Nutrition and Fitness Professional, LLC

Weight Loss Counseling, Vegetarian, Vegan, & Sports Nutrition, plus Fitness Training Services and Body Fat Assessments

Posts Tagged personal training

Women’s Body Image: Calorie Restriction, Strength Training, & Weight Loss

Mar 23

Posted by Joey Gochnour, BS, BS, MEd, RDN, CSSD, CSOWM, LD, NASM-CPT in Diet or Exercise?, Personal Experiences and Opinions | No Comments

I get to work with a lot of women who want to lose weight on the fitness side as a personal trainer and on the nutrition side as a registered dietitian.  Most women who come in to “lose weight” really just want to change their body composition, and it is interesting to see whether people think it is their eating habits or their exercise program that will do that for them.

While I do assess whether they are actually overweight or not through a variety of different assessment parameters, weight loss often tends to reinforce a body image that is inaccurate for women in society, especially if they are not truly overweight.  That gets us to the methodology.

Restricting to maintain a light frame is not healthy because it is an unrealistic healthy body.  It is really just nutrient deprived and fitness deprived, especially as you age and are no longer able to maintain an idealized adolescent and thin teenage body that many women think is healthy.

Colleagues who work in eating disorders have found out that letting these women who really aren’t overweight or have health issues due to their weight actually attempt to lose weight is not helpful even if done in “a healthy way” because it reinforces anorexic psychology and behaviors.

I find this valuable information because often times, my belief has been that “hey, you can try it, but you won’t like the outcome when you get there because it won’t be the body type you are looking for anyway and are probably going to gain the weight back again without any change in overall fitness ability.”  Unfortunately, people are going to do what they want.

If they try to diet and weight comes back, I figure it is a learning experience because many men and women are determined to do what they’re going to do anyway.  Why be resistant?  Why not teach them to do it in a healthier way to reduce the risk of malnutrition and let them learn from the experience?

This is only for women who are slightly overweight according to some of the traditional weight assessments.  If they are clearly underweight or normal weight, I don’t help them on that restriction.  It is unethical.

What I find many women are often saying, is something like “I don’t like my body” or “I don’t feel sexy in my body,” and they are focusing on WEIGHT only as the only measure of that.
 
First of all, feeling sexy has to do with a lot of things, including having self esteem.  It is not just physiology and body composition.  Working with a qualified psychotherapist (I know a few good ones) often helps you figure out what to focus on and what is important.  Sometimes, a weight obsession is really tangent to something deeper.
 
Having worked with many women who come to me as a personal trainer to “lose weight” (even though physically training for a few hours a week results in mild, if any, weight loss, which is frustrating for them when it is explained to them on the first day), many women come out of it with a more positive body image, feel sexier, fit into their clothes better, have a tighter body, and they weigh MORE or the SAME while eating MORE or the SAME amount of food.
 
It is also obvious to me as a trainer which clients are restricting or under eating when working out because they never improve and are hungry working out on low calorie diets, among many other signs and symptoms I will not go into detail in a blog post.  They are stuck on the light weights.  They never fully recover.
 
While some women want to maintain an image of being small and frail, I do not support it when training because it isn’t healthy.  Osteoporosis, or lean mass?
 
Getting women to buy a healthier body image, ie one that is strong, can lift more than pink 5 lb dumbbells, and consume over 2000-2400 Calories is what I try to do.  It is difficult.  It is its own area of eating disorder work, not even recognized by the old school eating disorder specialists.  Of course, they don’t even lift or train people! 🙂
 
The summary of what I’m trying to say is that while some women are focused on body image, teaching women what a healthy body image is with strength training and eating more is probably what is most helpful for them long term due to the relapse rate of women who just try to modify their body with diet alone.
 
Many women will likely be focused on their body image either way, so why not give tangible feedback through fitness parameters they are not able to meet when restricting?
 
To clarify, strength training is NOT bodybuilding, as that is an ENTIRELY different concept.  Strength training produces results with very little time in the gym and very little loss of fitness in weeks of not doing it with strength goals rather than calorie burn and aesthetic goals.  Bodybuilding is aesthetics focused.
 
The problem is that when some women go to do a workout program, it is circuit training, non-specific, non-goal oriented resistance training, “go-for-the-burn spinning classes or CrossFit,” pink weights with dance music and air crunches (about as hard as it sounds), stretching, pilates, yoga, and a small percentage go with bodybuilding, which is also not what I would recommend for a positive body image because the focus is on aesthetics/weight/body fat% rather than fitness parameters you can improve with goal-oriented training programs.
 
Goal oriented training programs focus on overall increase in functional capacity like weight lifted, repetitions (reps), and sets with moderate progressive overload.  They focus on attaining better coordination, balance, agility, strength, REASONABLE muscular and cardiovascular endurance, flexibility, and body composition.  However, I’m not promoting the concept of mainstream “functional training” programs, as that is not standardized either.  Those programs sometimes make no sense to me either as to the purpose of some of their exercises.
 
In comparison to bodybuilding, strength training focuses not just on body composition but also other important and more readily testable exercises that show you are actually more adept at moving your body in space in time rather than just lifting weights till your muscles are broken down to the maximum for no purpose other than to build them.
 
Sometimes it is amazing to me how much exercise people do that is not doing anything for their bodies in terms of aesthetics, yet they are focused entirely on aesthetics for exercise.
 
I’m sure many of us have heard others say they walk 8 miles a day “to burn calories,” while simultaneously complaining they have no butt, or they adopt a running program for the sole purpose of calorie burn and again wonder why their butt isn’t getting nicer (it doesn’t overload the gluteal muscles and is not high intensity).  These are not fitness goals that are healthy, and frankly, it is an abuse of the purpose of exercise.
 
The problem is trying to get women to strength train, something that may make them fit into clothes better independent of calorie restriction (or even by eating more food!).  Some do not want to do it because of this unhealthy body image that women are supposed to be thin, skinny (more like skinny-fat), frail, and if they lift anything over 5 lbs they may start to look like a man.  This is an irrational, but all too common a belief.
 
Being frail is not cool!  If more women strength trained, I think it would cut down the number of women who are dissatisfied with their bodies significantly.  Bodies are made to move and be strong.
 
Strength training also can give realistic negative feedback on your physical condition as a result of cutting calories, thus giving negative reinforcement to the restrictive and thin mentality.  Use “that butt” as a reason to actually eat more food because you won’t get “that butt” if you don’t eat more and lift heavy.
 
Big guys train hardcore, sometimes have chemical help, and lift more than 50 lbs.  Most lift more than 100 lbs.  Getting to the 30 lb dumbbells as a woman and squatting your body weight should be seen as an accomplishment, not that you are manly.  Furthermore, male testosterone levels are much higher than women’s, so even if lifting the same amount as a man, you will not look like a man.  Times change, and so should women’s body image evolve to a healthier one that strength trains.
 


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Why I List Out All My Credentials

Aug 31

Posted by Joey Gochnour, BS, BS, MEd, RDN, CSSD, CSOWM, LD, NASM-CPT in Personal Experiences and Opinions | No Comments

The United States educational system allows you to pursue graduate degrees in many fields without the prerequisite background.  This is very true for degrees in the health sciences.  Typically, a master’s degree is about 36 credits and includes research-based coursework, which is often not practical to working with clients.

A master’s degree without a bachelor’s in the field lacks the comprehensive coursework and internship experiences required in a bachelor’s degree, which is usually around 120 credits.  While some of them are general education, most of the other coursework is coursework related to the degree.

Some master’s and doctoral programs require some prerequisites, but not all of them nor are they uniform.  The University of Texas, for example, does not require those with a master’s in kinesiology to have the bachelor’s degree.  Having done my master’s at UT, I would not say that it would qualify me to work in various areas of physical activity since it was such specialized knowledge in exercise physiology, a subject that is probably meaningless had you not had an undergraduate chock full of science to even understand the master’s.

I know what information was NOT in the master’s, so to be practicing without the undergraduate level work and experience required to get that degree is a problem with the educational system.  I also had to complete 3 internships at the undergraduate level for kinesiology.  To not list that against people who just have a master’s is to omit pertinent structured educational experience I have that others do not.  It is not to just list more letters off my name.

I adopted the UK’s manner of listing credentials because the British have it right in terms of recognizing that if you have a PhD, you may not have a bachelor’s and master’s in the subject.  If you have a master’s in a subject, you don’t always have a bachelor’s degree in it (especially in health and fitness).  “Practice in the UK varies from that in the US partly because it is designed to draw attention to the fact that not everybody who possesses a higher ranking award possesses lower ones as well.”

In my particular case, a nutritional sciences degree is NOT the same step-wise prerequisite that a dietetics degree is.  I had to go back to school after having a nutritional sciences degree for another 4 years to complete the dietetics coursework and 1200 hr internship, which is encompassed in the RD credential.  The coursework to become an RD is not 100% science, as my undergraduate education was mostly a pre-med degree.

Dietetics also includes classes on counseling individuals and educating groups, foodservice, community nutrition (WIC, government programs, etc.).  

Had I just had a dietetics degree, I wouldn’t list my other BS degree because it would be included in the RD credential.  The nutritional sciences curriculum at Penn State was a pre-med track with more advanced sciences required than the dietetics track.  Nutrition sciences had to take a more difficult organic chemistry, a microbiology with a lab instead of just lecture, organic chemistry lab, physics 1 and 2 each with a lab, and multiple levels of bio with labs including genetics and PCR.

Additionally, I took college-level anatomy and physiology in high school (and won the award for highest GPA in it at Strake Jesuit College Preparatory), physiology and exercise physiology as an undergraduate at PSU, and then multiple levels of physiology during my master’s, including being a preceptor for the undergraduate UT physiology course and leading study discussions.  Nutrition and fitness is a lot of human physiology.

On a side note, ask people who are “certified nutritionists” whether they had to pass high level sciences (and by pass, good luck getting into a dietetic internship with less than a 3.5 GPA).  You may get a quizzical look.  This is another reason why credentials are important in the nutrition and fitness field.  They won’t be able to stand their ground when it comes to tough questions on human physiology and nutrition.  No one has tested their knowledge and made them pass anything high stakes.

These sciences are a way to weed out people who think they know nutrition and human physiology for a reason.  Everyone thinks they are an expert these days, so it creates artificial competition against real practitioners.  I mean artificial because some people are not qualified to practice but there is no law prohibiting who can do nutrition counseling (or fitness) in Texas.

To think that people would pay people who are of these sham certifications baffles me.  I’ve been told before, “Your rates are too expensive.  I hired someone who charges $30.”  If you are willing to put your health into the hands of someone who only charges $30 an hour as a freelance professional to travel to your home, something is really fishy with that professional.

Even a massage costs 2-5 times that.  Psychotherapists charge 3-6 times that amount and people see them regularly.  $30 an hour doesn’t even pay for day-use office space in Austin among the other costs of being in business.  A small business must pay double taxes on their income as well.  About 50% of my clients only need one session to get them on the right foot, but those who visit more frequently have the best results, especially for weight loss, disordered eating, and eating disorders.

Back on credentials.

Master’s degrees are not uniform from school to school or subject to subject.  Sometimes other nutrition “professionals” just list a master’s degree after their name without saying what that degree is actually in.  If you aren’t listing what it is in these days, you are hiding something.  You should ask what their degree is in.  What if your nutritionist has a master’s in, say, computer science?  How does that relate to them being able to serve you?  Why are they listing it after their name on their nutrition services website?  What if their undergraduate was architecture?

One of the perks of being a credentialed healthcare provider through various health insurance companies is that it is a badge that the provider’s education is legitimate.  Insurance companies verify you actually have what you say you have.  It is a lengthy 3-4 month process for most private insurance except Medicare, which credentials faster within a month.

There are some in the fitness and nutrition field that say they have degrees when they do not.  No one is verifying their information.  This is a problem, so you SHOULD ask.  Anyone can practice fitness or nutrition counseling in Texas.  That’s the law.  They aren’t breaking any laws.  They just cannot call themselves a “licensed dietitian” or a “registered dietitian.”  Anyone can use the term “nutritionist.”  Registered dietitians can also call themselves “registered dietitian nutritionists,” which is also a protected term and credential.

Most personal trainers lack a kinesiology (or exercise science) degree.  Other fields require formal education before certification.  Personal training is backwards–they don’t even care if you have a degree when hiring at most gyms.  In fact, a degree is worth the same as a kettlebell or group exercise certification at most businesses that hire personal trainers in terms of pay rate increases.  This is utterly ridiculous, but it is true.

Now, let’s talk about this emerging field called “functional and integrative medicine.”  First, I am not trashing all practitioners of this field.  There are some people who know what they are doing.  Then there are the hippies who skipped and spurned all traditional education and now think they can practice at the same level as those of us with professional education.

It is one thing to go into functional and integrative (ie a new term for alternative, or non-evidence based) practice as a healthcare professional who has traditional credentials but also tries alternative therapies, and it is another thing to go into it with no professional education at all in the traditional sense and just do alternative therapies because you told yourself you are a badass.

It is another thing to go into the field, proclaim being at the same level, and have no academic background in the subject at all.  This is what a charlatan or quack is.  A charlatan uses marketing, emotions, and bells and whistles to appeal to those who believe that a traditionalist must not know anything at all.  I’m sorry if you had a bad experience with a traditionalist.  Sometimes even good practitioners are not on their game with 100% of their clients or patients all the time.  Maybe getting second opinions is what you need rather than one and blame the whole profession.

Is there more to practicing nutrition than knowing science?  Absolutely.  Good practitioners need to know how to ask the right questions, assess clients’ readiness to change, explore motivations, have good people and business skills, etc.  There is a lot of stuff going into the practice of nutrition than there is just pure science knowledge.  However, to consider all practitioners at the same level in spite of those of us who took the extra effort to actually know our field forward and backward before practicing is myopic!

Not many people get formal education in both nutrition and kinesiology and have a unique perspective of how they interact with experience in both fields.

Feel free to comment and share.



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BCAAs–Waste of Money Supplement Scam

May 2

Posted by Joey Gochnour, BS, BS, MEd, RDN, CSSD, CSOWM, LD, NASM-CPT in Science Analysis | 3 Comments

Branched chain amino acids, or BCAAs, are synonymous with the amino acids leucine, isoleucine, and valine.  These are essential amino acids, of which there are 9.  Essential amino acids are found in pretty much any source of protein or protein complement.  This includes eggs, soy, animal flesh, dairy protein (casein and whey), beans, nuts, seeds, and grains (which tend to be low on lysine, they still have BCAAs).  Essential means you must eat them every day for good nutrition.

I’m tired of seeing this scam promoted.  If you eat protein, your blood has plenty of BCAAs.  If you are worried about your BCAA level going down during exercise, eat dietary sources of protein sometime within 2-3 hours of your workout or a faster absorbing protein 30 min to 1 hour before your workout (whey) if you didn’t plan your day well enough to have dietary sources.  That is a good time period to ensure BCAAs, or protein in general, will be in your blood.

If you supplement with BCAAs or protein and your body doesn’t need it, your liver deaminates (removes the nitrogen group) or transaminates (moves the nitrogen to a different keto acid, making a different amino acid) the amino acid to maintain homeostasis.  The nitrogen group forms urea, which is filtered by the kidneys into your urine.

The carbon backbone of the amino acid is then integrated into either glucogenic pathways (pathways that synthesize glucose) or ketogenic pathways (pathways that synthesize fatty acids and ketones).

In other words, BCAAs become carbohydrate or fat calories, just like dietary carbohydrate and dietary fat do, and an insignificant amount of calories at that.  Except you bought BCAAs, and your body isn’t using them like that.  Consider the cost difference.  Let me break it down for you:

If you bought a container of BCAAs with 40 servings of 10 calories each, you might get 400 Calories from that whole container, according to the label.  That said, they apparently don’t count the protein from amino acids into the total calories on the label.  This particular item actually has 12 Calories from carbohydrate (rounded down to 10, so that is legit), but 5 g of protein from amino acids leucine, isoleucine, and valine.

Add 20 calories to that serving size from the 5g of protein, so there are about 30 calories per serving total.  So, 30 calories times 40 servings means the bottle has 1200 calories total, 3 times as much as reported on the label.

If that’s not enough to make you distrust this supplement, this bottle costs $26.39 at the time this post is written.  For $26.39, you could have bought about 10 bags of rice and 10 bags of beans or lentils, or you could buy 5 bottles of olive oil or 2-3 large containers of nuts if you prefer to get your calories from fat.  All of these are much more cost effective per calorie than buying a bottle of BCAAs.

People who tell you to buy BCAAs may be salesmen trying to make a living in the supplement industry or personal trainers who don’t have any human physiology or biochemistry education who work for gyms that tell you to push supplements or lose your job.  These are not people you should take nutrition advice from.

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Video: How to Low and High Row, Fitness on the Forty Acres, Healthy Horns

Mar 30

Posted by Joey Gochnour, BS, BS, MEd, RDN, CSSD, CSOWM, LD, NASM-CPT in Media Quotes, Personal Experiences and Opinions | No Comments

Fitness series managed and edited by David Robbins, a kinesiology graduate who was kind enough to feature me in this video on low and high row on a Hammer Strength brand machine at the Recreational Sports Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

 



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Video: Overhead Press, Healthy Horns, Fitness on the Forty Acres

Mar 30

Posted by Joey Gochnour, BS, BS, MEd, RDN, CSSD, CSOWM, LD, NASM-CPT in Media Quotes, Personal Experiences and Opinions | No Comments

Video series managed and edited by David Robbins, a UT kinesiology graduate, who kindly featured me as expert on the subject.

Great compound exercise for the shoulders.

 



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Video: How to Squat–Healthy Horns, Fitness on the Forty Acres

Mar 30

Posted by Joey Gochnour, BS, BS, MEd, RDN, CSSD, CSOWM, LD, NASM-CPT in Media Quotes, Personal Experiences and Opinions | No Comments

The University Health Services of University of Texas at Austin did a fitness video series for Fitness on the Forty Acres, managed by David Robbins, a kinesiology graduate who helped organize the series. He was nice enough to feature me as expert.

 



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Health Benefits of Resistance Training vs Aerobic Exercise + Media Quote

Mar 19

Posted by Joey Gochnour, BS, BS, MEd, RDN, CSSD, CSOWM, LD, NASM-CPT in Diet or Exercise?, Media Quotes, Science Analysis | No Comments

I answered a media query on the benefits of cardiovascular exercise vs weight lifting for Medical Daily.  To expand upon it, here’s my take:

Weightlifting builds bone density in the bones of the muscles worked.  Squats can help build hip bone density, but not wrist bone density, which would require stress on the wrist from an exercise such as a chest press or forearm exercise.
 
Weight lifting is effective for increasing glucose sensitivity (blood sugar sensitivity).  This means that some people, such as a person who is diabetic, may not need as much insulin as usual or that the person can consume more carbohydrate without negative effects on their body.
 
Resistance training also builds physical strength, improves muscle coordination, and is a stimulus to the body to increase lean mass.  Because of increases in lean mass, weight lifting is effective in improving body composition (lowering fat mass % and increasing lean mass %), which can improve self esteem and body confidence.  Being stronger can make daily tasks easier, makes you more athletic, and allows you to push your body more intensely during other exercises.
 
Cardio in the light to moderate intensity range stimulates the body to increase overall blood volume, thereby increasing the amount of red blood cells if the behavior is maintained for over a month (the time it takes to remake blood cells).

This happens because cardio can stimulate an increase in overall blood plasma volume, the watery component of blood.  With more blood volume, the density of the red blood cells in the blood is diluted.  The kidneys recognize this and secrete erythropoetin, a hormone that acts on the bone marrow to produce more blood cells to match the new blood volume.
 
Cardio is helpful for reducing blood pressure acutely.  This could be due to relaxation of the blood vessels due to exertion, a loss of fluid and sodium from the body, an increase in nitric oxide production (dilates blood vessels), or a combination of these.  Cardio in the light to moderate intensity range also creates adaptations in the peripheral cardiovascular system, such as increasing capillary density and overall efficient circulation.
 
All cardio will increase the blood circulation by utilizing the muscles of the body to pump blood that is in the veins back to the heart.  This is called the muscle pump, and it only works when you are moving.  This reduces the work the heart must do to pump fresh blood throughout the body.  It also increases the stroke volume of the heart–the amount of blood pumped per heart beat.  This can result in lower heart rates due to greater heart efficiency.
 
Most people can expend the largest amount of energy (calories) with light to moderate cardiovascular exercise when performed to exhaustion compared with weightlifting or intense cardio when performed to exhaustion, which is important when balancing dietary intake of calories.

 

Light to moderate cardio also does not spike caloric needs for repair as much as weight lifting or intense cardio due to less muscle breakdown, which is helpful for not slowing down the weight loss process (due to increases in lean mass, some people consider the “afterburn”).
 
To clarify, often people think that more exercise is better for weight loss.  This is not true.  If your body is broken down, caloric needs increase.  If needs are increased while you are not consuming enough for repair, your body won’t lose weight.

 

Instead, it will stall until it is healed.  It’s like, why would it lose weight if you are telling it to gain lean mass.  Lean mass gains and weight loss at the same time can be conflicting goals that will take twice as long to achieve either goal.  It is important to focus one’s goals.
 
Think about it.  How many people actually lose weight from a marathon?  Some people gain weight from it.  How does that make sense other than the explanation above?  Back to cardio…
 
Intense cardio can improve VO2max, the maximum amount of oxygen a person can consume and a measure of cardiovascular fitness.  Intense cardio improves cardiovascular fitness the best.  It burns the most calories per unit of time so is great for maximizing your workout time, if time is limited; however most people fatigue (beginners or athletes) before it would burn an equivalent amount of calories of moderate cardio to exhaustion or even sub-exhaustion.
 
For me, I know I can burn 600-700 Calories on a treadmill on an incline at a moderate pace in 35-40 min.  If I push myself and do intense cardio (mile time speed or sprint intervals), I burn out in 15-20 minutes and have only burned 200-400 Calories.  Yes, there is an afterburn, but I think that is overhyped.  We don’t talk about the afterburn from weight lifting–we call it soreness or delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS).
 
Intense cardio should be performed for the aerobic fitness stimulus and not viewed soley as a caloric energy dump.  Successful weight loss clients use exercise to build skills and use larger volumes (sets, reps, time) of exercise to keep it off after the weight loss process is over but not during the process.

 

Why would you commit to 6 days of exercise for the purpose of weight loss in an unsustainable manner?  Are you planning to exercise for 6 days a week for the rest of your life?  It’s just asking for an injury.  People who request this are often given it by trainers because it can be lucrative, or they don’t know any better themselves.

 

Listening to a real exercise professional will save you some money and hard work.  I do not support these sorts of weight loss endeavors.  Diets are there for a reason.  It’s all about the dietary caloric deficit.  Check out the cool graph on this post, in case you missed it!  You’d be surprised how little I exercise to maintain a great physique.  Nutrition is very important, and focused, purposeful, goal-oriented exercise also is very important.

 

Intense cardio also improves central cardiovascular functions (heart, and forced inspiration and expiration muscles) more than moderate cardio, but it is often more physically and psychologically stressful.  For this reason, I recommend doing it only when you are rested and recovered (from a leg and cardiovascular workout history standpoint).  Cardio will also improve blood sugar sensitivity of muscle at any intensity just as weight lifting will.
 
If you have any questions about what you are actually doing with a particular form of exercise, I’d love to hear in the comments below.  I focus on physiological parameters to improve when designing exercise programs for my clients and me.  If you like this post, please comment, subscribe to my newsletter for new articles and updates, and share on social media 🙂  If you want to work with me, check out my services.



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My Recent Weight Loss Experience: Part 1

Dec 29

Posted by Joey Gochnour, BS, BS, MEd, RDN, CSSD, CSOWM, LD, NASM-CPT in Diet or Exercise?, Personal Experiences and Opinions | No Comments

In an effort to become a better personal trainer and registered dietitian, I decided to embark upon a weight loss journey on November 1, 2014 that ended December 15, 2014.  Granted, I didn’t need to lose weight for any health reasons, but I tend to go on some sort of a reduced calorie modified version of what I currently eat about every year and a half to reset to where I like to be.  Otherwise, I’d just keep gaining weight the way I like to eat and sometimes exercise! 🙂

Because this post got longer than I expected, you can jump to the how I felt when I did it part after the Preface heading, which gives background on my thoughts on weight and rationale for changing my weight.

Preface

Not everyone loses weight because they need to.  It is often a want to sort of thing.  For me, I enjoy being at different weights for different reasons.  Sometimes I like to emphasize the big heavy lifts, and more mass makes me better at that.  After a while, I tend to find it exhausting maintaining that weight, eating all that food, and keeping up my cardio to keep my body fat percentage down.

Add training and nutrition consulting with local Austin clients, working with private client hours on top of that who are not local via telehealth, and developing this website, it can get fatiguing after a while.

I also don’t like to be too lightweight.  In our society, a muscular male physique is valued more than a ripped, agile, and fast male physique.  I also just feel weaker than I can be and don’t emphasize endurance activities in my routine.  Rather, I do them for general health and maintenance.

The perks of being light include: I save money on my grocery bills, I have boundless amounts of energy, I can workout “forever” without getting fatigued, and my strength:mass ratio is probably the best due to these previous qualities.  Strength:mass ratio, ie maximizing your strength for a given body weight, is the way to go if you lift weights, in my opinion, as it takes less time to maintain the results and yields the most functional body type.

If you think about it, for a small framed individual to have tons of weight, be it muscle or fat, it makes the body less efficient at doing anything.  Your organs don’t grow enough to keep up with the body size changes.  Your heart prefers a certain size, your liver a certain size, your kidneys a certain size, and your lungs a certain size.  They just don’t grow like your muscles can, so when you pick a body size to be, understand the pros and cons.

Bigger people are stronger, but lighter people (to an extent…as there is too light) can be more athletic for anything that requires moving the body through space and time.  I prefer the ideal body weight equation over BMI when assessing weight ranges for people, but I look at both models and consider fitness status as well for the big picture.

My belief in the healthiest human body is one that is good at many aspects fitness but also absent of disease or disease risk propensity.  Aspects of fitness include skill based and precision work, muscular strength, muscular endurance, agility, balance, cardiovascular fitness, and body composition.

The heavier I get, the more strength and muscle I have, but also the more likely I will have high blood pressure, as it runs in my family.  Moreover, the less likely I will be good at running for any extended period of time over a couple miles.  Think of fueling a Prius vs a Hummer.

I have had either prehypertension or high blood pressure at a few points in my life of high stress, and it is more likely to come on as my weight creeps up.  Being able to squat and bench heavy at that point becomes moot to me.  I’m already a small- to medium-framed individual anyway so won’t set any big records there.

I’m a 5’10” male who likes to weigh between 165-175.  When I was a competitive swimmer, however, I weighed 150 and got my best times at 145 (age 17) when I had diarrhea during a meet that I was shaved, tapered, and wearing a fastskin for.  That experience taught me that losing 10 lbs of water weight (I actually lost from 155 during that meet) gave me collegiate division 1-worthy times for swimming.

I didn’t understand that at the time though, and obviously it is not a healthy thing to do due to the electrolyte abnormalities and possible heart risks with that fast of weight loss while competing at a high level.  But I digress!  Back to weight loss!

There are a few reasons I decided to lose the weight.  I knew the holidays were coming up, and I wouldn’t be able to work out as much or the way I wanted with family.  I also needed a break from working out, in general, to let my body fully repair and heal.  I decided it was a good time to do so.

My weight was creeping up to 182 at a peak but averaged around 177-178.  I carry a lot of water weight that fluctuates depending on the time of day, hydration, how much fiber and sodium I have had, stress levels, and exercise amounts.

I also knew I started lifting really heavy and found it easy, a sign I gained some muscle (and fat), which when working out as many years as I have, I know I don’t make many muscle gain or strength improvements anymore without a significant technique or routine change.

I also was becoming exhausted with less cardio than I used to.  Any extra muscle on my frame size at this point inevitably carries more and more fat.  You can’t continue to gain muscle with a low body fat percentage on a given frame size forever.

How I Lost the Weight–Diet Only this Year*

In the past, I have lost weight by the book.  I did both diet and exercise in the past.  This time, I just did diet only.  The asterisk means that I was still biking to my personal training employed job and still training clients (some who require more physical effort on my part than others, which is what goes with the profession), but I was doing no formal exercise as I usually do to push my own limits.

Usually, I hit all muscle groups heavy a little less than once a week, do high intensity cardio (run or swim), moderate and relaxing cardio (run or swim), bike to/from work, agility and balance and gymnastics skill work using bodyweight at playgrounds with parallel bars and monkey bars, or I’ll count a physical outing like hiking or kayaking as a workout for the day.  These make great date ideas that do NOT involve food…I’ll have to post on that topic another day!

In the past, I did it by cutting my food portions of non-protein calories like carbohydrates and fats down very mildly, as I still wanted to be able to fuel my workouts.  I have a food scale and use measuring cups and live alone, so it is much easier to track.  I believed in sports nutrition by the book in that it was supposed to have that magic 30-min to 2-hr window after a workout when you have to eat, or you lose all your gains!  More on that in another post.

I also still lost about 5-10% of my strength with weight loss, which is inevitable.  I couldn’t do as many reps or sets in the gym, and my high intensity work wasn’t as intense.

In the past, I also would get muscle cramps, tight muscles, and nights where I had to “refeed” the calories I cut that day in order to fall asleep because my body was trying to repair muscles that I wasn’t feeding.  I wasn’t even severely cutting my calories, but to be able to workout at the intensities I usually do, my body needed more calories and wouldn’t relax until it got them.

This time, I went into my weight loss journey knowing I would lose strength and endurance no matter what I do.  Why go through the psychological trauma of seeing your lifts decrease in weight and repetitions when you could just start over at the end?

As a trainer, I see unfit people get fit very quickly.  Losing your gains is not hard to get back.  My clients teach me this when they are gone for an extended period of time and then come back.  It is exhilarating to see, from my perspective, and made me less strict with my own regimens.

When cutting calories, my body doesn’t want to work out intensely.  It is just counter intuitive to push yourself harder while eating less as an already lean individual (for someone who is new or intermediate to exercise, this sentence may not apply due to relativity of ratings of perceived exertion during exercise).

This time, I got NO cramps, I didn’t have to wake up in the middle of the night to refeed myself food I had cut out earlier in the day due to working out raising my calorie needs.  I had no tight muscles.  Muscles shrink during weight loss anyway.  Why try to make them bigger during this phase of your life?  I took my own advice and experience and did it on myself this year.  The weight loss experience was much more pleasant.

I usually eat about 3000 Calories a day at my 175 weight, consisting of 4 meals and a snack.  Normally, I work out 5 days a week doing different activities at various intensities.  When I cut my calories, I started out having 3 meals and a snack.

The first week, I was hungry.  After the first week, I wasn’t hungry and didn’t get hungry for the rest of the experience.  I was able to cut down to 2 meals and a snack after I noticed I was losing weight slower and the fact I was starting to be satisfied on smaller amounts of food.

I probably ended up having about 1500-1700 Calories with those 2.5 meals when I finished my weight loss journey at about 160.  I could probably be more specific since I have my diet in a spreadsheet and could figure out the specific numbers, but that is beyond the scope of this post.

From a sociological standpoint, people were concerned rather than encouraging.  There is a stigma any time you cut weight and are already relatively lean, whether male or female, especially for those not familiar with athletic populations who do this often.

There is a lot of overlap with anorexia nervosa behaviors and effective weight loss behaviors.  I think the difference is whether it becomes a clinical problem of becoming underweight, malnourished, and having a distorted, unrealistic body image.  Another difference is knowing when to stop these behaviors.  There is a difference in knowing which thoughts are rational and which are irrational.

I think a lot of the concern is also self-reflective on those who are concerned about their own thoughts about body image.  Perhaps they want to lose weight, fear the process of doing it, and hesitate to do it.  It is a temporary lifestyle change, after all.  If you associate too much of your daily joy and life-meaning with the act of eating food, then that will be something to think about.

The bottom line of this? I cut calories more intuitively this time.  I didn’t have exercise and all its variability in energy expenditure making things complicated.  I used the intuitive eating technique for knowing when I wasn’t eating enough.

I only looked at my calories afterwards because I’m a registered dietitian and feel compelled to know this sort of information for the sake of my career and to better help clients, the few who actually understand and think in calories.  I have a different idea for ways the general population should better understand food calories in another post.

I overshot my weight goal of 165 to 160 on purpose (on average, as it dipped to 158 depending on the day) because I knew the moment I started eating more and exercising again, I would gain my weight back to 165 very quickly thanks to fluid shifts and storing more carbohydrates again.  Rather than having to restart adapting to fewer carbohydrates as energy again, which can take a while, I just decided to overshoot my weight goal a bit.

Interestingly, whether it is the adaptation to eating fewer carbohydates (due to lower calorie intake), or the fact I wasn’t always having blood diverted to my digestive system, I was much more mentally clear during the process.  Who knows?  The research isn’t out on that yet.  I do like to keep up on ketogenic diets though just for sheer interest in the unknown.  This is not to be confused with ketoacidosis.

Notice mental clarity is the same thing people on that religion of bulletproof coffee report.  I think it is more due to the weight loss and blood to gut diversion being reduced, not the “grassfed pure butter that is good for your brain.”  I would like to see some references for that statement.  Oh right, there aren’t any!

So, that is the end of my weight loss journey (and the midpoint to getting back to fitness).  Once I got to the point of finishing up, I was mildly irrationally afraid of starting to eat more food again and having to get back into shape.  What a pain, I thought.  I could see how people can get stuck on eating less and less food when you have been successful with weight loss.  It is an anorexic thought.

That’s why everyone should have fitness goals.  It’s not optional these days.  You HAVE to exercise to be healthy.  It lets you eat more food and feel great.  Who wouldn’t want that?

Now that it is a week or two back into my old routine, I’m back on 3.5-4 meals a day and am exercising again.  I feel great, lighter (weight didn’t come back instantly or anything), and healthier.  I lost a fair amount of fitness in that I’m not pushing myself to my weights I was pre-weight loss because I didn’t feel that would be safe.

That said, I probably only lost about 10% of my strength.  I expect to gain about 5% of it back in the next month, depending on soreness and when I can fit workouts in my schedule.  I’ll write Part 2 when that happens.

The whole point of the diet and no exercise thing this year was to better understand what clients feel physically when losing weight, and to prove a point that you don’t need to work out while losing weight because it can take twice as long and be accompanied by all sorts of musculoskeletal annoyances like tight muscles and overtrained muscles.

I also wanted to see if the weight loss process was faster this year (and it was).  That said, Part 2 of the post is to see how long it takes me to get back to full fitness, so I haven’t proved it is faster in terms of maintaining fitness yet.  The first week back I will tell you that I was SORE AS EVER.  I am not sure if the caps emphasize that enough, but I was a bit zealous in starting myself back to about where I should be mathematically speaking in terms of strength losses and cardio.  I also got winded in a half mile of intense cardio.  It will come back in a month.  I’m not worried.

This isn’t the first time in my life I’ve just let a high level of fitness go.  When I quit swimming competitively at age 19, I played 6 months of addicted World of Warcraft gaming.  I lost 17 lbs of muscle then (160 to 143).  No, it wasn’t healthy, but I wasn’t depriving myself of food.  I just wasn’t exercising then nor was I hungry.  So, fitness can come and go.  Your gains are easily reattainable.  Why try to choose two competing goals at the same time?

My opinion is that unless you are brand new to exercise and have to learn a lot of techniques and get into the healthy habit of exercising in order to build your self-efficacy to do exercise competently, then you may achieve physical goals faster and with more satisfaction by focusing on one at a time.  If it is weight loss and you are a very fit individual already, try to diet first.  Seriously, don’t try to increase the amount of exercise at the same time.  You will learn! 🙂

In the future when I lose weight again (after it creeps on again, as it will because the body is a master at caloric efficiency, which I do NOT view as a diet failure as media/science makes it sound…more on that in another post), I plan to do LESS exercise rather than NONE.  I may lose the weight faster with no exercise, but I lost more fitness this time than I would like.

I’ll keep readers updated for my next post (Part 2) in a month or so whenever I’m back at peak condition, hopefully at my 165 or 170 weight.  I really am not too concerned about whichever one it will end up as.  Life happens, so be as fit as you can be for it, and maximize your functional capacity!

Please comment and share!



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Personal Training: Problems in An Unregulated Yet Needed Industry

Nov 9

Posted by Joey Gochnour, BS, BS, MEd, RDN, CSSD, CSOWM, LD, NASM-CPT in Diet or Exercise?, Personal Experiences and Opinions | 2 Comments

Personal trainers are the experts on how to get healthy, fit, gain muscle, and lose weight.   Or so much of the public thinks who didn’t do their research.  Unfortunately, MOST personal trainers are given WAY too much undeserved credibility.  A quick Google search will show you how many certifications are online.  Freelance personal training, which is what most trainers do who hope to make it their career, doesn’t even require a certification unless you want liability insurance.

Do most clients ask their trainers if they have liability insurance or a certification?  No.

Do most clients even know what certifications are worthwhile?  No.

Do clients even want to put that much trust in someone who got a certification on a weekend online?  Apparently.

Do you even want to trust someone who got a certification from one of the more reputable sources (ACSM, NASM, ACE, NSCA, Cooper), which requires a testing center, when they don’t even have a formal education in the subject?  Apparently.

Do you trust them to take care of your diabetes, hypertension, orthopedic concerns, cardiovascular concerns, understand what medications limit exercise, etc?  Apparently.

What if you get light headed during training…then what should your trainer do to help that problem and explain it to you?  Are you being taught myths and fads or evidence based techniques?  Why are we doing this exercise?  

Apparently, YES, people do trust people with weekend certifications to know all this information.  The industry proves this due to how many successful fitness “professionals” there are without any education.  The industry is driven by charisma, unfortunately.  This is ONE big problem with the industry.  The number of barely qualified people doing the work far outnumbers those with formal education on what they are doing.

Does your trainer have a degree in kinesiology, exercise science, biomechanics, exercise physiology?  Have they ever taken an anatomy class?  You would think these would be requirements, but they aren’t!

In other fields, non-professionals doing the work of the professionals is not NEARLY as much of a problem.  Companies won’t hire you unless you have a degree in the subject and there aren’t many freelancers who think they can do better than they could do at a company.  You wouldn’t trust any other medical provider to operate on you or otherwise care for your health without formal education.  You wouldn’t trust someone without a JD to give you legal counsel.  Why is it any different with exercise science and nutrition?  People will accept information from ANYONE in this field!  Mantras like “everyone is different” and “it works for me/Cameron Diaz/Dr. Oz/Oprah/Arnold” dilute real knowledge and wisdom when we need it most as a nation.  The number of charlatans drowns out the true professionals.

A second problem is the fact that the lay public thinks personal training will make them lose weight.  It doesn’t make you lose weight.  If that were the case, personal trainers would be rail thin due to all the activity they do every day.  Exercise changes your body composition.  It doesn’t change your weight, and if you’re overweight, you’re not going to change your body composition enough to look like your trainer without nutrition changes.  If anything, you will gain weight because exercise stimulates your appetite due to the muscle breakdown.

You would do better spending your money on a registered dietitian if your goal is weight loss.  Weight loss is one of the biggest issues in America today, and people have the misinformation that exercise causes weight loss.  Most uneducated personal trainers will not know it isn’t the exercise but diet that causes weight loss, and if they do, will they tell you and risk losing you as a client to a registered dietitian?  Probably not because exercise is always good for everything right?  Wrong.

People give WAY too much trust to trainers on topics like nutrition.  Did you know that some people, such as registered dietitians and those with a bachelor’s degree in nutrition, are much more minimally qualified to counsel on nutrition issues?  These include: weight loss and weight gain, cholesterol, hypertension, performance nutrition, and many other nutrition-related issues.  You shouldn’t trust your trainer on nutrition unless they have a degree in nutrition and/or are a registered dietitian, which is someone with a degree who has been accepted into a competitive 1200 hour supervised practice program and proved their efficacy that they know what they are doing.  Not all nutrition majors get into these programs.

A third MAJOR problem is the financial disparity between employment and freelance personal training.  You cannot make a living at most places that employ personal trainers, especially since the Affordable Care Act (thanks Obama).  Some places prevent you from working more than a certain number of hours so that they don’t have to pay you benefits.  Now, the health and wellness specialist, the personal trainer, has to pay for his or her own health insurance.  Most commission places pay anywhere from 33% to 50% to 60% maximum of your client income, expect you to do the sales, and they don’t reward you for being a good trainer or getting results.

The only reasons you would get a pay increase are more certifications, more formal education, or more experience, but it isn’t enough of an increase to make the education cost-effective (but does make a better trainer and decrease risk of injury to the client and ability to achieve client results).  Plus, most of the fitness industry certifications are stupid.  I don’t think I need to get a certification on how to use a kettlebell, battle ropes (lol), vibration training, or TRX after having degrees.  Seriously?  Interestingly, getting a kettlebell certification is a similar increase in pay as a degree at many gyms.  That’s just ABOMINABLE, isn’t it?

Other gyms sell packages of sessions and don’t pay the trainer the rest of the sessions if the client doesn’t finish them with the trainer.  So if you do a good job and your client learns what they are doing ahead of time, they will stop seeing you because you’re a good teacher, and they think you’re pocketing the rest of the sessions.  WRONG.  The trainer just doesn’t get paid because he/she didn’t work the hours.  Additionally, most places make you do all the scheduling, so if you’re not working with a client, you’re playing scheduling whac-a-mole with all your clients times so that you aren’t working 12-15 hour days while sitting around for hours between clients.  If someone cancels repeatedly, you may or may not get paid for reserving that time slot.

Considering the fact that pay at employed training isn’t enough to make a living, many personal trainers end up having to “under the table” train, ie they squat at various gyms that did not hire them, stealing potential clients and not paying for the equipment they use.  Many gyms don’t think you’re training if you’re “working out with” the client–this is one of the stupidest policies I’ve ever seen in my life.  If an extremely fit guy is working out with someone not even at the same level, you think he’s doing it for free?  He’s just doing it out of the kind service of his heart?  You, as a gym, are ok with the liability of that?  Ok then!

This is also unfair to those who are employed legitimately at those gyms because these freelance trainers can charge what they want and not give half their gross to the employer (and a chunk to the government).  Some even only accept cash and then don’t report it on their taxes.  These trainers are taking business away from the gym.  Because it is the responsibility of management and not the other trainers to report “squatting” trainers (definition 3), they often get away with what they are doing.  Management has these policies to avoid confrontational events, but if management doesn’t enforce it, employed trainers just have to watch it happen and have to bite their tongue.

What makes this worse is so many of these barely qualified trainers do it as a hobby on the side and charge a fraction of the prices you must set if you need to make a living in the industry if you are a full-time trainer.  The amateurs are in a freelance, unregulated market, charging less against fully educated, real professionals.  These amateurs who do it as a hobby lack any experience or education.  Anyone can have a great body, but education makes you know the principles behind why it works and how to assess what other people need and teach other people what they are doing that is or isn’t working in a way that they will understand.  These trainers don’t know (or care in some cases) if their training style is healthy long-term.  Some trainers can be extremely enthusiastic but not know a thing about what they are really doing.

People often gravitate to what the cheapest trainer charges who looks good.  Well guess what?  You get what you pay for.  In many cases, this is eye candy.  Chances are the “ugly” or not overly muscle bound trainer knows what he/she is doing more if they are successful.

You might ask, then, what makes someone with a degree different than someone who just has the bare minimum?  The public thinks we’re here to just “give you a workout and tell you what to do,” and often doesn’t even take our profession seriously.  They think it is about leisure.

There are different techniques of training that yield different results.  Strength training is different from bodybuilding, which is different from endurance training.  Flexibility, agility, fat loss, muscle gain, and strength gain all are different training techniques.  Injuries require alternate techniques than uninjured people and have contraindicated exercises.  Diabetics need to know how exercise will affect their metabolism and how to deal with that.  Sometimes counseling techniques are needed to elicit behavior change.  It is impossible for any one trainer to be excellent at all styles of training, even with a degree, but the degree should give them an idea of where to start at  least.

A trainer with a degree in kinesiology will know a more comprehensive way of working out the body so as to not neglect underused muscles that get injured later on because the person didn’t strengthen the neglected muscles while progressing in their program.  The trainer with the degree thinks by anatomy and muscle actions, letting those needs dictate the training program than having a pre-made, one-size-fits-all workout of the day.  Speaking of generic workouts, many new and uneducated trainers think that you have to burn someone to the ground to train them.  This style only works with a certain population of well-fed individuals who want muscle gain who don’t want any specific training adaptations and are fine with not being able to use their affected body parts for days after.  This sort of training also carries a high risk of injury, such as rhabodomyolysis, which is when muscle cell integrity fails and spills contents (myoglobin) into the blood, which can cause acute kidney failure.

That’s not the point of training.  The point of training is to increase your lifetime functional capacity.  One of the most pointless adaptations is to be able to do something 10-15 times in the long term.  Where in life is this useful?  It’s currently a popular training style because people think that’s how many times you have to do each movement.  Granted, I do recommend somewhere in this range for beginners who are still learning movements and want lower risk of injury during the learning phase, but staying in this repetition range long term when you’re not an endurance athlete is nonspecific training.  The point is to get better at something.

Trainers who aren’t educated won’t know what energy systems and adaptations that produces other than it might make you socially look good for whatever body type is trending right now in the magazines and media.

In summary, the lack of education and low barrier to entry to credibility to the fitness field, the dilution of true professionals in the field, and the business structure of the freelance vs employed environment make the personal training industry a hot mess during an obesity crisis in the US.  Obesity is not fixed with physical activity yet people think it does, and registered dietitians are not even recognized as the key to weight loss on many health plans while the public thinks personal training is the way to do it.



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Exercising for Weight Loss

Jun 26

Posted by Joey Gochnour, BS, BS, MEd, RDN, CSSD, CSOWM, LD, NASM-CPT in Diet or Exercise? | No Comments

Personal training, ie pure physical activity without diet changes, is not an effective way to see weight loss in a client.

Clients are often allowed to check “weight loss” as a goal with exercising for most personal training services, which are generally cheaper than my services as a registered and licensed dietitian.  It is frustrating having to compete for weight loss clients against personal trainers who may not know that weight loss is only achieved with diet changes, especially considering the lack of education of a personal trainer in approaching dietary changes with people.

Scientific studies1,2,3 and my experience in training people who have not made any diet changes in spite of significantly increasing their physical activity capacity demonstrate that there must be a dietary caloric deficit in order to lose weight.

Sure you will become healthier on the inside, gain some lean mass and thus reduce body fat percentage (without weight loss), and your clothes may fit better from exercise (or you may have to buy new ones because the old ones no longer fit), but to see the number go down on the scale, you need to change your eating habits. Moderate aerobic exercise is great for increasing HDL cholesterol and improving blood sugar sensitivity.  Resistance training is also great for building bone density, strong muscles, coordination, and improving blood sugar sensitivity.  However, exercise alone will not make you lose weight!

  1. Int J Obes 21: 941-, 1997.
  2. Int J Sports Nutr 8: 213-, 1998.
  3. Am J Clin Nutr 54: 56-, 1991.

 



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