Inflammation can make muscles feel bigger, even though the only
thing that's grown is the amount of fluid your muscles are
holding, and that's temporary. But I should warn you that some
women have been known to interpret that transitory swelling as
proof that they're "bulking up," which absolutely is not what's
going on. It takes weeks for actual, measurable muscle growth to
occur, no matter how tight your arms or legs feel the day after one
of Alwyn's workouts.
Men and women tend to react differently to post-workout
inflammation. Both of us will misinterpret the fluid buildup as
proof that our muscles are getting bigger, but while you will
worry that you' re turning into Hulkette, I'll strut around like I 've
suddenly morphed into the "after" picture in a supplement ad.
You might overreact by turning down the intensity of future
workouts, which will undermine your goals, but my reaction
could be even worse. I'll try to produce that inflammation after
every workout as proof that my muscles are still growing, and I'll
end up overtraining. At best, the result will be that I won't have
anything to show for all my sweat and tears, since I'm not
allowing my body to recover from one workout to the next. At
worst, I'll get hurt, burn out, or become one of those guys who
post too much on Internet bodybuilding forums.
Consider this fair warning: You may feel sore after some of
Alwyn's workouts, particularly when you jump into a new phase
of the program, with exercises and protocols you haven't tried
before. You may even notice some swelling and tightness in your
muscles. Just remember that these are signs that the program is
working, not that it's working too well.where you start to wonder if
maybe I'm the victim of too many protein shakes. I'm going to
argue that steady-pace endurance exercise-what most of us refer
to as "cardio" or "aerobics"-is overrated as a tool for fat loss.
But before I do, let me point out that I'm not disputing any of the
facts that are indisputable. Does endurance exercise burn calories?
Sure. Does it contribute to a longer, healthier life? Absolutely.
I'm not out to demonize anyone's favorite type of exercise. I
just want to show you a better way to lose body fat, and I want to
alleviate any fear you might have that not doing endurance
exercise will somehow make you less healthy. (See "The Heart of
the Matter" on page 27 for a detailed look at exercise and heart
health.) Alwyn's workouts call for plenty of exercise, including
exercise at high levels of intensity, which will give you all the
benefits you want from endurance exercise without actually
requiring much of it. The "higher levels of intensity" is crucial,Okay, I said it: You don't need to do any endurance work, if you
don't want. Alwyn's female clients typically lose fat rapidly, with
or without it. That's because the two most powerful drivers of fat
loss are diet and anaerobic exercise. I'll get into diet in the next
section, and stick with exercise in this chapter, although I'll warn
you that there 's going to be some crossover. We aren't proposing
that you do Alwyn's workouts without changing your diet, or that
you follow Cassandra's nutrition plan without also building some
sweat equity in the weight room. Frankly, we don't know how
well either component works without the other. Dr. Kenneth Cooper, a former college track star, coined the word
"aerobics " to promote endurance exercise. Here 's what he wrote
in Aerobics, his 1968 best seller: 'TIl state my position early. The
best exercises are running, swimming, cycling, walking,
stationary running, handball, basketball, and squash, and in just
about that order. Isometrics, weight lifting, and calisthenics,
though good as far as they go, don't even make the list, despite
the fact that most exercise books are based on one of these three. "
Cooper believed that steady-pace exercise was the key to
everything. It was a counterintuitive idea, but unlike so many
other leap-of-faith notions that arose in the 1960s ("Tune in, turn
on, drop out") , it gained a permanent foothold in science and
practice. I call it "counterintuitive" because the human species
didn't really evolve to excel at long-distance runs . We 're made to
walk long distances-that's how our ancient ancestors put food on
the table, before they figured out retailing-and to run really fast
when we must. We're good at start-stop activities involving lots
of different speeds and changes of direction, which is why human
children instinctively play games like "tag," why human adults
invent games like basketball and soccer, and why fighting sports
like boxing and tae kwon do have rounds of several minutes,
rather than continuous action until one fighter wins.
What most of us aren't good at, by nature, is jogging or
swimming at a steady pace for longer than a few minutes.
And yet that's what Cooper and many who followed his
example have spent four decades telling us we should do.
To be fair, it's hard to make the argument that we're designed
to do sets of bench presses or deadlifts, either. So maybe it's
facetious to take any aspects of modern life, including our
exercise routines, and put them into a prehistoric context. I'mjust
trying to make the point that the ability to do anaerobic exercises
-lifting heavy things, running fast, jumping, climbing, fightingwas vital to the survival of our species. Being able to jog for an
hour at a specified percentage of your maximum heart rate wasn't.
The word "aerobic" refers to the aerobic energy system, one of
three ways your body can fuel movement. You use your aerobic
system constantly, whether you think about it or not. As long as
you're breathing easily, whether you're working, sleeping, doing
chores, or exercising, you're using it. That is, you 're using oxygen
to burn a combination of fat and glycogen (the form of
carbohydrate your body uses for energy) to keep your body
functioning.
Generally, the healthier you are, the higher the percentage of fat
you'll burn at rest. If you' re obese and/or diabetic, you'll burn
more glycogen and less fat. A perfectly healthy woman would
burn just under 60 percent fat and just over 40 percent glycogen
most of the time. During exercise, as your heart rate quickens and
you start breathing harder, the ratio will shift. All-out exercise is
anaerobic-your body can 't use oxygen to burn fuel, so it uses
chemicals inside your body to generate the energy it needs. When
your body needs to fuel movement without oxygen, it uses
glycogen, rather than fat, to keep you moving. It has two systems
for this: one for very short sprints, up to perhaps ten seconds, and
the other for longer dashes that last about a minute.
Given what I just wrote, you'd think that exercising with the
aerobic energy system must be superior to using either of your
two anaerobic systems, since you burn more fat with aerobics.
That's where we got the now-very-much-discredited idea that
there 's a "fat-burning zone" in which we should all exercise.
The amount of fat you burn during exercise matters less than
the amount you burn when you aren't exercising. And that's
where you start to see some of the hidden benefits of strength
training.
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