It’s that wonderful time of the year where your social media will suddenly fill with everyone either starting some sort of fitness/diet journey or anyone who has ever been to a gym or lost some weight will start telling you how they diet and exercise in a hope that you too could have their body! I’ve not seen one yet but I’m especially excited to see a 21-day better glutes challenge where you will basically do squats and glute bridges incorrectly for 21 days and finish up with bigger quads which in turn will make your glutes look smaller by comparison.
Oh the joys of watching people with very little knowledge of what they are doing try to teach others. I can’t even argue that they are just trying to be helpful as most of them monetise the process somehow even if its just through doing paid ads. No doubt some extraordinary pill or gel or fat burning coffee is about to do the rounds too. If you take it for 21 days and see the results yourself then you’ll be amazed! It really is incredible what effects laxatives and diuretics can have on bloating. Does nothing for your health or body composition though. I feel I’m due a good old moany ramble about something and this weeks’ rant of choice is based around the challenges that appear around this time of year, or any other time of year, and are just tricks to distract you from doing what you are really supposed to be doing. No doubt I’ll get side-tracked, but I will try and stay on topic.
So, what’s my issue with someone doing a challenge or trying something new that could be beneficial for 21 days? Well, there’s a few things.
Does the punishment fit the crime?
You’re looking at a problem you’ve had for probably a number of years and trying to make significant progress towards correcting it with a secret ‘hack’. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it doesn’t exist. There is no hack. You’re first step to identifying what you should be doing is identifying what you want to change. Are you trying to get a bigger bum? Are you trying to lose fat? Are you trying to do both? Do you want to be stronger? Fitter? Healthier? Any combination of these? Well, some of them don’t pair up and most of them won’t be fixed by one solution alone. Let’s say we have a client that would like to build a bigger bum, get stronger and reduce body fat. The challenge I’ve seen previously that comes to mind for achieving these goals is the squat challenge. Wrong. First of all, few people have the ability and competence to perform squats correctly without guidance and even fewer people are aware that glute activation and significant involvement only happens when the knees reach an angle beneath 90 degrees. That’s just the first issue. The second is that reduction of body fat is not based on exercise. It would be a result of dietary choices like maintaining a negative calorie balance among other things. The third problem would be that growth and reduction at the same time aren’t possible. Yes, you could make your bum appear more pronounced by reducing fat however you would lose inches. Multiple factors are at play here and a challenge won’t give the desired response and that will more than likely lead to demotivating you and the end of your fitness/health/diet journey until next new year.
Are you just repeating mistakes?
The mentality is totally wrong. The world health organisation believes that in order for people to make changes to their health and body composition they must be willing to make lifelong adaptations. And yet here my industry is trying to sell quick fixes or hook you onto a product that is a ‘minimal effort, no fuss solution’ to your problems. It will always be doomed to fail. I cannot explain how frustrating it is as a professional to watch people spend large sums of money over time on quick fixes which may deliver some results but always need to be repeated.
Here’s some examples I have come across in my time as a Personal Trainer;
“I can’t afford to do a nutrition course for £145, I’ll stick to my juice detox every six months as it’s only £80.”
I presume you all see the issue here. Not willing to invest £145 into learning something which they can draw upon at anytime in their life and create knowledge that will benefit them until the day they die. But happy to pay £160 a year for something that offers some results that are short-lived because it’s cheaper. See the frustrating part yet? Try this one…
“Well, my friend did this diet where you take this shake and then don’t eat any carbs and have 800kcal a day and they lost a stone and a half in 2 months.”
There’s a number of issues with this one. For starters, when I prescribe nutritional advice; you will always eat over 1000kcal unless you’re actually tiny. You will always eat carbs because cutting any food group out is asking for trouble (cutting carbs out shows you didn’t pay attention at school. Fat is burnt in a carbohydrate fueled flame! (Look into how Krebs cycle starts or check out the chart below where you can see how Glycolysis leads to Krebs cycle). Keep in mind, the amount of weight lost in a period of time isn’t a reflection of how good your diet and exercise regime is but merely a reflection of how much you had you could lose. If you’re 20 stone, you should lose weight faster than someone who is 10 stone in most cases. 1 and a half stone in 2 months isn’t unrealistic for most people and that’s without starving themselves or avoiding all the things they like.
So, people are unwilling to look at their diet not as a diet, but as their general day to day intake and make changes to it that allow them to have chocolate, burgers, chips etc still, because they would rather see a diet as a 2-month slog where you restrict everything and cause physical and psychological damage to yourself. At some point these individuals will stumble into doing things the correct way but unfortunately due to years of crash dieting and creating poor habits and an even poorer relationship with food, they are likely to find the results they can achieve are reduced and require greater commitment to undo the damage done over the years.
To summarise this point, mentality is a huge factor to achieving your goals, to achieve your desired body composition and strength goals you have to look at the journey as a lifelong commitment. The infuriating aspect is that when you train and diet efficiently, it really isn’t very hard to do. The world unfortunately is full of bad information which confuses everything beyond belief in an attempt to sell a gimmick. Diet right for your body type springs to mind! What a mess we are in that someone can persuade people that they need to eat different foods because they have a different body type to another person. Fat burns in negative calorie balances. There are no real exceptions.
What if it doesn’t work?
It will potentially do nothing. This is probably the most important point because clearly you want to change something and clearly you have found some motivation to make a start. How demoralising is it when you try hard at something and commit only to find that for whatever reason it didn’t work. There are many reasons as to why these challenges don’t work, I’ll list a few and then there a couple I will talk about in more detail. So, the main reasons your exercise or diet-based challenge didn’t work; the challenge wasn’t suitable for the goal, the supplement is a placebo, another change i.e. calorie control needed to accompany the challenge and the progression or overload was insufficient. The two main ones I’d like to discuss relate to diet challenges and exercise challenges respectively.
Most diet-based challenges involve either, taking a shake or meal replacement product which will ‘detox’ your body along with bunch of other buzz words like cleanse, heal, boost and rejuvenate (It’s like our liver and kidneys forget how to do their job), in the aim of reducing your calorie intake and then resulting in weight loss, (notice I said ‘weight’ loss). Or they will essentially be a diuretic and encourage you to expel more fluids than normal therefore dehydrating you, removing your ‘bloat’ and again creating weight loss. There are issues here. Firstly, you need to understand that weight loss from maintaining a negative calorie balance is a process that happens over time. You cannot simply not eat for a day and then lose fat that day. The body has defenses in place from back in the days where we hunted for food and couldn’t always find it. As you maintain the negative calorie balance, different things contribute to your reduction in body mass at different proportions. As time goes by and calories stay beneath daily expenditure, you’re body must resort to burning fat. This continues and adapts for around 4 weeks until finally it stabilises and yes that is 28 days and therefore negates a 21-day diet challenge.
The charts below are charts I use in my nutrition courses and they demonstrate what contributes to weight loss in each week of maintaining a negative calorie balance. As you can see, although the second and third week may be of some use, the first week is mainly water that’s being lost. As most of these challenges don’t require you to track calories and ensure you’re maintaining a negative balance, there is actually a strong chance you will never make it into the breakdowns for week 2 and 3 and will just stay in the week 1 category. A diets based challenge for weight loss, has short lived results that stem from loosing and gaining water.
With regards to a diuretic based product, the short comings are simple. You’re losing water again. Water is not something your body will allow you to not have without some form of encouragement. Therefore, when you stop taking the diuretic product, you will regain the water and the ‘bloat’. Have you ever wondered why people selling the pills and teas that ‘literally melt body fat’ only have before and afters of people going so far? You never see them shredded with an 8 pack. That’s because unless you’re super lean already, dehydrating yourself will only have limited results and clearly, it’s not great for your health.
With the exercise-based challenges you have to look at training types. Let’s assume that it’s a strength based challenge and is looking at squats. Day 1 you do 10 squats and you increase by 3 reps every day for 21 days. Now when you first start you have done 10 squats which maybe took 20 seconds to complete. It was just your bodyweight you were presumably lifting and therefor the amount of muscle recruited to perform the exercise is limited. For the amount of time you were moving you would have been in the right category for using fuels that will burn more fat off in the long run by developing the strength based fuel systems. Below is a chart that shows what fuel systems are used dependant on exercise duration. Rest time between sets and resistance applied/effort level would factor into this but lets keep it simple for now. 10 days later you are doing 10 squats plus an extra 30 which may take you 1 minute 20 seconds or more to achieve. You are now moving into energy systems which are no longer strength based. They are not likely to improve the maximum force output of a muscle and not likely to lead to the muscle needing to store more glycogen and burn more calories when at rest. Therefore, you’re now improving your aerobic fitness and not your strength and without any control of variables such as calorific intake, your body composition is unlikely to improve either. The stronger a muscle is, the greater the cross sectional area of the muscle is. Therefor if you want bigger glutes for example, you must have a stronger bum. Squats are the best way to do this. But you’d need weight and to be moving no more than 30 seconds. Yes I do think hip thrusting glute bridge glutey builders are a total waste of time but that’s a whole other ramble. By no longer working to a strength regime, you are no longer building the muscle mass. You are now doing something that’s probably starting to feel a bit of a chore for little to no reward. It’s just undirected and inefficient.
Yes you can argue that in the aerobic category you would burn more fat during the exercise session however long term this is not as efficient as emptying your glycogen stores by focusing on the ATP and the ATP-CP systems and then refueling. This is something I will discuss in more depth another time.
The issue here is that you are doing a lot of work that is repetitive and potentially unrewarding and it will not encourage you to do more. Nor will it help to prove that you can make substantial changes to yourself without working your arse off. Who wants to do more work than is necessary anyway. Certainly not me. Minimal effort, maximum return is my mantra for training.
Some positivity…
So, what’s my point? Well, it’s horrendously upsetting to see so many people keen and wanting to try to make a real change to themselves at this time of year and then see them apply their efforts to things that aren’t going to offer the return that they need. So hopefully if I have done anything with this lengthy rant, I have made you question some of the stuff that no doubt fills your social media feeds right now. What I do recommend is that you take the money you would spend on supplements, pills or the booty builder 3000 and you invest in something educational. Not a book on a specific diet like keto or paleo or 5:2 etc. But an actual education-based product that allows you to make your own conclusions, understand this industry and hopefully find the genuinely helpful things out there. Like my nutrition course maybe 😉. Seriously, it’s not bad. In all honesty though rather than getting the juice detox system on the go this January or whatever you were thinking of doing, sit down with a professional, pay them if you have to (they could use the money in these times) and ask questions, learn and then make informed choices. Stop buying into and funding the bits of this industry that make it look bad and unreliable. Diets don’t work remember… except they do, it’s just the fads that people come up with don’t work. You can achieve the things you want to do, you first just need to accept you have to do the work. But there are good professionals out there that are willing and able to help you. You’re one goal this year in my opinion, should be to accept that your goals in fitness etc are for life, not just for this year and not just for January. It will take commitment and work, but trust me, if you put everything together properly it’s actually quite easy and even fun!
Stay safe!