Move!

Happy New Year! The start of a new year and a fresh canvas to make our mark upon!

Now, how awfully predictable that shortly after the Christmas and New Year period a blog about training and fitness will throw up a piece about "smelting down that Xmas pud of a belly!", or something to that effect. However, keeping in line with such tradition, I am going to do just that very thing, albeit brief.

Losing weight, technically, is a straightforward procedure, somewhat obscured by circumstances, subjective experience, the media, etc. That is another issue, the good thing is that if we take away all the things clouding fat loss and just concentrate on the body simply as is, the equation to weight loss becomes clearer, and good job too.

Its essentially the law of thermodynamics. One must expend more energy (calories) than one intakes. If someone is training but still not losing weight, somewhere along the line they are still taking in too much too lose the excess weight. The above equation is true for the overwhelming majority of the population.

Fat and glucose are two of the major energy sources for any activity, even just sitting down doing nothing. As for anyone laying any claim to some sort of "fat burning zone", some mysterious intensity of exercise where fat is most efficiently burned, such notions can be flatly ignored. In fact, the body utilizes fat as an energy source the MOST when it is at rest. So why don't we just do nothing and burn off all the fat? Because unfortunately, doing nothing expends very little energy (calories), and so the above law says that we will not lose weight. However, what IS important, is how many calories you burn, not how much fat as an energy source! And to do this, we simply need to move!

Post-exercise, our metabolism is raised, and as a result, more energy is being 'burned' for hours after training. So after exercise we are burning much more than before we started, and as a result, that fat is being scorched away too.

After spending a year-long dissertation researching all the potential factors as to why the Chinese population is becoming more overweight in recent decades, it all came down to one simple reason. Calories in are increasingly greater than calories expended. There are a plethora of contributing factors to this, but at the heart of it this is all it is, and its all the body knows and responds to.

So at the end of the day, just remember to expend more than you are putting in, and that means moving and eating healthy.

Also, this stuff doesn't have to be boring! Push Training is all about taking exercise back to how it felt when being a kid, like play! Of course, we play hard...

A prime example here is of one high school teacher, Sam, showing how its done. Starting three years ago at 125kg, Sam has now lost 40kg through finding joy in the movement he does. Just compare the top video, of him before, to the one below.





Here is his blog: Sam Books and Thoughts