This article for those who are interested in losing fat/understanding the Malaysian fat epidemic. This is also not for those who's already skinny, or trying to gain mass with failure (the hopeless skinny bastard).
First of all, some facts:
Using the BMI method (which is pretty accurate as more than 90% of people are nowhere near muscular/athletic), Malaysia has the highest obesity rates in Asia, period. But then again, you don't need statistics; you can see it whenever you walk into the shopping mall. And did you know that only about 1% of people who try to lose weight fail to retain the lost weight? What's worrying as well is that even if you're skinny, you might not be healthy in the Malaysian context. There are people within normal BMI's who have dyslipidemia (aka skinny but high BF%).
So your goals are to:
1) Not become unhealthy/fat in the first place.
2) To become healthier/reduce fat if you're not healthy/fat.
3) If you don't want to reduce your weight, you can still become healthier by maintaining your weight but by reducing your lean body mass with a concomitant decrease in body fat%.
The culprits are two-fold:
1) We eat too much overall, or too much of certain things
2) We move too little
Let's go to the second one first, which is easier to tackle.
We Move Too Little
Most Malaysians are in fact, sedentary to the core. Urbanization and the infiltration of electronics which have become more and more a part of everyday life and culture has led to a reduction in physical activity. Urbanization in itself has led to a reduction of time that can be spent to exercise.
The fact that we move so little is reflected in our basal metabolic rate. You don't need to measure it as it's observable in our people. Being a hot and humid country, our people should be sweating a lot. It surprises me that many Malaysians have become so sedentary that they're pretty much room temperature intolerant, much less air-conditioned rooms. What is perplexing is that they blame my heat intolerance on being fat. When I give them examples of people who can wear multiple layers of clothes in hot wheather and be comfortable and fat, they couldn't recruit them. It's like you're looking at hypothyroid people.
When you become fatter, you are more heat intolerant if your BMR remains relatively the same, not if it plummets down and down. Retrospectively, I was even more heat intolerant during the Matric years; I had to shower before Zuhur prayers as my shirt was always just literally drenched from sweat going from class to class.
Most Malaysians do not prefer to exercise, and that's a pity. When it comes to fat loss, exercise has many benefits:
1) exercise in itself burns calories
2) certain modalities build lean mass, which allows you to actually show something once you've shed some fat
3) you greatly improve cardiovascular health, musculoskeletal health, and relieve stress. Check your resting heart rate. If you can't get below 65 (70 is already high if you're an athlete), you're just not fit enough cardiovascular-wise.
This post won't discuss the merits of each exercise modality (cardio, resistance training, sports) in details, but here's a brief overview of the pros and cons (your choice is up to you):
1) Cardio (especially steady-state) is the easiest and the cheapest, and its goal is to burn calories, period. But it's responsible for a chronic increase in stress hormones and a decrease in androgens (there's no such thing as a muscular jogger, ever). There is an increased risk of overuse injuries related to the knees and feet. Cyclists are at risk of lower back pain.
2) Resistance training is what gives you lean mass, strength, and super-dense bones to prevent osteoporosis; modifications can also burn fat. But there's an increased risk of injuries anywhere related to poor form in performing the exercises (common) and increased risk of functional imbalances from imbalanced programs which may lead to injuries later (not that the sedentary people are excluded from this). For example while deadlifting alone there's a risk of rupturing your erector spinae, tearing your hamstrings, contributing to patello-femoral knee pain, or worst of all, bursting your intervertebral disc, depending on you performing the exercises correctly.
3) Sports (the exertional type of course, not chess) gives you a goal, and that is to win. It also gives you the highest avenue for socialization. And due to competitiveness, you might exert yourself to win; all the better for your health. The problem is that you need um, people to play with, at the correct time. And sports in itself may cause injuries secondary to fouls or secondary to inherent imbalances which should have been corrected with the adequate dose of resistance training and cardio.
The problem with trying to exercise for most people are multiple:
1) there's no motivation/desire. As stated before, this article is not going to adress that at all.
2) time/people barrier.
3) fatigue.
Let's try to solve the time/people barrier.
The easiest solution is always to plan your activities, weeks in advance. This allows you to plan beforehand your other activities to not interfere with your exercise plans as much as possible. And even if you have too many obligations, planning means that you just might be able to squeeze in some time for exercise somewhere. And always plan ahead your alternative activites, in case you suddenly can't perform your intended exercise at the last minute.
In my case, I've timed my exercise schedule in advanced, which is the same every week (being :
Usually - Mon-Tue (weights), Wed (cardio), Thu-Fri (weights), Sat (cardio)
Occasionally - Mon, Wed, Fri, Sat (weights), Tue, Thu (cardio)
Very rarely - Sports on cardio days.
Being a student, I've the luxury to always have my weights sessions on time, whether they are done at night or in the evening. Having a gym that closes at 10 helps in my case. Of course, if you are busier, you will have to adjust accordingly. But it certainly can be done. Worst comes to worst, you could allocate 2 days to train per week. When I was really short on time, I would train right before sleep, with a dumbbell. Before I trained at a gym (only about 4 months ago), the only equipment I had were (eventually) 2 10 kg dumbbells, 1 very good quality (Reebok) leather jump rope, and a chinup bar. Being inexperienced in the workload of housemanship (which will be a challenge for me), I can't comment on time allocation in that setting. But improving cardiovascular activity (e.g. with high intense cardio right before sleep if that's all you have) will always help in improving your work capacity, whether you're a university student or a worker.
Work capacity was improved unintentionally in many students during school days by biking to and fro; improved on purpose in boarding schools by making sports compulsory; why not implement such measures for us adults? Look at the extraordinary work capacity of soldiers.
Even a little can help. And that little will improve body composition and work capacity, which brings tangible benefits in itself. Start small, e.g. a session per week, and build up as you are more comfortable with the load and able to fit in more time for exercise.
In summary, to deal with the time factor:
1) Plan your exercise in advance, to fit in your sessions between compulsory activities
2) When everything fails, do anything before sleep (something that you can fit in 10 minutes time)
3) Start small, and build up from there
Next is the people factor. Exercise is difficult if there are no partners to help you. That's what sports provide: companionship, competitiveness, and inherently much more fun.
The solution is simple: train like an athlete during the off-season: lot's of conditioning, strength + mass building, a minimal amount of actual sports (2 days at most). For example: if you can, say, train 3-4 days a week, make 2 of those resistance training, with 1 cardio. And make cardio day sports day. Whenever there's not enough people to play sports with, you have cardio to fall back to. Make individual training a priority, sprinkled in with group stuff.
This is how I fit in sports into my schedule; just as a kicker to give me enthusiasm by mingling with other people. On cardio days, I might go to the IMC b-ball court and play. But if there's not enough people playing, I just go either to the gym/hostel and do my cardio there. Besides, for the most part sports is mostly about cardio and probably 30% strength anyways.
In summary:
1) Make exercise an individual exercise your priority, with individual exercise an alternative whenever you don't have enough people for group sports.
2) Sports is for the most part cardio, so treat sports and cardio as the same.
Last but not least is fatigue.
The first thing as regards to fatigue is managing what you do when you're awake to allow yourself enough sleep. That means sacrificing some aspects of your activities. If you're fat and not fit/healthy, that hour of exercise is probably more important than the hour you spend playing video/computer games or watching TV shows. Doing both means eating into your sleep, which is not how you want to manage fatigue. As you're able to fit in your exercise seamlessly into your schedule, you may transition those activities back in.
Another underrated issue is that most people exercise on an empty stomach. In sports, nutrition, whether pre-workout or post-workout, is a key element in improving performance. For general purposes, eat your meals either 1 hour before, or within 30 minutes after your session. Note that this does not necessarily mean extra meals. Giving nutrients to your body when it's starving for it ensures optimal fatigue management.
And since we're talking about nutrition, you can't recover well from intense sessions if you're eat crap and sleep with poor posture etc. Google up tips on proper sleeping, and learn to eat nutritious foods. Eat more nutrient dense foods, e.g. livers, and most of all vegetables. I'm talking about the foods rich in vitamins and minerals. As a rule of thumb, you're not eating enough of these types of foods. People trying to thin out are so caught up in macronutrients (carbs/protein/fats) that they forget that other nutrients come into play in your physiology. And if you're not interested in choosing a variety of healthy foods, get those supplements of vitamins and minerals. You will feel better if you're deficient in something.
As regards to your programming, remember that the best way to improve fatigue management is by incorporating work capacity building measures, whether it involves weights or not. The options are endless, whether it's by incorporating simple steady state cardio or even by the use of complexes with weights. If you don't have these in your "programming", put them in.
I'll continue with the nutrition aspect in my next post, and another post will touch on some other "intangibles" that concern both exercise and nutrition but not touched in details in both (yet displayed in the blog posts).
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