If you’ve taken up running to lose weight but have found you’ve gained more pounds than you’ve shed, a personal trainer has the reason why.
Fitness fanatic Julia Buckley has helped hundreds of people get into shape after they have failed to lose weight despite following a tiring exercise regime.
Writing on her blog, Julia explains that the problem is many people are doing the wrong kind of exercise to shed fat. Her motto is to ‘go harder, not longer’. She believes that if people only do long, steady exercise – like slow marathon training runs – they won’t lose weight. In fact, their bodies will cling to fat to help them keep running for miles.
She explains: ‘Any type of long, slow endurance exercise, when done regularly will cause the body to become more endurance-focused. It will then want to store energy as fat to ensure it has plenty of reserves to get through all the miles it is used to.’
People often also reward themselves after a run by over-eating and consuming more calories than they burnt off making their fat burning efforts futile.
Of course, Julia agrees that running is a great form of exercise with numerous health benefits and many people take pleasure from the sport for reasons beyond dropping a dress size.
But Julia said if your primary goal for running is to lose weight, then long, slow runs are not the best way to shed fat.
You may drop pounds initially, but then find your weight stagnates.
The 37-year-old has learnt this from her own experience. When training for marathons and ultra marathons, she spent hours pushing herself to run long distances but didn’t lose any weight. She thought the answer was to put even more time-consuming miles in – which eventually led to illness and injury – and she still didn’t have the body she wanted.
She says: ‘I’ve never been obese but I certainly had some stubborn extra pounds I just couldn’t seem to shift. And for a fitness writer, that is not a good a look.’
But now Julia has a healthy lean and toned physique without an inch of fat, and she says it’s all thanks to high intensity exercise and pumping iron.
She said: ‘When I switched from long steady exercise to short, high-intensity sessions and added more variety and strength training into my training mix, my body changed. A lot. The fat came off, my energy levels soared and I became healthier, stronger and fitter.’
Now Julia spends less time working out than she did when she was going for 50 mile runs but is in much better physical shape.
Her workouts – which she is sharing in a new online programme, Extreme Inferno, that begins next week – includes weight lifting, core stability exercises and short bursts of efforts which raise the heart rate.
She said these 20-40 minute workouts are much more effective for weightloss because of the “afterburn” effect.
She explains: ‘Your metabolic rate goes through the roof and stays elevated even after you finish training while your body adapts and recovers. This will cause you to burn more fat for 24-48 hours after exercising, depending on how intense the training was. Of course, you also get the health and fitness improvements that come as a result of working your heart, lungs and muscles harder.’
On top of her workouts, Julia still runs but instead of doing long, slow plods, she does shorter, faster ones. She recommends her clients stick to running no more than 30 minutes at a time if their main aim for exercising is fat loss.
One of Julia’s clients, Becca Jones, 40, from London, said it certainly worked for her.
She explains on her blog how she lost a stone after swapping long slow runs for weight lifting and high intensity training.
She said: ‘I’m not saying that running makes you fat or that it’s impossible to lose some fat through long distance running. However, there are other forms of exercise that give much greater bang for the buck in terms of torching fat. So if fat loss is your top priority then in my experience your time would be better spent on lifting weights or exercising at high intensity for short bursts.’
Becca explains that when she trained for her first marathon, she over indulged on the wrong foods as the endurance-based training made her hungry.
She said: ‘When I was training for my first marathon I ate ALL the carbs. I fuelled my runs on pasta, rice, bread, porridge, pizza, sweets, chocolate, cake.’
She added: ‘It’s so easy to reward yourself with a carby sugary treat after a long run. “Go on, have that slice of cake, you’ve run for miles – you deserve it”. All fine, except that if fat loss is your priority then rewarding yourself with cake and chocolate probably isn’t going to help your progress too much in the long run.’
Since taking advice from Julia, Becca has learnt to eat carbs on moderation, re-fuel with protein-based snacks instead of sugary ones, and eat more vegetables.
As a result, she’s found not only has she lost weight, she’s also become a faster runner, gaining personal best times over 5k to marathon since swapping her long-distance jogs for Julia’s strengthening exercises and high intensity training.