Stop Exercising to Burn Calories!
One of the biggest lies that we’re told from the fitness industry is that you need to exercise because it burns calories and when you burn calories you lose weight. Therefore, the more calories that you burn the more weight you’ll lose.
Sound familiar?
Total garbage. If you’ve ever tried to exercise in hopes that you’ll lose body fat you’ve probably discovered that it's a crappy way to get leaner. Not only that, there’s a ton of other flaws with this approach.
When all that matters is burning calories the type of workouts you perform become irrelevant because the end goal is simply to burn calories. That means it doesn’t matter whether or not you’re lifting weights or doing zumba the end result is the same. There’s just one problem, if you’ve been around the gym for more than 3 minutes you have probably noticed a difference between the guys who lift weights and the guys who run marathons. If only burning calories mattered they would, in theory, look the same BUT, they don’t.
Most guys when they only take into account the amount of calories that an activity burns are setting themselves up for failure. For reference, a normal guy will burn about 100 calories to cover a distance of one mile. This means that if you want to put yourself in the recommended 500 kcal/day deficit to lose weight at a rate of one pound per week, you would need to cover 5 miles per day to do it IF your diet stayed the exact same every day.
There are three problems with this approach that immediately come to mind.
Your body adapts to an activity (especially one like running or walking) pretty quickly which means that soon you become a running/walking machine and you no longer will burn 100 cal per mile. You will need to increase your speed and mileage to burn the same amount of calories.
Most guys don’t eat the same exact foods in the exact amounts everyday. Our energy intake varies from day to day. If you’ve ever increased your exercise volume you might have noticed that you actually get hungrier! That’s because your body has mechanisms in place to keep you at a set weight. Most guys who seek to burn more calories will typically eat more calories or, white knuckle it until they blow up entirely and quit working out all together.
If you run a 10 minute mile to start, that means you're spending 50 minutes on the treadmill or on the road EVERY day of the week. That’s a decent chunk of time to carve out each day. Many guys may not have that kind of time to devote each day to getting leaner.
If you’re wondering if there’s a better way, there is.
The first step is to ditch the notion that you are exercising to burn calories. You’re not. You should be working out to get stronger, build or maintain lean tissue (muscle), help your body utilize food better, and move pain free. These are all the reasons you should workout, any calories that you happen to burn during exercise are just a bonus.
The next step to address the elephant in the room, your eating habits, everybody KNOWS that they need to change the way they eat in order to have a positive impact on body composition/leanness but, nobody WANTS to make these changes because they’re tough. Calories that you don’t consume are calories that you don’t have to burn. This is the way that you get into that 500kcal deficit without having to dedicate 50 minutes a day to running or any other calorie burning activity.
If you are time strapped shooting for 2-3 hours of exercise per week focusing on resistance training and a little conditioning at the end of each session is enough to see great results starting out when combined with an intelligent approach to eating that is sustainable. I am a huge proponent of kettlebell and calisthenics training for time strapped guys because of how great of a workout you can get with minimal time and equipment. If you’re looking for a buffet of kettlebell and calisthenics workouts designed with busy guys in mind I invite you to check out these 30 kettlebell and bodyweight workouts for guys over 30 that can be done in around 30 minutes. You can download them free below!