Any Suggestions on a Calorie Burning Exercise?

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Any suggestions on a calorie burning exercise? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times best selling author, celebrity nutrition expert, expert and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you.

Welcome to Ask the Health Expert.

David from Facebook asks My biggest issue at 76 76. Go David. And with back issues is I've not found a high impact exercise I can tolerate. I do ride a recumbent bike in the summer but in Toledo area not wise during the winter. Any suggestions on a calorie burning exercise? Ah, talking my favorite subject here. And yes, I've definitely got some suggestions. Stay with me, I'll be right back.

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All right. I still remember when I blew out my knee, gosh, early on. I've had so many knee surgeries over the years from a pointe ballet injury because six foot tall women should not do point ballet, just FYI. And so I had to learn how to do all sorts of stuff around that so it can be done. David, whatever's going on, I'm going to walk you through because you kind of said two different things, high impact and calorie burning. Well, you don't need to do high impact exercise to burn calories. But the reality is it's not about the calories you burn during exercise that are going to make the difference in your body composition and metabolism. It's actually the training effect, the quality of the exercise. And when I think of high impact, it's not hard, it's high intensity rather than high impact that's going to make the difference here. So I'm going to give you my formulas, my core four fitness formulas, part of my fast fitness program. And the first thing I tell people to do is just move more, move more. Look for anything you can do in daily life that just requires you moving more. Like, you know how they say, oh, park farther away? I mean, no, really park farther away at the store, take the stairs. You know, anything that you can do to make you move more. I'm lucky. In my house, my office is on the second floor and all day long I go up and down and up and down and up and down. So just look at what you can do that requires you to move more. Now here's the thing though. While the moving more is important and it counts, it doesn't really count as exercise. In order for it to count as exercise, you have to get hot and sweaty and it should hurt a bit. So there's two things that I want to make sure you do here. One is high intensity interval training, not high impact high intensity interval training. And the other is resistance training. And when I think of resistance training, it's really to put on muscle that build your metabolic spanx because muscle requires more energy to be on your body. Like there's two things we know that really impact your metabolic rate positively. One is making sure your thyroid function is working well. If your thyroid's depressed, your metabolic rate will be depressed. If you've got a lot of toxins, your metabolic rate will be depressed. So good thyroid function and more muscle, more muscle means a better metabolic rate. If you're trying to fight your weight by doing cardio all the time, you're fighting a losing battle because cardio can actually break down some of the muscle, lower your metabolic rate, and make you dependent on doing it all the time. Now, we want to do this high intensity interval training because it's so important for our heart, but we want to really use it to help our body handle stress better and to boost growth hormone and anti inflammatory hormones, which it can do, and then create oxygen debt that your body has to recover from to have that little metabolic boost. Boost. So what high intensity interval training looks like is something that you can do for 30, like 20 to 60 seconds and not longer, and then recover from it for generally twice as long. The fitter you are, the less you have to recover, but the harder you push, the more you have to recover. So if you're pushing really hard, you probably need twice as long to recover. So you can do that on a recumbent bike. You're going to push as hard as you possibly can for 30 seconds. So you kick up the resistance and the speed, and then you're going to like, just take the resistance off and just, you know, glide for a minute to recover. Push for 30 seconds, glide for 60 seconds. You want to keep moving during the recovery thing because it actually helps buffer that lactic acid that you created. You can use that as a secondary fuel source. So important to do that. So how can you do this? Well, you can do it on peloton, you can do it on a regular bike. You could do it running up and down stairs. You can do it getting in and out of a chair, like depending this is relative to your fitness level. So if you're really just starting, it may be that just squatting over a chair 30 times is like, boom. That's going to get you. So it may be sprinting down the block and walking it off, it might be doing jumping jacks. Whatever you can only do for 20 to 60 seconds. And then you're like out of breath, thighs are burning and you need to walk it off. But you really want to feel that way. It should not get easier. You should keep making it harder. So do that part on the recumbent Bike and then the second piece of this. Then you want to do hiit training three days a week. And you want to get eight, four to eight total minutes of the hard stuff. So if you're doing 30 second increments, that means you're going to do 8 to 16 increments of the hard stuff. And the good news is you do that pretty fast, right? Like think about if you're doing the peloton. I got a peloton like everybody else did during the pandemic. And boy, when I do some of that hiit training, like I do a 15 or 20 minute thing and I'm like, you know, dying afterwards, just done. I always think I'm going to go do something else. And it's like, no, I'm not. Then the other part of this is resistance training. And this is where you're going to work in your, what we call hypertrophy range. That's where you're going to build muscle. And that's eight to 12 repetitions. And what you want to do is do multiple sets of that. So a repetition is one round of an exercise. So if you're doing, let's say a push up, it would be one pushup is a rep and a set is a group of push ups. So Ideally you're doing two to four sets with a 60 second break. You don't want to have too long of a break. And here's why, you wanna have a short break. So you don't just, if you don't break, if you have 30 second break, you didn't give yourself long enough. And so it's like you just kept going. And you really wanna do the heaviest weight you can handle for 8 to 12 repetitions. If you give yourself too long a break, all your muscle fibers recover. Remember, you're only going to build the muscle fibers you recruit. And so you wanna do multiple sets so that your muscle fibers get more and more and more fatigue and you pull in more and more and more of the fibers. Cause you don't use all of your fib. You do an exercise, the more fatigued you get, the harder it is. The more of those fibers you pull in, the more fibers you pull in, the more you stimulate. All right, so I divided the body into four parts. Upper body pushing, upper body pulling, hips and thighs and power core. So upper body pushing are. Chest press involves the chest, the shoulders and the triceps and the upper back. So that would be chest press, which is your chest and your triceps and the front of your shoulders. It would be an overhead press, it would be a dip, it would be a chest press, an incline press. And notice I like to do exercises that are multi joint exercises. So rather than say do a, you know, a kickback tricep exercise that's only involving your tricep, I would do a dip that involves my chest, lats and triceps. So I like to use multi joint situation, crossing the shoulder joint and the elbow joint for that versus just one joint whenever possible. Upper body pulling, things like lats, lats, biceps, upper back and back stensors. And some of it and that are things like lat pulldowns, bent over rows, seated rows, upright rows, high cable rows, one arm rows and then hips and thighs, things like step ups, lunges squats, ball wall squats, cable squats and then power core crunches, back extensions, hip lifts, Superman, a lot of the different yoga poses. And recently, and I think this is the best deal of all, especially during the pandemic when you could not find weights to save your life. Fortunately I already had a gym at home, but we got some extra weights from both my sons and it was like we had to, we had to find them from. We bought used weights which is fine. I mean a weight just has to weigh right, but trying to track them down and I mean we paid premium for those used weights Anyway. I've really fallen in love with this TRX which is. If You Google a TRX you can find the training on YouTube. It comes with a little training book and you can do chest presses and rows and squats and pullover abs, all sorts of great stuff on there. So if you have an exercise ball and you have some free weights and you have this trx, man, you've got everything you need at home to do really good weight workouts. So highly recommend that and you can work around that back exercise issue. When I was in grad school I did all my grad work on spinal biomechanics and there is a lot of stuff that you can safely do with a back injury. I don't know the nature of your back injury. One of the things I would say is work with a, an exercise physiologist or a physical trainer on that, physical therapist on that so they can help you. My girlfriend Emily Kaibard is a great one for that. And I think Dr. Jen, I'm just getting to, just met her at a party also has some great stuff for back. So there's some people out there, great stuff there too. But the most important thing, and I see you doing this like you're going, okay, how am I going to do this? Not geez, I can't do this. It's like, okay, I've got this issue. How do I do it? And the final part of that Core four is, is the flexibility piece is making sure. Now what's cool is resistance training. Going through full range of motion also improves flexibility. It does not make you tighter unless you're doing shortened range of motion. But what you want to think of here too is how can I add in some flexibility and stability stuff? So this is where things like yoga that I'm finally doing really come into play. So flexibility, stretching, held into deep stretches, that kind of stuff will be great.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert.

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