of your maximal output. Aim for moderate to high intensity and work hard for a minute with a minute of rest where you are still moving lightly.

If you are wondering where you should start? Try this:

Newbie? One minute work, one minute rest.

Not so newbie? One minute work, 30 seconds rest.

Athlete? Try different distances or times, or effort levels. For example, start with a longer distance and move to a shorter distance, or begin with an all-out effort and end with a sub-maximal effort.

Whether you love running, or spinning, or swimming, or crushing squats – there is still a hierarchy of exercises to prioritize *IF* your goal is fat loss. If this isn’t your goal or you just aren’t willing to give up some of these other modalities, then just accept that your road may be a bit more tough.

And hey, if anything works for you? Use it! There is certainly no shortage of people and science who will say something works, with a massive backlash of people who will say it doesn’t.

What’s important to you is to realize that this is a journey of SELF-care and discovery. And part of that is getting to know your body intimately again. What works, what doesn’t, what’s stopped working, what works short-term, what works long-term.. You get the point. No one will know better than you what makes you feel best and gives you the results you are looking for until you commit to something and fill that time with honest reflection.

DO what you will commit to.

The longer you throw too many balls in the air – i.e. yoga on Monday, spinning on Tuesday, Zumba on Wednesday, treat because-I’m-so-committed on Thursday, “Whoops I forgot my session with my trainer!” on Friday, another treat-because-I-already-screwed-my-week on Saturday, etc etc etc..

Choose your poison and kick it’s ass.

If it’s fat loss you are looking for and you don’t want to be disappointed, prioritize the proper exercise hierarchy, combine that with optimal nutrition for your body type, and just finally go kill it!

Right?

You GOT this..