The Fit Blog

In short, yes, green tea does cause an increase in metabolic rate. In a 2000 study from the department of physiology at the University of Geneva, researchers found that yes indeed, green tea extract, rich in catechin polyphenols is effective in increasing the body’s energy expenditure (and fat oxidation) for a 24 hour period.

The research involved subjects ingesting green tea at breakfast, lunch and dinner. Relative to the placebo, the green tea resulted in a thermogenic effect that promoted fat oxidation and a 24 hour increase in calorie expenditure.

Interestingly enough, the study also suggested that it wasn’t the caffeine that caused the effect. Treatment with equal amounts of strict caffeine in amounts equivalent to those found in the green tea had no noticable effect on metabolic rate.

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You may do this yourself or see others doing it. Sit-ups to lose stomach fat. While this would definitely assist in muscle building and burning calories (to some extent), sit-ups themselves will not target fat loss in the stomach. It is a common misconception that targetting fat loss is possible.

What you are after is the catabolic conversion of fat cells to energy. This conversion is controlled by your metabolism and your metabolism is not incredibly worried about where the fat comes from.

What you can do, however, is make sure that you are effectivly burning fat and maintaining a fairly low calory diet by working on your metabolism. Eventually your metabolism will have no choice but to metabolize whatever remaining fat it can find.

Yes, this means fat loss in a specific area may be a long process. And this is a major contributor to failure with diet and exercise programs.

Here are some great tips for losing stubborn body fat:

• Try to work your whole body every time you hit the gym. Full body workouts will work more muscle and therefore require more calories.
• Run intervals or short distances instead of lengthy runs on the treadmill. Long endurance activities will actually cause your metabolism to burn tissue besides fat for energy. In fact, it has been shown that working out for longer than 80 minutes in a go could potentially be counter-productive and cause muscle loss as the body attempts to get calories from muscle, completely ignoring any stored fat.
• Exercise at a high intensity. High intensity traning has been shown to increase metabolic rate even after exercising and cause continued fat loss.
• Diet is key. Keep off of high glycemic carbs and high calory fats. We all love bacon and maple syrup but neigher are good for your fat loss goals.
• Workout for short periods of time more often. You go to the gym for an hour three times per week? What about 20 minutes here or there? Again, short but high intensity, full body workouts in series such as 3 days on and 1 day rest will kick things into high gear.
• Remember that you can’t target stomach fat by doing sit-ups. Instead, make sure to work more and larger muiscle groups. Quadraceps muscles will require significantly more calories and as such, can possibly burn more fat than working smaller muscles such as shoulders or biceps.

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I know this is from March, but I haven’t really been reading my Men’s Health magazines lately. In March, however, Paul Walker made his umpteenth appearance in Men’s Health. From a fitness perspective, his article wasn’t super inspiring. Titled, “Find your Balance”, Paul talks about how to do just that. Turns out that although Paul’s movie roles typically require him to be fit, he doesn’t necessarily train at a gym. Instead Paul will “dive or stand-up paddle or canoe-surf or swim, or even do pullups from tree branches if I have to. And of course, there’s surfing.”

If the last few days in Southern Ontario are any indication of what kind of weather the Summer holds, I’m down with those suggestions as well.  The point is, a gym isn’t a necessity to stay in shape.  Get active in many ways.  The more you do or try out, the more you will discover that you absolutely love and the less “lopsided” you will become.  Life is short – get out there and, for lack of a better word at the moment, do stuff.

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It’s no secret that metabolism plays a huge role in weight maintenance and muscle building.  But first things first, what is metabolism?  And what does it mean to say metabolic rate?

A person’s metabolism is the chemical pathways that take molecules in one form and convert them to some other form for the body to use.  From oxygen to glucose, a person’s metabolism is the chemical processes that make your body do what it does.  In a sense, metabolism is a very broad term, accounting for many key bodily functions.

Metabolic Rate is a term specifically used to describe the rate at which energy is used to maintain the body’s state.  Resting metabolic rate is the energy expended to maintain body state while the body is at rest.  Energy expenditure, of course, is just another way of saying burning calories.  In some metabolic pathways, these calories come in the form of glucose (sugar).  In other pathways, lipids or fat.

The two main metabolic modes that a dieter or body builder would be interested in are anabolism and catabolism.  In anabolism, molecules are combined to form larger molecules.  Muscle building, for example, is an anabolic process.  Conversely, catabolism involves the breakdown of larger molecules into smaller ones, releasing energy.  Oxydation of glucose to produce ATP which is a form of energy for movement, is an example of a catabolic process.

Now that the basics are out of the way, think about this – at rest, how much is going on in your body?  How many functions to keep your body working, to keep you alive?  Think about it for a second – heart functions, lung functions, muscle maintenance processes, brain processing, temperature regulation, oxygen movement, liver function… the list is incredibly long.  Now how much energy do you think that takes?  Lots.  And remember that the energy requirements generally come from the burning of calories.  In fact, an average male could burn around 2000 calories in a day, doing absolutely nothing but watching tv!  So think about this some more…  Next time you are running on a treadmill and look down and see that you’ve burned a measly 200 calories, that’s just a tenth of what you can burn doing nothing!  Why even bother working to burn calories at the gym!?  Doesn’t tt really seems like a waste of time?

Truth is, working out with the intention to burn calories is a waste of time.  Sure you can spend an hour on the elliptical machine and leave the gym with a 400 calorie deficit, but is that really an effective use of time?  Wouldn’t it be great if you could spend just a half hour at the gym, burn 200 calories while there, but actually perform training that raises your metabolic rate for the next 24 hours, increasing your calorie deficit through the rest of the day?  Wouldn’t it also be great to incorporate other techniques to boost your metabolism and let it do the work for you for your weight loss?

If you intend to lose weight, you need to train your metabolism.  You need your metabolism operating in the most effective way possible to help you reach your weight loss goals.

This is the first of a series of articles, in which I will be presenting some techniques to help boost metabolic rate and increase fat loss.

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I’ve been making this killer combo a part of my weekly routine lately.  I have no doubt that this exercise is one of the single best full body exercises out there.

The Bear Complex is a combination of several Olympic style lifts, done in succession without letting the barbell touch the ground.  To begin, clean the barbell, then perform a front squat, then a jerk to bring the bar back, followed by a back squat, then another jerk and finally bringing the bar back to the front and to the ground.

If the measure of an exercise truly is the power in which that exercise elicits, then the Bear Complex would be right up there at the top.

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I did this little exercise in a gymnastics certification last year. It’s a great parallette workout combining both pushups and dips on the parallettes, with some additional core and cardio effort.

Check out a related post for making your own parallettes here.

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Everyone’s favourite iPhone interval timer, WOD Timer, now has a new home on the web! Go on and take a peek at the site in all its Web 2.0 glory. We spared no expense at getting this setup. Well, actually I did it myself over the weekend. I’m still fairly proud of it though. And please, as always, I’m looking for feedback. And if you want some promo codes for the iPhone version, let me know as I’ve been known to give a few away.

Check the site out at www.wodtimer.com.

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Well, in all truthfulness, WOD Timer v1.1 was actually available several days ago.  It’s true, I finally fixed most of the glaring bugs and added a couple new features.

Some of the new features include vocal audio cues, interval time progress bar, UI updates and changes and additional settings.

For more information, check out the video below.  And please, if (or when) you download the app, leave some feedback in the app store!

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What are parallettes? Parallettes are essentially a pair of bars used to simulate the muck larger parallel bars used in gymnastics.   Parallettes are also a great piece of equipment that can be made easily and very inexpensively.  Parallettes can be used for a variety of bodyweight exercises that are perfect for strengthening the upper body and core and will help develop better balance.  They are similar to pushup bars but generally a little bit longer.

You can, of course, purchase parallettes, but they can easily be made with some PVC pipe and a tiny bit of time.

To start, you will need the following items from the local hardware store (I purchased mine at Home Depot).

• About 6 feet of PVC pipe about 1 to 1 1/2 inches in diameter.  I used 1 1/2 for mine and the size is perfect for my grip.
• 4 x PVC  T joints
• 4 x PVC  pipe caps
• 4 x PVC  90 degree joints
• PVC glue (please use in a well ventilated area as this stuff is really smelly)

Instructions for one parallette:

1. Cut a section of PVC about 14 to 16 inches
2. Glue a 90 degree joint to each end of the section
3. Cut two sections of PVC about 4 to 6 inches
4. Glue one small section to each of the 90 degree joints
5. Glue a T joint onto each of the ends
6. Cut 4 4 inch sections of PVC
7. Glue one 4 inch section to both sides of each T joint
8. Glue on caps at each end of the 4 inch section

That’s it!  Here’s a diagram of the sections of the parallette

And here is one of my parallettes:

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Awesome video compilation featuring various feats of strength. Serious lifting going on in this video. Unbelievable stuff. I’m unsure of the original source on this one. If you know, please let us know in the comments!

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Simple – cut some cheese strings in half, dip them in egg, cover them in flax seed (they should be as eggy and flax seedy as possible) and fry them in canola oil (or oil of choice). Don’t let the oil get too hot. Probably best just when it’s about to smoke. Fry them only until the outside is getting a little crispy or the cheese is really starting to ooze. Turn often and keep a close eye on them. Takes only about a minute or two.

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TheFitBlog.net has just released a Google Gadget for calculating body mass index (BMI). This gadget can super easily be embedded on a web page or your iGoogle site.

Download the BMI Calculator gadget.

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For those who don’t know, I have a thing for break dancing.  It’s just an incredible display of strength.  This video of Guy Junior is no exception.  Watch and be amazed.

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Going for a 5 or 10 km run is a fantastic aerobic exercise that will burn lots of calories. However, the normal run is generally a moderate intensity exercise.

Long bouts of moderate intensity exercise may actually preferentially burn more muscle tissue than one would like [1]. The goal, after all, is usually to burn calories from carbohydrate storage and maintain muscle.

Some studies have found that brief intervals of high intensity training are more effective at maintaining muscle and building their capacity for lactic acid oxidation [2].

Lactic acid builds up as muscles undergo intense strain. You may recognize this as the burning sensation you might sometimes feel as you’re trying to lift that last rep or trying to sprint the last 100m of a good jog. During the recovery from bout of the high intensity, lactic acid is broken down. This process uses energy from carbohydrate storage or fat [3]. Translation – interval training may be better than a moderate intensity run for losing fat and getting lean.

So next time you’re heading out for your weekly (or monthly or whenever you can get yourself off the couch) run, perhaps head down to the track instead and run 5 or 6 400m sprints, each followed by 2 minutes of rest. It may take less time than a 10k jog, but it may be just as effective.

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