Breaking Down the 12-3-30 Workout: My Honest Reaction!

Hey, what's up? It's time for another reaction video. These things are fun. So today we've got a gal talking about a 12, 3:30 workout. I'll tell you what that is. Let's see what she has to say. Maybe she'll tell you what it is. Here we go.

I used to weigh 30 more pounds than I do right now. I've been able to keep the weight off for about two years now. And I'm going to teach you how I did it. So here's me before. I don't diet, I don't calorie count. Here is a recent picture of me for reference. Okay, how did I do this? Literally all you need is a treadmill. You put it on an incline of 12, a speed of 3, and for 30 minutes, as many times as you can a week. I do it about 5:12, 3:30. I used to be so intimidated by the gym and it wasn't motivating. But now I go, I do this one thing and I can feel good about myself. Plus I feel like I look snatched. And this is like all I do. And I look forward to it. It's my me time. So period. I use.

Let's talk about that. So the idea of walking on a treadmill for that amount of time.

Needs to be couched with the concept of how many calories you might burn doing that. So I weigh about 175 pounds, give or take on a good day, whether or not I've had cheesecake. And if I walk at a 12% incline on a treadmill for 3 miles or for 30 minutes, 3 miles per hour, I would burn, based on the average calorie calculator, anywhere in the range of about 250 to 300 calories, let's say 275 calories. The actual number of calories burn can vary slightly based on individual factors like your muscle mass, your metabolic rate, the efficiency of the movement when you're on the treadmill. That, based on my rough knowledge of food, is the equivalent of a pretty small cookie. All right, so I'm walking for 30 minutes and I'm burning a cookie. I could walk for an hour and burn maybe half of my lunch. So you're not going to be burning a ton of calories during this effort. Although I will tell you that it is a good, steady state aerobic type of exercise. Walking on a treadmill for 30 minutes, 3 miles per hour, 12% incline, gets you into the gym or gets you moving. I think this is a fantastic place, place to start. It will build stamina. As I've written about in my book Boundless. There are other components of aerobic function that go beyond stamina. There is VO2 max. This workout will not build VO2 max. You must do shorter efforts that are 4 to 6 minutes in duration max at maximum sustainable pace to trigger your VO2 max for a few rounds. Classic workout would be 4 minutes. At high as intensities. You can go with 4 minutes of recovery 4 times 3. Right? That's a classic VO2 max workout. This workout will also not appreciably trigger mitochondrial proliferation or growth, meaning you got to do short efforts like 30 seconds hard, two minutes easy. 30 seconds hard, two minutes easy, five times through for a mitochondrial triggering workout. This workout, although it will have a little bit of a burn associated with it because you are walking uphill for a while, you're not going to get a huge amount of lactate tolerance, meaning your ability to be able to tolerate lactic acid, which, which is also a component of longevity. This will, however, build aerobic fitness stamina and you will be oxidizing a high amount of fat by walking at a steady state pace like this. But there are other things that you would need to do from a cardio standpoint if you wanted to hit all aspects of your aerobic blueprint, so to speak. In addition to that, of course you are not going to gain what I would consider to be arguably an even more important component of fitness muscle from doing a workout like this. Maybe a little bit in your legs, maybe more if you're doing a weighted vest or holding a set of dumbbells or something like that. But you must also lift weights. All right, I won't beat around the bush. Muscle is great for your blood sugar and blood pressure regulation. It is good for strength, it fights frailty, it's associated with longevity. If I had to choose between lifting weights for 30 minutes and walking on a treadmill for 30 minutes and I was just as likely to do either, I would choose the lifting weights again. I want to come back to the fact though that if this type of a workout is what gets you moving great, it's fantastic, it's easy, it's simple, you memorize it. It's not difficult to wrap your head around. The other thing that you should know about is that if you are going to walk on a treadmill for 30 minutes, varying the speed and varying the incline is going to result in a lower overall risk of over training injuries. Right? Moving the same muscle at a chronic repetitive motion multiple times per week so for example, you could do the first two minutes on a 10% incline at a speed of 4, and the second two minutes at a 10.5 incline at a speed of 3.8, and the next two minutes at a 11% incline and a speed of 3.5. You get the idea. So you can vary the incline and the speed and get a little bit more of an impact on the type of gait that you are engaged with, the type of muscles you're engaging, although we've established that treadmill is not going to result in appreciable muscle growth. And also keep yourself from getting the potential for some hip tightness, knee tightness, et cetera, from walking at the same incline and the same speed over and over again. So ultimately this workout will move the dial for sure. Again, I also think that this gal probably did some dieting as well. Maybe a little bit of weight training, I don't know. But it's good. It's a good start. There are just some components missing and some variations you should do in it if you really want to take this to the next level. So that's my thoughts on the 12 3:30 TikTok workout and wherever else it's found. Hey, subscribe to my channel if you want more cool videos like this. Let me know if you dig the reaction videos. I'll keep doing them.