Posts by segundoii

If you are doing exercise, maybe much more than you usually do you might add muscle to your body. Dump the scale altogether, get an new measure for yourself. I am on a furious exercise regime out in the mountains--and there is no scale but I know that my body is transforming. So what do you do? Go by feel and look.

Do you feel like your body is getting more toned, do you notice that some of the less than attractive parts of your body are losing there softness, flabiness, etc.? Maybe your leg muscles are becoming more defined and your waist is tightening up? On the one hand you may add muscle weight in place you want (legs) and lose fat around the waist.  Find out for yourself how your body react to weight loss without the scale and you will be more comfortable, relaxed, and ready to enjoy getting fit.

Also, unless you are frequently measuring your body fat too, it is unfair to yourself to go by weight loss alone.

It is so natural for young boys to want to pick up dumbells and just pump away? When my little brother came of age he wanted to do the same. So what I showed him is how to use his body as a weight. Go to a park, use the benches, bars, the ground itself etc.  Make them workout their entire body outside, this will be much better for them because they will not be able to grasp the idea that you should aim for balanced strength with weights. 

The biggest problem with kids and weights is that kids don't understand moderation, they don't understand that building strength in your lower back is more important than pumping your biceps so they look good in the mirror. So they will invariably start doing weights and end up with back spasms, or tendinitis, and imbalanced strength. 

HIIT--was coined maybe 14 years ago. I was one of those obsessive workout types looking for the next cutting edge workout. Muscle Media, the now defunct health magazine helped popularized it. However, interval training has been around foreover

Play a pickup basketball game when you usually don't, not only will you "train" at intervals but you won't cheat by cutting yourself some slack, unless you are lazy and don't play defense. So go play a sport you usually don't --and play competitively, short bursts of high intensity followed by a short rest. I saw some ultimate Frisbee at the park the other day--intervals no doubt. Same goes for soccer, or touch football.

Throw some intervals in your swim, on your runs, when using cardio machines, in the weight room, etc. All workouts get boring, so I would just be mindful of making sure you use intervals from time to time. And let your body recover from one session and then go on to another. I think you will get good results from trying to keep your interval training as random as possible and frequent rather than creating a wind sprint workout over the course of 12 weeks that you will eventually tire of and then end up dumping the so called HIIT routine.

Of course saunas burn calories, yet how many would require knowing exactly how the variables that contribute to energy expenditure are at work when you are in the sauna. I find it odd that people intuitively think they know that no calories are burnt or a few calories are burnt.  Have you tested your intuitions?

Even when you are sitting at your desk or couch you are burning calories, when you eat you burn calories, and, yes, when you exercise you burn many more calories than when at rest.   What is also odd is that people think that you can only burn fat calories when you exercise.   This does not makes sense either; if you create a caloric deficit then overtime your body would have to tap into its fat stores to fulfill all of your caloric needs.

A sauna does not burn calories in the same way as exercise because you are not expending energy to move your mass over a distance, like when you go on a run. Nor is it like building muscle, which will increase your metabolism and burn more calories over the long haul.

However, two things do happen when you spend enough time in sauna

First, your heart rate increases in a sauna. If you don't think that you expend more energy with an elevated heart rate then I don't know what to tell you. Take a heart rate monitor into a sauna, check it out for your self.  Again, remember that if your heart rate reaches 140/minute it is still not the same as moving your body mass (jogging) over a distance at 140/minute.

Second, I have to assume, but I have not verified, that at some point your core body temperature rises. This depends upon how long you stay in and how hot it is.  A higher core body temperature increases the rate of moisture evaporation and burns more calories. Same thing happens when we run on a hot humid day. I suppose you can check this with a thermometer.

So if you put all the variables together I suppose you could find out how many calories you actually burn. I have no interest in doing that, but there is no doubt that the energy expenditure is much higher than at rest.  And unless you have evidence that clearly demonstrates that higher heart rate, higher core body temperature, and moisture evaporation does not require energy--calorie burning--then I don't think you can say that saunas don't burn calories.