Click Here To Watch: Fat Loss and Muscle Gain with Less Activity
Fat Loss and Muscle Gain with Less Activity
So this video is going to be a game-changer and really challenge the way you look at the relationship between activity, weight loss, and building muscle.
So a lot of people over the years will talk about the weight that they put on whenever they’re not active and doing less, but is that really true?
And does activity or lack of activity for that matter have anything to do with building muscle?
So, here’s my experience.
I train three times a week with high-intensity workouts that last anywhere between 10, 15 to 20 minutes. And with that training, I was able to go from 125 pounds to realizing my goal of being a successful natural bodybuilder.
And I’ve trained this way for the past 33 years, and managed to look like this a full 20 years after my last natural bodybuilding competition.
And before the pandemic, I had a pretty hectic schedule.
I’d wake up, go train clients, come back home, then go out and train clients again, and that would give me an activity level somewhere around 10,000 to 12,000 steps every single day.
But the pandemic happened, gyms closed.
I’m training from home, I’m training clients online.
And my daily activity because of the lockdown, goes from 12,000 to 10,000 steps per day to only about 2,500 to 3,000 steps a day max, major difference.
And because I train with high intensity for only just about an hour a week, you would imagine that that drastic drop in overall activity would mean that I would gain a lot of weight, but what actually happened will surprise you.
So I know you want to know what happened. So stay tuned. Let’s talk more about that.
So in this video we’re talking about the relationship between activity and weight loss, fat loss and muscle building.
Namely what happened when the lockdown made it such that I went from an activity level of having about 10 to 12,000 steps per day to only 2,500 to 3000 steps per day training in both cases for only about an hour a week.
But before I go any further, I’d like to thank everyone for tuning in, especially those that feel this is a one stop place for anyone training naturally without drugs or steroids.
Thank you so much, and do be sure to like, subscribe and hit the bell so you’re first in line to get the new content as it comes out.
So the suspension is building, I know you want to know what happened and here’s exactly what happened.
Fat Loss and Muscle Gains From Less Activity and High Intensity Training
When my activity level plummeted, I lost body fat, lost weight, and was more muscular.
When the lockdown started, I weighed exactly 207 pounds.
I was able to drop down to somewhere around 203 to 205 pounds with less activity.
When I dropped down from 207 to 205, 203, I didn’t get smaller.
I saw myself getting more defined and also hardening up at the same time.
And here’s the most important part, and I think something you’re not going to see very often, my diet was exactly the same.
I’m the person who eats exactly the same thing every day, day in, day out.
My diet doesn’t change.
I never have cheat meals, I don’t indulge in junk food.
I don’t stray off my diet.
Everything stays exactly the same.
And my caloric intake when I was averaging an activity level of somewhere between 12,000 to 10,000 steps per day running up and down to going to only 2,500 to 3,000 steps per day were exactly the same.
No different.
Inactivity Does Not Cause Weight Gain – It’s All Diet
And that’s extremely important because like I said at the beginning, a lot of people blame inactivity for their weight gain over time.
But the problem is in almost every single of those situations, those people didn’t track exactly what they ate and they didn’t eat exactly the same things every single day.
So there’s no real control to figure out what exactly caused that weight gain.
And in my experience, weight gain is completely dietary related.
It is not activity related.
Now, some of you out there might think that that doesn’t make sense, but here’s the problem with thinking that way.
Science isn’t about explanations nor is science about things making sense.
Science is about repeatable outcomes.
Dancers Losing Weight And Building Muscle From Doing Less
And here’s the important part. This isn’t an isolated incident by any stretch.
It’s what I have seen time and time again with my clients and people training over the course of three decades.
In fact, I’ll give you another scenario which perfectly encapsulates it.
I’ve worked on a lot of dancers over the years, going to dance school, dancing pretty much every single day.
Day in, day out, six, seven days a week then they leave dance school.
And on leaving dance school, they literally have a drop in their overall activity level.
All the time they’re training with high intensity workouts that last a maximum of less than an hour over the course of a week.
Now you would expect that a dancer who cuts down so significantly on their overall activity levels would put weight on as a result.
But while following the exact same diet, when their activity levels drastically went down, their muscle mass increased and their body fat decreased.
This isn’t something, again, that I saw once.
It’s something I saw time and time again. And so by doing less, it means that there’s more recovery time, which seems to somehow on the other way with high intensity training to lead to increased weight loss and increased muscle mass.
100lb Plus Weight Loss From High Intensity Training and Less Activity
And then there are more examples in terms of weight loss that clients that I’ve had over the years that have all crossed a hundred pound weight loss barriers were the ones who did the least.
People who tend to do things like cardio on their off days or a lot of exercise base activities on their off days.
And the idea of trying to lose weight faster or lose more weight always seemed to lose less weight than those who didn’t do much of anything in between their workouts.
The Real Relationship Between Activity and Energy Expenditure
Now that might sound completely irrational, but none of this in any shape or form is defined by the fundamental laws of physics, it’s just simple biology.
The problem is in the fitness industry when people talk about energy expenditures, they talk about it from a bit of an outdated perspective.
And that initially when we were trying to understand how much energy human beings were expending while doing activity, you’d use a setup to essentially put a gas mask over an individual while they did some kind of cardiovascular activity and then measure how much energy was expended.
Pretty simple concept.
It’s how we know how much energy more or less is expended during different activities.
But there’s a problem with that, in that none of those procedures took into consideration what happened after the activity.
And it was only when we were able to do something called full room calorimetry. We were able to put individuals into a room, measure how much energy they expended during activity, and then over the course of 24 to 48 hours seeing exactly what happened to them metabolically we were really able to see that there’s a bit of a problem with just simply measuring activity expenditures.
For example, if someone does a cardiovascular activity that caused them to expend about 200 kilocalories, what happens over the next 24 to 48 hours is that the amount of energy that their body expends on an hourly basis is going to slowly be reduced until it compensates for that 200 extra calories that were burned, putting them back into equilibrium with the amount of calories that their bodies usually expend.
Now, that might sound completely irrational, but if you think about it from an evolutionary point of view, it makes perfect sense.
An Evolutionary Perspective Regarding Activity Levels
If it was that our ancestors had to expend a lot of energy in their activity levels, we probably wouldn’t be here.
Keeping in mind that in our ancestral environment without supermarkets and restaurants and everything else, all the food that you were able to ingest were food that you either hunted or gathered, which requires a significant amount of actual activity to get those foods.
And so it makes sense that our body to be conservative in doing everything possible to minimize the amount of calories used if we perform a large amount of activity.
And again, there are a lot of studies out there that back this up, the Hadza are hunter gatherers and they spend a lot of time walking for miles and miles hunting and foraging and measurement of their daily total energy expenditure.
Surprisingly found that their expenditures were identical to that are sedentary westerners, which suggests that even major differences in terms of your overall activity levels have little to do with overall energy expenditure, which means that prevalence of obesity come primarily, as I said, from differences in energy intake, (what you eat) rather than activity levels.
How High Intensity Weight Training Increases Cardiovascular Fitness
The problem is, we don’t have enough studies that really look into this in terms of how that relates to muscle mass.
And that my experience over the years has always been that individuals who trained three times a week will always seem to put on more muscle mass and lose more body fat than those training more and any anytime so, but any type of steady state cardio into that mix, their results were always drastically less.
And again, this is not a dis against cardio.
No way.
It’s not me saying you should never do it or it’s bad for you, but it’s me giving you my observations of what I’ve seen having trained hundreds of men and women over the course of three decades.
The short answer is no.
Every single time I’ve gone for a stress test, I’ve always scored the top one percentile.
And I’ve even had people arguing with me that I must be doing cardio or running or something or the other because there’s no way my fitness levels can be so high as someone who only lifts weight.
But it’s all I do.
Bear in mind that the cardiovascular system supports the muscular system, not the other way around.
So if you train your muscles at extremely high intensity the way that I do, you will increase significantly your cardiovascular fitness.
And like I said before, for those who have limited amounts of time but are seeking maximum fitness, this is a game changer.
And again, this is not my idea.
This is not what I think things should be or how I think things are.
It’s what I’ve observed and also the reason why this challenge exists.
A lot of what I see people talking about in the fitness world doesn’t actually correlate what I’ve seen and observed with actual human beings over the course of decades to whom much is given, much is expected, which is why I always try to share my knowledge with you.
And I hope that the information I put out here helps you have a perspective based on repeatable outcomes, that you can then take that information and apply it to your own training with regards to achieving your goals.
So I know we have a lot of comments and questions about this. Do be sure to put them below.
Thanks for tuning in and as always, Excelsior!
CLICK FOR A FREE COPY OF KEVIN’S WEIGHT LOSS EBOOK!Featured everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to CBS News, Kevin Richardson’s Naturally Intense High Intensity Training have helped hundreds lose weight and transform their bodies with his 10 Minute Workouts. One of the top natural bodybuilders of his time, Kevin is also the international fitness consultant for UNICEF and one of the top personal trainers in New York City.
