Came a question from a reader unto my inbox:
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Matt, I’ve been thinking about NEAT, zone 2 and generally the idea that low intensity, long duration movement is important for weight loss, and some people even seem to think it’s better than higher intensity sprinting type work.
I’ve noticed a discrepancy. I keep observing that people who work retail or adjacent service jobs who are on their feet for hours multiple times a week often seem super out of shape.
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It’s begun to seem to me like if you can get enough nutrition and sleep in to avoid incapacitating yourself, short bursts of high intensity work multiple times a week is actually easier than finding an hour a day to walk around and more of a concrete, simple habit than counting calories. Plus if it also involves strength, like doing lots of push ups for instance, you look better when you lean down. It also seems to be more effective unless you take things all the way and ruck for hours.
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Here’s a line from an email I wrote the other day:
“The leaner you are, the more that sprints and interval training helps to slim the fat tissue.”
Let me tell a story to illustrate.
Years ago, a trainer-friend of mine asked me about a problem with one of her clients. She was working with an obese woman. In their training, she was doing the intense cardio, Crossfit-ish kind of training.
“She’s really good with the workouts. She’s always there and she puts in the work. But she isn’t losing any weight.”
I knew immediately what was wrong, but I threw it out there:
“How much activity is she getting outside of your workouts?”
Direct hit over the target.
This is a perfect case-study of what I call the 165 Hours Effect.
Fitness people focus on what they can see, which is the one, two, or three hours a week of exercise that they do with their clients.
Problem is, there’s 168 hours in a week. You’re hitting 3 of them.
The factors that push against fat-loss, or muscle-gain, or whatever you’re trying to do, have a whole lot more opportunities to do their baleful work than your few hours (at most) of exercise.
There’s opportunities for bad eating, for poor rest and sleep, for lots of psychological and physiological stress, and for being a plain-old lazy sack lounging on the couch.
It came to pass that my friend’s client wasn’t doing jack outside of their sessions together.
“Get her to walk. Every day she can. Aim for 30-60 minutes. If she can only do 15, something is better than nothing.”
Next time I talked to her a month or two later, the client had started to drop weight off.
Why does walking work?
1) Human beings drastically over-state how much activity they do.
2) Human beings drastically under-estimate how much they eat.
Walking gets a person up and moving around. If you’re very heavy, walking is a major stressor that can burn up a good chunk of energy. (Not to mention the simple health-giving effects of blood flow and breathing, which should not be underestimated in the out-of-shape.)
To go a level deeper, add a third thing:
3) Few people really understand how to create intentional changes in their body with training and nutrition.
You can see this misunderstanding with all the false either/or binaries in the reader’s question.
Either you do low-intensity steady state, or high-intensity sprints.
Either you exercise, or you count calories.
Retail people on their feet all day don’t look good because being on your feet by itself does nothing to trigger changes.
Being on you feet has negligible calorie burn once you’re adapted to it.
Activity has its own quality. A solid 40-minute full-body strength-training session is not in the same category as standing on your feet for 8 hours.
Totally different effects on your body, no matter how it feels.
In other words, stop thinking like this.
Stop it.
There are no either/or situations.
You have a set of tools which serve different purposes.
To get the body you want, you use EVERY tool available to you, where it is appropriate.
You wouldn’t tell the contractors building your house that he has to choose between a hammer and a band-saw.
Very overweight and obese people benefit from lots of walking and other low-intensity activity.
The leaner you get, the more sprints and interval-training help to melt off the last lingering fat-pockets.
I use both for myself.
Neither one of them will do a single blessed thing if your diet isn’t on point with both calories and protein intake.
And while “weight loss” can happen even then, the effects of starving yourself skinny are not remotely the same as a slow-walk to maintain muscle.
Strength training is a centerpiece because of its effects on muscle gain and retention.
I don’t wander through life like I’m browsing at the shop.
I take the tools that work and use them where they work.
If you want more focus and direction in your training and nutrition to get to the result… and stop spinning your wheels wasting time with internet fads… then you might be interested in working with me 1:1
It isn’t cheap, and I don’t fluff around with time-wasters. But if you can show me you’re committed to real change, I can help you get there.
You’ll need to be on my email list for access to spaces. Use this link:
Matt Perryman