My Beef With ORANGE THEORY For Weight Loss

Orangetheory, Beachbody, Burn Boot Camp, F45, any sort of HIIT cardio training, I got beef with it and here's why. Let's talk about part 1 in the saga of my beef with HIIT cardio classes like that. Please give me till the end of the video to explain myself fully before you keyboard warrior attack me, all right? From a results perspective, from a seeing progress perspective, If your goal is to get stronger and build muscle and change the way your body looks, then high-intensity classes like Orange Theory, Burn Boot Camp, those sorts of things are going to be suboptimal. And here's why. The first reason is going to be centered around the rest times that you take during these classes. Because your rest is so short, your performance from a muscle and a strength perspective is going to plummet, meaning you won't be able to lift as much weight, you won't be able to do as many reps. You won't be able to lift as heavy and push yourself as close to failure, which means you're not going to see results with getting stronger and building muscle. Now, when you first start doing it, Orange Theory, Beachbody, whatever it is, will you maybe see some progress? Of course, because when you're a beginner and when you start doing anything, you are going to see progress no matter what it is. But the more advanced you get, you are going to have to be getting on a real proper strength training program in order for you to continue to change your body, grow muscle, get stronger, all those things. This is why a lot of people, and this may be you, you might be that like skinny fat right now where maybe you did lose some weight and maybe you have, you know, uh, seen some progress in that area, but you don't really look like you lift. Like you look in the mirror and you're like, what the fuck? Why don't I look like I work out? Or like when you wear clothes, Or something like that. It might not look like you work out. This is why, because these HIIT cardio classes are cardio. Even though yes, there is strength there, there's weightlifting involved. It's weightlifting with an emphasis on muscular endurance or your cardiovascular system. Because in combination with the short rest times that we talked about, the high reps that people are usually doing in these classes, cause it's just like, Go, go, go! Lift as much weight as you can. Go as fast as you can. Do as many as you can. Yes, you might feel like, but Eric, I'm exhausted. What are you talking about? I'm going close to failure. I'm pushing myself. You very well might be. I'm not taking that away from you, but you're pushing yourself more from, again, a cardio perspective because your heart rate is so high 24/7. You're not going to build muscle and get stronger that way. You're going to build better cardio. Cardio that way, which I'm sure you may have seen, but you're not going to build more strength and muscle that way. And again, because you're not anywhere near recovered going into the sets when you're doing your weightlifting, the weight that you are lifting is so much less. It is, it is so much less than what you actually could do for that exercise. I'm somebody who, I own a coaching program. It's called the Clubhouse. I have an app for it. If you want to check it out, go ahead. But the reason I say it is because when people join the clubhouse, when they come from a HIIT cardio background, they are shocked at how much weight they could actually lift. People could lift 30, 40, 50, 60, 100 more pounds than they thought they could lift because when they were doing these cardio classes, these high intensity classes, they were so go, go, go. There was no way they could lift heavy enough weight. And the last reason why HIIT cardio is going to be suboptimal for getting stronger and building muscle is because of the high intensity. nature of it, you're always so go, go, go, your heart rate's through the roof, your stress and your cortisol is going to skyrocket through the roof. And we're actually going to come back to this a little bit later in the video, so please stick around. If your cortisol is through the roof and you can't recover from your workouts, you are not going to be able to get stronger and build muscle because it's not just about the workout that you do in the gym, it's about are you actually recovering From that workout. And if you cannot recover, which most people doing these classes aren't recovering, then you're not going to be able to see the progress that you want to see. And you might ask me, well, Eric, what if my goal is to lose weight? What if that's your goal? Perfect. Remember, your weight loss is going to come down to your nutrition and how many steps per day, how much walking per day that you're doing. If you're doing HIIT cardio to try to burn as many calories as humanly possible to lose more weight, that math is never going work because it'll take you, let's just say, 50 minutes to burn 500 calories. It will take you less than 5 minutes to eat 500 calories, less than like 2 minutes if you're me. So the math isn't mathing. It's never going to add up. Your nutrition should be taking care of your weight loss via eating in a calorie deficit. Your workouts should be centered around getting stronger, building muscle, and changing your physique, Let your nutrition take care of the weight loss. So yes, you should— even if your goal is weight loss, you should still be trying to get stronger and build muscle in your workouts. Let's talk about my second part of my beef with HIIT classes. I told you we were going to come back to this, but in these HIIT-style classes, your stress is going to shoot up and your results are going to shoot Doing a lot of these HIIT cardio classes increases your stress, aka your cortisol. Now, before you freak out, and to be very fair and try to be unbiased here, cortisol rising is not inherently a bad thing. In fact, you need some cortisol to rise in order to actually see some progress and make some change. The issue is when you have too much of that cortisol because what starts to happen is what we talked about earlier. You start to become under-recovered in your workouts. What does this mean when you're under-recovered? Well, for example, your cravings are going to start to skyrocket. Your hunger is going to start to skyrocket. You ever get done like a HIIT cardio class, Orange Theory, Burn Boot Camp, whatever it is, you ever get done and just like all you want is to eat sugar? All you want is just some carbohydrates. That's what like you're craving. Yes, that would make sense because you are under-recovering from the work that you were doing and so much stress leads to more cravings and hunger. Second part of under-recovering, your energy is going to get depleted, is going to get lowered as well. Again, you ever get done your HIIT cardio classes and just feel like you're worthless the rest of the day? You feel like you got hit by a fucking truck. Again, I can't tell you how many people have joined up inside of the clubhouse. I had a conversation with somebody earlier this week where they came from Orange Theory, and they were like, when I got done, I was useless the rest of the day. I would lay on the couch. I would like mosey around the house. I couldn't play with my kids. I was so exhausted. I had brain fog all day long. My day at work sucked. Like they were just gassed. They were exhausted. Their energy was much lower when you're doing. Such high intensity and such long duration of these, of this high intensity, it's going to lead your energy to go down. Start to piece these things together. You got really high cravings, really high hunger. You got really low energy. Do you think you're going to have a lot of willpower to say stick with your diet? Do you think you're gonna have a lot of willpower to say stick with the routine that you're doing? Not only does your willpower go down and all these things happen, but Your burnout also increases during this time as well. And you may have already been there. Maybe you've been doing something for 2, 3 months already and like you're just starting to get fucking tired. You're starting to get burnt out from it. You're not hitting your calories. You're not sticking to your nutrition. You're falling off track. You're almost like not looking forward to going to the gym. You're almost kind of like dreading going to the gym. All of these things start to happen when you do too much of these classes. And remember, What did we just say? Even if you are somebody who you want to lose weight and you think you're like working really hard towards it, you very well might be. But if you can't stick to your nutrition, you've probably heard this before, you can't out-train a bad diet. And so if you're going, going, going, going, going, but it's causing you to fall off track with your diet, to overeat, to give into cravings, to fall off on the weekends, is it really doing you a net positive? And this is where so many people will tell me, Eric, I just can't stick to my diet. And they think it's because like it's only their diet. Usually it comes back to the kind of exercise that you're doing. This is why I believe exercise and nutrition go 50/50 hand in hand. It's not one or the other. They have to go hand in hand. I'll say on this, when we're talking about the results perspective, is going to be plateaus. Plateaus happen a lot when people are doing these HIIT style classes because from a strength perspective, all we talked about earlier with the too short of rest times, the too high of reps, not being able to lift heavy enough, but also usually during these classes, people are changing up their workouts all the time. And if you change up your workouts too often, you are not going to be able to have something that we call progressive overload. This just means over time you're getting better. But if let's say on week 1 you're doing squats, and then week 2 you're doing reverse lunges, and then on week 3 you're doing a step-up, and then on week 4 you're doing a Bulgarian split squat, and then week 5 you finally come back to squats. How do you know if you're getting better with squats over time? You don't do it every single week, so you don't know. And it's almost just like people are just throwing random workouts together. Which nothing inherently wrong with doing workouts, but if you want— there's a difference between following workouts and following a program. A program is designed to get you results. There's a reason everything is there. Any trainer or any monkey could just like throw together a workout and be like, do this and you're gonna sweat, and do this and you're gonna be out of breath. You automatically— being out of breath and being sweaty and Feeling like you worked hard. Unfortunately, it's not that easy for you to get the results that you want to get to. I strongly encourage you to be following a real strength training program instead, because that's actually a program designed where you can get better week to week. Squats, week 1, you did 50 pounds for 5 reps. Week 2, 55 pounds for 5 reps. Week 3, 60 pounds for 5 reps. You can see you're getting better over time. Or maybe let's say you did 50 pounds for 5 reps. 50 pounds for 6 reps, 50 pounds for 70 reps. You can see you're getting better over time. And then again, from the weight loss perspective, if you're not— if you're working so hard in these classes and you're trying to go as hard as you can, but you're not able to stick to your nutrition, and also when your cortisol is elevated, you're also going to be holding on to a little bit more water weight as well, which could show up on the scale. And so from a weight loss perspective, plateaus happen all the time in these classes because you're just— things aren't lining up. Again, you're not really following a program. You're just going in and just like trying to be out of breath and get sweaty, which is maybe better than no movement at all, but you have to take a smarter approach if you want to see better results. And really quickly before we get into point number 3, I have 45 totally free workouts If you want them, that are based around getting stronger and building muscle, you can click the link in the description of this video. I will shoot it right over to your email, totally free, no strings attached. So feel free to check it out if you'd like. And now my point 3 for my last beef for HIIT classes. And remember, you promised me until the end of the video to fully explain myself, so you got to stick with me. Orangetheory, Beachbody, Burn Boot Camp, F45, all of these things have a much higher risk of injury. And here's why. The first one is something we keep coming back to, but it's just going to be— I'm trying to get comfortable here. It's just going to be the lower rest times and just the higher intensity, fast-paced nature. When you're going to do shoulder presses, those aren't meant to be, do as many shoulder presses as you can. No wonder you're getting shoulder pain. When you're doing squats, squats are not meant to be, do as many squats as you can. Of course your knees are going to hurt. When you're doing deadlifts, it shouldn't be, do as many deadlifts as you can in this amount of time. Of course your back is hurting. So when you're doing these movements, these exercises, you're doing them in a fashion that is just going to lead you to a risk of injury. Of course, exercising, lifting weights has a degree of risk of injury already worked into it, which I understand. But when you're doing these very short rest times, you're again, you're going in, you're going into your next set, not even anywhere near fully recovered. How do you think your, your performance, how do you think your form is going to be with the exercises when you're doing a shoulder press and you're exhausted? Of course your form is going to start to deteriorate. And if your form deteriorates, that's where you're using bad posture. You're using the wrong muscles. You're going to injure your shoulder, injure your knees, injure Your lower back. And then again, point number 2, you're under-recovering. So you're going into your workouts, your muscles aren't recovered, your central nervous system isn't recovered, your body is not recovered, and yet you're just going to go pound it into the ground again. Push yourself as hard as you can. Super high intensity. Go, go, go. Of course, you're eventually going to run yourself into the ground and run yourself into an injury. Remember, if you get injured, you— it doesn't matter how, how much you love the workouts, or it doesn't matter anything. If you can't do anything, you can't see progress. And so that's why one of the main goals for me as, as a personal trainer, I program workouts with the intention of getting progress, but also with the intention of keeping people injury-free. Because if you get injured, you can't keep going. And if you can't keep going, you can't see progress. Now I got 2 final things for you. My first is the caveat to everything that I just said, because if you're somebody who's like, Eric, I don't give a fuck what you just said. I like it. It works for me. I'm seeing the progress I want to see. I just enjoy doing it even if it's not the most optimal. Cool. That's you. Do you. Who is some guy with some shitty beard on the internet to tell you otherwise? If you're somebody who wants to see better progress and you want to be able to make the most out of your workouts, you know, have better workouts, see more results, do all the things that we talked about, then I might look to start to switch things up. And then number 2, what to do instead. I got 2 options for you. Number 1, you could join the Clubhouse. It's where I write new strength training programs every single month. You can head here to check it out if you'd like. Or number 2, you can watch this video right here. Hope it helped. Don't forget to like and subscribe, and we'll chat soon.