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Exercise

Getting Started With Running

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Getting Started With Running

New year, new resolutions, lots of new people at the gym. Many people who resolve to lose weight think the best way to do so is by exercising, and the one exercise everyone knows how to do since they learned it at around three years old is how to run.

Caveat

I’m putting the not-so-fine print first. If your goal is to lose weight, you will get more bang for your buck by changing your eating habits rather than exercising. Running is fabulous exercise, it’s great for your health, and easily accessible to just about everyone since you don’t need a gym membership or super fancy equipment. But if I want a 200 calorie deficit in my day, I can either run 2 miles, or I can simply not drink a daily can of soda. As always, consult a doctor before beginning any exercise regimen.

Walk before you run

Runners always talk about that runner’s high and how much they love putting in the miles. And that’s true. There is a certain zen to just zoning out and focusing on nothing but the scenery and putting one foot in front of the other. That said, when starting out, running is HARD. To make sure you have a decent cardiovascular base for starting a running program, you should be able to walk at a brisk pace for 30 minutes without feeling like you’re going to die. If you cannot manage that yet, that’s okay! Work on adding a little time and distance, bit by bit until you can hit that 30 minute mark.

The all-in approach

Once you’re ready to start running, there are a couple of methods to increase the distance/time you can run. One method is to simply start running, and see how far you get. Spend the rest of the 30 minutes walking it out. Next time you go for a run, try to go just a teeny bit further, even if it’s one more driveway or 10 more seconds. Incrementally increase the time/distance you run until you can run for the full 30 minutes.

The couch to 5K approach

There are countless apps that will coach you through the famous “couch to 5k” program. In 8 weeks, the program takes you from not running, to running a full 30 minutes. It does this by alternating between walking and running. In the beginning, you walk for longer, with short bursts of running. As the weeks progress, the run intervals get longer, and the walks get shorter. Many people tend to have to repeat a week (when getting back into running after a very long hiatus, I also had to repeat a week), but it is nice to know that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, as it were, for when you will hit the goal of running for 30 minutes, non-stop.

Either way

No matter which method you go with, there are some universal constants. When starting out, it is super important to have a rest day between your runs. Running is awesome, but it’s also a LOT of stress on your body, so be sure to give yourself time to recover. You will need to learn to breathe again. The toughest part when first starting out with running is getting the breathing down. That’s what stops most people; it’s not that their legs give out, it’s that they can’t get air. If you find this happening to you, try to focus on your breathing, and perhaps try slowing your pace down some. When I feel like I can’t breathe, I try to breathe in for x steps and then breathe out for x steps. How many steps equal x depends on your needs. Your body will eventually adjust, but it’s a bit of a shock to the system at first. No matter how fast you can walk, when you switch from walking to running, the breathing is completely different, and you’ll need to learn how to deal with it so you don’t get winded.

Preventing injury

It’s January. It may be snowy or icy where you live. Perhaps you live in a warm climate, but the sidewalks are just terrible. Perhaps you don’t have sidewalks and need to run in the street. Be aware of where you are putting your feet so that you don’t sideline yourself with an injury. If you are running in the street, wear reflective clothing and run against traffic, so you can see who is coming. One of the most common running injuries is shin splints. Shin splints are caused by the impact of running. Running on a dirt trail or rubber track can help minimize the impact, as can running on a treadmill. If this isn’t an option, try landing more toward the middle of your foot, rather than striking with your heel, and allow your ankle to do its job as a shock absorber to lessen the impact. Keep in mind, this will make your calf muscles VERY sore at first, until they get used to it.

The Shoes

The only real equipment you need to get started with running is a good pair of running shoes. There are MANY schools of thought on this one. The best shoe for you is one that you feel comfortable in, and doesn’t make your feet hurt or blister. Whether you need any sort of motion control or extra padding, or whether you prefer to go a minimalist route is up to you. If running in the same sneakers you’ve had for the past 20 years feels fine, then stick with it. If you’ve got some money to spend, and new gear will help keep you motivated, visit your local running shoe store, where a specialist can help you find a pair of shoes that works well with your particular feet and gait. Note: find a specialty running shoe store. Your general sporting goods store folks are nice people, but don’t have the specialized training to fit the right shoe to your foot.

Get out there!

Hopefully this information will help you get started if one of your goals this year is to get running. If you have any questions about running, let me know in the comments!

Should You Workout if You’re Feeling Sick?

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should-you-workout-if-youre-sick

I did not go to the gym on Monday. Normally, I really prefer to go on a Monday morning. I feel that it sets the tone for the whole week – starting things off on the right foot as it were. But I didn’t go. I didn’t go because the cold that has been threatening and looming over my head for what feels like months finally decided to make its presence known in force on Sunday. So I decided to rest instead. This time, it was the right call. I slept in, and woke up on Monday morning feeling better, if still congested.

That said, there have been times where I’ve been sick and I’ve gone and worked out anyway. I’ve found that going for a run outside when it’s cold out and I’ve got a head cold sounds like a horrible idea, but between the weather and the exercise, it does wonders for my sinuses.

So how do you know whether you should rest or power through when you’re feeling a bit under the weather? Here are some tips:

  1. Do NOT exercise if you have a fever. Just don’t. Get some fluids and go back to bed.
  2. If your symptoms lie above your neck: sniffling, sneezing, nasal congestion, some light cardio can help clear out the pipes some.
  3. If you have symptoms in your lungs: chest congestion, a “wet” cough, wheezing, then you are better served by resting; exerting yourself will just exacerbate your symptoms.
  4. Listen to what your body tells you. If you feel achy and absolutely miserable, REST! If you are feeling stubborn and refuse to feel sick, and feel “okay” except for that one nagging symptom that just will not go away, then feel free to get in a workout, but try to keep it light and easy.
  5. Wipe down EVERYTHING. If you do hit the gym, be sure to wipe down any equipment you touch with anti-bacterial wipes (your gym should provide these) so you don’t spread your germs to anyone else!

Hopefully you’ll be back to normal in no time! If you’ve got a question about working out while ill, or anything else, let me know!

Why Diet Matters More than Exercise for Weight Loss

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Why Diet Matters More than Exercise for Weight Loss

 

I’m sure you’ve heard the oft-cited statistic that diet is 70-80% of weight loss, and that exercise makes up the remainder. Let me explain why.

Earlier this year, I got myself a FitBit Blaze which has a built-in heart rate monitor. This means that by telling the app my height and weight, it bases my calorie burn throughout the day on that combined with my heart rate. This helps give me a much more accurate picture of my TDEE than just using a calculator alone. That said, the calculator I tend to use is really close to what my FitBit tells me.

The other data that I get from my FitBit is how many calories I burned during exercise, and how that compares to my total calories for the day. In the example below, I went for a one-mile walk and burned 126 calories. But that was just a smidgen of the 2020 calories I burned over the course of the entire day.

calories burned

So where does the rest of that calorie burn come from? That’s where your basal metabolic rate (BMR) and Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) come from. BMR is how many calories your body burns just to keep you alive if you laid in bed all day. TDEE takes into account your average activity throughout the day, and includes things like calories burned to digest food, get dressed, walk to the coffee machine, bounce your leg up and down if you’re the fidgety type.

So you can see that very few of the calories I burned for the day are attributed to the exercise I did. Just over six percent. Most of my calories burned are based on my BMR. The only way to change your BMR is to increase your lean muscle mass through resistance training (either body-weight exercises or lifting weights). On the other hand, I consumed just over 1500 calories that same day. That comes out to about 74% of the calories I burned for the day. So you can see how changing how I eat can have a much greater impact on my weight than changing how much I exercise.

Which brings us back around to the weight loss equation. TDEE minus 500 calories each day equals weight loss of one pound per week. In order to burn off 500 calories, I would have had to walk five times as far. That would have been 5 miles, and it would have taken me nearly two hours at the pace I was going (which was, admittedly, somewhat leisurely). That is a lot of time and effort. It is far easier for me to simply cut 500 calories worth of food from my diet. If you drink your calories in the form of soda, energy drinks, alcohol or specialty coffees, the quickest way to cut those calories is to switch to water or a calorie-free version of your favorite drink. I get that it is difficult to go from a double shot mocha with whipped cream to black coffee, but if you can manage the swap, you can reach your goals so much sooner, and without feeling like you’ve had to completely sacrifice something.

Eating Back Exercise Calories

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Should You Eat Back Calories Burned Off from Exercise-

A question I see get asked a lot is whether or not one should “eat back” the calories burned during exercise. You’ve calculated your TDEE, and you’re eating at a deficit to lose weight*, but that exercise raises your TDEE some, so you’re now at a greater deficit. Should you eat those calories back?

This is a bit tough for me because to be perfectly honest, I just don’t get it. After doing all that work, why would you negate it all by eating it all back? There’s also a big potential pitfall with eating back your calories: overestimating how many calories you’ve burned and thus eating back more than what you just worked off. Studies show** that people regularly overestimate how many calories we burn during exercise. And it’s not our fault; cardio machines grossly overestimate how many calories you burn, and even fitness apps can just do a best guess based on national averages. So the treadmill/app tells you that you’ve burned 300 calories when it’s really 200, and you think that means you’ve earned that 250 calorie snickers bar. But in reality, you’ve undone all your hard work, and you’re now over your budget.

Studies also show we tend to be bad at estimating how many calories we eat***. In this case, we tend to underestimate the number of calories in the food we have. With more and more places putting calorie counts on menus, this is getting harder to do, but if this isn’t commonplace where you live yet, it can be easy to convince yourself that your post-workout smoothie is healthy, and therefore much lower in calories than it really is. Combined with the elliptical machine telling you that you burned more than you actually did, and it becomes really easy to eat more than your TDEE for the day.

So, what do you do if exercise leaves you woozy and you have to have something after your workout? Here are a couple of tips:

  • Aim for eating back half the calories you burned at most.
  • If working out is always leaving you feeling ravenous, try switching to lower-intensity exercise.
  • A controversial opinion is to stop exercising all together and just focus on your diet.
  • Try to think of any calories burned during exercise as merely a bonus or a turbo boost to get you to your destination faster!

 

*If you’re trying to gain muscle, you definitely want to eat back those calories, getting as much of them from protein as possible!
** http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26469988
*** http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1454084

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