Ep 84: Why Working Out LESS Burns More Calories and Boosts Your Metabolism and Fat Loss
Can you supercharge your metabolism and maximize fat loss with LESS exercise? In today's episode, we talk about the four key components of metabolism and debunk the myth that more exercise equals more calories burned. We also dive into the drawbacks of over-exercising and the role muscle tissue plays in boosting metabolism.
We talk about strength and cardio training, underlining the multiple benefits of cardio, from enhancing heart health to boosting lung capacity, while also spotlighting the lesser-known yet equally important gains from walking. Overall, you'll learn how to make your workouts not just rigorous but efficient and sustainable for building muscle, losing fat, and improving your body composition.
Tune in to this episode and tap into the science of getting fit.
__________
Book a FREE 30-minute call with Philip here.
__________
Today you’ll learn all about:
[1:55] Reading of two 5-star reviews
[3:23] Components of metabolism
[4:49] Exercising more to burn calories
[7:16] The importance of strength training and muscle
[8:58] Tony shares what he likes about Philip and the Wits & Weights community
[11:26] Constrained energy model
[13:43] Benefits of working out less
[15:26] Effective amount of cardio
[19:04] What is a results breakthrough session, and how to get a free call
[20:37] Outro
FREE 30-minute results breakthrough session with Philip ⬇️
https://witsandweights.com/free-call
Learn about 1-on-1 coaching ⬇️
https://witsandweights.com/coaching
Ask Philip anything ⬇️
IG: @witsandweights
Email: philip@witsandweights.com
Podcast: Q&A voicemail
🥩 Download Ultimate Macros Guide and 50 High-Protein Recipes here
🫙 Get high-quality 1st Phorm supplements here
👏 ENJOY THE SHOW?
Have you followed the podcast?
Get notified of new episodes. Use your favorite podcast platform or one of the buttons below. Then hit “Subscribe” or “Follow” and you’re good to go!
Transcript
Philip Pape 00:00
So if you're running a lot, right, if you're a marathon runner, that's the extreme. But even if you're just running on a regular basis, your body's gonna adapt to that. It's going to become more calorie efficient. And so it is going to burn fewer extra calories for extra, every extra calorie of work put into it, and it becomes less and less efficient. Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast. I'm your host, Philip pape, and this twice a week podcast is dedicated to helping you achieve physical self mastery by getting stronger. Optimizing your nutrition and upgrading your body composition will uncover science backed strategies for movement, metabolism, muscle and mindset with a skeptical eye on the fitness industry. So you can look and feel your absolute best. Let's dive right in. Wits & Weights community Welcome to another solo episode of the Wits & Weights podcast. I hope you enjoyed our last episode 83 with Christopher Mar, where we explored stress management and the fascinating intersection of eastern and western medicine in the context of your body's well being today for Episode 84, titled Why working out less burns more calories and boosts your metabolism and fat loss. We are myth busting the idea that the more you workout, the higher your expenditure, or your daily calories burned, more exercise, more cardio, more soreness, more sweat more suffering, these are not necessary. And in fact exercise are what we're going to use, we're going to use the word training from here on out can be both intrinsically rewarding and be fun, and a way to massively ramp up your metabolism to make fat loss easier for the rest of your life. No, you do not have to get destroyed, wiped or drained by your workouts. You can do a lot less during the week and make tremendous progress, in fact much more progress than most people who are slaving away with exercise all the time and doing it effectively. Now before we get into the details, I did want to read a couple recent five star reviews from listeners. The first one is by the very own Dr. Bill Campbell of the body by science research review. I'm a subscriber to that I was thrilled to see that he wrote a review. And he said, quote, a well informed podcast that gets away from the fats and brings the attention back to where things should be relative to our exercise and nutritional programs on the things that are sustainable and repeatable over time. I'm glad he gets it. And I've been following Bill's work for a while now. He will be coming on for an interview soon. So if you want to catch that, make sure to subscribe again, subscribe or follow to this podcast right now so you don't miss it. And if you're watching the video do the same. Another review is from Heather former hooter who says quote, I liked the show more than I was expecting to Okay, so I got to do a better job on my marketing there. Great expert guest very nuanced and non judgment, judgmental discussion about health and weight, highly recommend star shooting star Modi. All right. Thank you, Heather, especially for the words nuanced and non judgmental because that is definitely what we are going for. All right. Now let's dive into today's topic. The title of this episode is why working out less burns more calories and boost your metabolism and fat loss. And to do this, we do have to understand a little bit more about metabolism. I'm going to try to keep it brief. You know how I can get sometimes I get excited about this. But I'm going to first define the components of metabolism. talked about this before in several shows, but it's always good to have a refresher. There are four components, the BMR t f, neat and eat. BMR is your basal metabolic rate. This is the calories needed to perform basic life sustaining functions like breathing, and it accounts for roughly two thirds to up to three quarters of your expenditure. Okay, that's number one. Number two is your thermic effect of food. This is the energy required for digesting absorbing disposing your nutrients. And that's one 10% Then we have neat neat is my favorite This is everything we do that is not sleeping, eating or intentional exercise. So it's walking, cleaning, fidgeting, this can vary a lot based on your lifestyle, your job or how much you move throughout the day. And it can account for anywhere from like 10 to 30% of your expenditure. And then finally we have eat exercise Activity Thermogenesis oh by the way, I don't know if I defined I don't know if I define neat but it was non exercise Activity Thermogenesis. So eat is exercise Activity Thermogenesis, and this is structured planned exercise, whether it is lifting, playing a sport running. And this accounts for something like 5% a really, really small percentage of your metabolism and here's the thing. So here's the underlying practical theory that we're going to touch on multiple times throughout the show. When you try to exercise the calories or when you try to exercise over over every day, lots of running lots of cardio, lots of eat, okay, just to quote unquote burn calories, your body tends to compensate. It reduces energy expenditure in other areas, either in your neat, like you just move and fidget less than other times of the day without realizing it, or even by down regulating your hormones to reduce your expenditure to actually conserve more energy. So that's like, that's a core of why we're going to say that too much exercise is actually hurting you. And also, who loves to do all that exercise, nobody talks, like generally, nobody does. Very, very few people do, right. And in this community, we're we're, we're thinking about our body composition, our health, and longevity and all these things. We want it to be sustainable, right, going back to the five star review about being a sustainable approach, that's what it is, sustainability is something you could do for the long term until you're in your 70s 80s 90s. Literally till the day you die, you can do these things. Okay. The other thing that's really important for metabolism is the role of muscle muscle is muscle tissue is metabolically active. So it increases your metabolism, the more you have, and just recently, I think stronger by science reviewed the data again, and showed that roughly nine to 10 calories per pound of muscle per day. So it's not a massive amount, but it's also not nothing, meaning if you add 10 pounds of muscle over the next, you know, eight to 12 months, your new lifter, and that's a reasonable amount, and you're gonna make an extra 100 calories a day, add another 10 pounds of on top of that over the next few years after that, another 100. So you can be walking around with 20 pounds more muscle burning 200 more calories a day. That's a significant difference, right? 200 calories day is 1400 calories a week, it's almost a half a pound of fat, a week of flexibility. So muscle is metabolically active. And these both these concepts, the idea that your body adapts to too much of too much high intensity cardio or movement. And that muscle is important for increasing your metabolism. By increasing your BMR like the calories you burn all you burn all day, even while you're sleeping. That's really important to this discussion. So that leads me to the first assertion I'm going to make, which is that strength training is extremely important to this whole process. And we've talked before about training versus exercise, right? Exercise is going to the gym moving a lot. It's generally not structured and maybe may have a little structure to it like a class structure. But it generally does not focus on improving some skill over time progressing over time, in particular, strengthen muscle mass, which is what we focus on. Okay. So we know that strength training leads muscle growth, and then that muscle leads to the metabolic benefits of muscle and increases your metabolism. Higher metabolic rate, but there's also a little side benefit. And I looked into the literature and feel free to challenge me but it's called oh boy, what is it epoch? What does that stand for? It's like the afterburner effect, okay. Now, it's been downplayed quite a bit over the years with as more evidence comes out. But the idea is that after some form of more intense deliberate exercise, whether it is training, lifting, cardio, whatever, you will burn more calories the rest of the day than you would have otherwise. And they do show that this can last for anywhere from like two to 10 hours, it used to be a lot more than that they thought that about two to 10 hours, and it can burn up to something like anywhere from 100 to 200 more calories from a lifting session. Then, then other types of of sessions, so lifting or high intensity, cardio, alright. It's a little side effect. I just wanted to mention it but I also wanted to not overstate it. Because if people are like yeah, that's the reason we want to lift because you're gonna get this huge afterburn effect. That's not that's just a tiny thing.
08:58
My name is Tony Romo strength lifter in my 40s Thank you to Phil in his Wits, & Weights community for helping me learn more about nutrition and how to implement better ideas into my strength training. Phil has a very, very good understanding of macros and chemical compounds and hormones and all that and he's continuously learning and that's what I like about Phil. He's got a great sense of humor. He's very relaxed, very easy to talk to. One of the greatest things about Phil in my view is that he practices what he preaches. He also works out with barbells. He trains heavy you notice that he has made but he trains heavy. So if you talk with him about getting in better shape, eating better, he's probably going to give you some good advice and I would strongly recommend you talk with him and help you out. Thanks.
Philip Pape 09:43
One other side benefit I thought of was strength training is its role in blood sugar control, right? I hear about this a lot. And I talk about it a lot and the guys like Brandon Cruz and others how muscles are a sink for your glucose right? And they control blood sugar in there, folks. I just recently had a a Results breakthrough session. These are the free calls that I provide with somebody who he's 50 been lifting most of his life big, strong guy, you know, wants to lose some fat. And his doctor basically said, Look, if it wasn't for all the muscle, you have your blood pressure and your all your other numbers, you know, lipids and so on would bleed or your blood sugar and so on, would probably be in an unhealthy range. But they're actually in a fairly normal range, mainly because you have all this extra muscle mass. And the reason I mentioned that is because that also contributes to metabolism and fat loss, and just makes the whole thing easier. It just makes the whole thing so much easier. All right. So that's, that's the importance of strengthen muscle. Now, what about the other side, the training and the excessive cardio, right? Going back to that endurance adaptation that I talked about. Not only does your body compensate, but it also just overall adapts to that specific mode of training. So you've probably heard the concept of specificity, or stress recovery adaptation. We talk about that from a muscle perspective. But it also works from an endurance perspective. So if you're running a lot, right, if you're a marathon runner, that's the extreme. But even if you're just running on a regular basis, your body's going to adapt to that it's going to become more calorie efficient. And so it is going to burn fewer extra calories for X every extra calorie of work put into it, and it becomes less and less efficient. Now there's something called the constrained energy model proposed by Herman Ponsor at all. And he wrote a book called burn about this phenomenon. And it tends to be misunderstood, misapplied, mis interpreted, whatever. But generally, if you go from sedentary to some level of movement, you're gonna burn quite a bit more calories just doing that. But if you go from being somewhat active to more active, the extra calories burned, tend to not tend to not match the extra work put into it. So that's where I'm going in that, when you do all this extra work and think you're gonna burn a lot more calories, your body will just keep getting more and more efficient, like stingy with those calories. It says, Hey, you're telling me that all these cows, this energy coming in needs to be constantly burned, I'm just going to make it very efficient to do that, because that's what you're telling me. I'm going to downregulate my, the thyroid and the metabolism, and I might even up your hunger signals a bit to make you hungrier, and so on. Whereas when you strength train, you don't have that effect. When you walk a lot, you don't have that effect. Okay, so couple that with the fact that a lot of movement every day, can easily lead to overtraining. And overtraining affects recovery and thus, metabolism. So the, the extra stress on your body, the impact here, your muscles, you get muscle tears, from lots of running and other types of types of cardio like that. The the lack of sleep, or you're not able to sleep as much, or maybe you just don't have as much time to sleep, because you're doing all this exercise versus strength training, where you just need that sleep and recovery and you get it. This could affect your cortisol, which is your stress hormone, it can disrupt your sleep and disrupt your mood. And then you even have a greater risk of injury, when you're doing all of this exercise. Just, you know, strength training is one of if not the lowest chance of injury of like all the sports modalities. You know, soccer is way up there near the top, anything when you're running around gets you smack heads with each other is going to be a higher chance. But even just running in higher stress forms of cardio can do that. So a lot of this exercise where you're just constantly moving all the time, has these other side impacts that you don't often think about that you don't have with lifting. Okay. So what are the benefits of working out less, number one, improved recovery, you simply have fewer sessions that you're working out. So you have more time in between more time to rest, not only between workouts, but between exercises in between sets of those exercises. If you are lifting heavy by heavy we mean things like barbells and dumbbells, maybe some cables, but up in the four to six rep range for the big compound lifts like squats like deadlifts, or maybe in the anywhere from, you know, six to 12 range for some more direct work. But it's almost a failure or within a few reps shy of failure. It's heavy, you take longer rest periods, you take longer rest between sets, and you don't go as often throughout the week, beginners three days a week, advanced for maybe five. Six is is a specialized thing, which is its own thing if we're talking about spreading out the fatigue and stuff like that, but let's just talk about three or four days a week, which is a lot this lot less than seven days. All right. We talked about another benefit of having of working out less is because you're focusing on strength training, you have more muscle that muscle burns more calories. Awesome. This also manages hunger. Okay, and As you get more rest, you get less stress, you get improved sleep, all of these contribute to your metabolic rate. They all spiral on top of each other. Because if you get less sleep, you your hormones down regulate, and you get hungrier, and your metabolism goes down. And that doesn't help, because now it's hard to stick to a diet and so on. So forth. Right? Okay, so what do we want to do with all this? I didn't want to make this too long of an episode. But the last thing I want to talk about is cardio itself, like, am I telling you never to do cardio? Of course not. Of course, now, I've come to the realization through the evidence and experience, that cardio can be a great form of movement, if done right and done effectively from a programming perspective, meaning we prioritize our lifting. And then we don't do more than half of the time lifting as cardio. So if you lift three days a week for an hour, up to an hour and a half a week of cardio, cardio can improve your cardiovascular health, hence the name, it can improve your view to match your lung capacity, brain function, mood, you know, endorphins, we all know that most people don't like lots of it, though. So it can be helpful in short, highly effective bursts, like high intensity interval training, or even a medium intensity cardio just for maybe a half hour at a time, a few days a week. Okay, cardio, yes can burn a lot of calories in a short amount of time, which can contribute to fat loss or in a fat loss phase, but so can lots of walking. And it's easier to walk all day, but you can't do cardio all day, and you get all the other recovery and impact negatives from cardio. Now, there are forms of cardio that are less impactful like biking, swimming, pushing, or pulling a prowler sled where they're primarily concentric on the concentric, half of the muscle movement. So if you think of a bike, you're pumping the legs, but then they come up without any force. Whereas when you run, you are your force forcing on the lake. I'm not speaking very clearly here, but you're basically pounding into the pavement right here pushing off and you're, you're holding your weight as it compresses downwards. So that is an eccentric load that you're placing each time, let alone the impact on your knees, joints, everything else, especially compounded when most people have terrible form when they run that. So yes, you can burn some calories. Now here's the cool thing. Walking burns almost as many calories as running per mile, especially when it's when it's brisk walking, said this before, and I'll say it over and over again, you can only run for like 2030 minutes generally, before you start to get winded, you can walk for 1234 hours cumulative throughout the day, when you add it all up to get 10 12,000 steps, and you're gonna burn almost many calories. So if you're talking just apples to apples with calories, that's one way to do it. And again, walking is extremely low impact and sustainable. So, combine strength and cardio together in this nice beautiful way. And you will reap the benefits of both. Remember that working out less will not meaningfully reduce your expenditure and may actually increase it if you shift from a constant movement, endurance style high rep for high rep form of exercise to a lots of rest and recovery. You know, intense short workout sessions when I say intense, I mean like heavy with the barbell or whatever you're using for your lifting. And you get all these other benefits. So just to recap, metabolism is made up of those four components, one of which is controlled by your muscle mass, another is controlled by walking. And then the other is controlled by exercise, which is a very, very tiny amount. The body is compensates the body adapts strength training is the most important mode of training we can do if we care about our body composition, health and longevity. There are drawbacks with endurance adaptations with overtraining on recovery, when you do too much of this other movement, as well as its side impacts on sleep, stress, mood, cortisol, and so on. And so working out less can definitely increase your metabolism and fat loss. All right. So I hope you have now
Philip Pape 19:05
a good place to start when you ask that question. But if you've listened to all this, if you're still wondering exactly how do I structure this in my personal routine, how do I change the way I move and lift so my expenditure does not take a hit and I get all the benefits that Philip talked about. And if you need some more clarity and confidence, click the link in my show notes for a free results breakthrough session with me seriously, this is a free 30 minute call with me where I give you a clear strategy and action steps to take right away that's all he do. I map it out on a whiteboard. And we say we want to go from here to here. How do we do it boom, boom, boom, here's some actions gives you more certainty to move in the right direction. Whether it's your health, your fitness, your physique, all those things. Again, just use the link in my show notes for the free call. And then we can go over where you are now where you want to be and get you that laser focused vision. I do not sell you pay He or mentioned my services at all on the call unless you ask. I've helped dozens of people who do not become clients, but they are now finally making significant rapid progress toward their goals because we had this call. So click the link in my show notes and let's make that happen. Next week for episode 85 is an interview with Mark piont. I was on his show earlier in the year. And then I had him on to talk about the role of physical health in your mental health, coping with stress, managing stress and knowing that you are never alone on this journey to fascinating discussion. So definitely follow or subscribe to the show right now in your favorite podcast app so you do not miss it. As always, stay strong. And I will talk to you next time here on the Wits & Weights podcast. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Wits & Weights. If you found value in today's episode, and know someone else who's looking to level up their Wits & Weights, please take a moment to share this episode with them. And make sure to hit the Follow button in your podcast platform right now to catch the next episode. Until then, stay strong
