“You have questions? Hopefully I have the answers. In today’s Q and A, I want to go over a question I received from a member. They were asking, what should I do on the days that I’m not working out?… They said they typically go running or they’ll do a beach-body Shaun T style, higher intensity workout but they often feel tired or depleted afterwards, what should they do in that instance? 

All right. So I’m going to get right into it. I’ve answered kind of, or hinted around this before, but I’m just going to come out and be very blunt about it today. Cardio is not going to take you to your fat loss goal if that is your goal is to lose fat. I don’t know specifically if that’s what they’re trying to achieve. So you always have to start your training, whatever program you’re going in with a clear, defined goal. And that needs to be communicated to the coach, to whoever. At EarthFIT, when somebody comes in, they sit down with me, they communicate their goal; that’s part of the process. I then tell their coaches their goals, and then we use the best scientific principles to get you to your goals. So with training specifically, I’ll just talk about fat loss because that’s typically the goal everybody’s looking to achieve. 

First thing to know, you’re not going to outwork poor nutrition. Nutrition is going to play the largest role by far hands down, for fat loss. So if you’re looking to lose fat, you have to dial in your nutrition. Doing extra workouts is going to do nothing for you. It’s actually going to hurt you because it’s going to slow down your metabolism. Now, if your goals are to put on more muscle which also helps burn fats, then your off training days would look like one or two things.

(1) Either work on mobility because that mobility is thing and transfer over when you go into the gym to better performance, better strength gains.

(2) You could focus on sending a small muscle building signal, not too large of a signal to facilitate recovery, and then more muscle building growth. So what those workouts typically look like are short 10 minute. I like to use resistance band workouts, and you just do small movements like squats, you could do curls. If you’re trying to go for more of your arms, really, whatever body part you’re specifically trying to go after, or build up would be the one that I would suggest you target in those small mini workouts. Now, with those workouts, you do not want to overdo it. You keep the moderate intensity. You do like a five out of 10 on the intensity level. You’re just trying to again, send a small muscle building signal, facilitate some recovery so those muscles can grow. You’re sending the signal that says, “Hey, we need to get stronger”. 

Now I’m going to talk about why running and things like that are not beneficial if you’re trying to get fat loss. So in here, we’re already doing enough cardiovascular activity to stimulate fat oxidation, build up your aerobic capacity. So that physiological adaptation is already covered by the training you’d be doing in EarthFIT. Running outside of here really also it’s going to do is slow down your metabolism, in my opinion. If you’re consistently already training 2-3 days a week, it’s just going to slow down your metabolism. You may see good weight loss for the first, you know, month or two, but after that, your risk of injury is going to increase dramatically. And it can slow down your metabolism because what happens is you run, that’s an endurance style activity or you do like a high intensity workout – those are all telling your body “We don’t want more muscle. We want to pare that down. We need to get lighter.” So it’s going to shed both… The studies will show typically when you run, you’re losing 50% muscle, 50%, fat. So really what happens is your body fat percentage actually goes up because you weigh let’s say you drop 10 pounds. 5 of that is muscle, 5 of that is fat. Well, now you’re actually in a lighter weight, and you still have a high body fat, your body fat percentage actually goes up because you took down the muscle that you previously had with it as well. 

So I hope this clarifies things basically to summarize, if you’re training here at EarthFIT, I would recommend do mobility or a small muscle building workout. There are times and places to do more endurance training, but if you’re going for fat loss, that’s not going to take you there. Instances where you’d want to do more endurance is where you’re going to actually do it in endurance style events. So if you’re training for some type of race, or if you’re training to really just build up a better aerobic base, then that’s fine. Just understand it’s not going to take you specifically to fat loss if that’s your goal.

All right. I hope this clarifies things. I know there’s a lot of little long with it as usually when I get into the cardio topic, but that is all for today. Hope you found value in this video. If you did, give me a thumbs up. If you love it, give me a heart and as always stay strong.”

-EarthFIT Coach Sam