Thrown off by Science

A little while ago I had a very interesting conversation with Dr. Christopher Scott, an exercise physiologist and expert on metabolism. At present he's researching ways to measure anaerobic energy consumption--meaning, how many calories a person uses when exercising at high intensity. It's a surprisingly difficult question to solve, he says, because all standard measures of energy consumption are based on oxygen uptake. Anaerobic activity, by definition, doesn't use oxygen, so that method doesn't work very well. Scott has been trying to solve the problems that fitness nerds like me have been pondering for decades now--how and why does high intensity activity burn so many calories?

EPOC--the "afterburn" effect that supposedly burns boatloads of calories after you've stopped working out, doesn't really seem to account for the caloric burn in the way we used to think. But something is happening, of course, because sprinters, as we all know, are lean, mean, running machines--even more so than their long-distance running cousins. And even if you're no Usain Bolt, enough people have had success burning blubber off with anaerobic activity to make it clear as day that it's a great way to torch fat.

Ok. So here was the fascinating gem I got from Scott: treadmills and stationary bikes were designed to make it easy to study aerobic metabolism.

This is actually quite significant: when you realize that two of the most widely-used tools for burning fat and building fitness weren't designed for that purpose at all, you realize that many people have got their fitness programs backwards.

Think about it: scientists wanted to know how people responded to exercise. So they created these convenient things that could be used in a lab to roughly simulate exercise. Then they put people on these machines and measured their energy output and oxygen consumption and so on and so forth and got some sense of how peoples' bodies behaved under the stress of something resembling exercise.

No one ever said, "This is a great way to burn fat!" or "These machines are great for getting fit!" Nope. They were a machine that made measuring oxygen consumption convenient for guys in white coats.

In a sense, the definition of what constitutes sensible exercise came out what those white-coated guys could measure: lots about aerobic metabolism. Nada about anaerobic. Nada about flexibility or upper body strength or movement capacity. The ways of measuring and recording physiological response dictated the best ways to exercise.

The fact that to this day we don't have an accurate way of measuring anaerobic energy consumption--even though, anecdotally, anyway, it appears to thrash the aerobic pathway for burning calories, is just one example of how flawed and limited metrics and methods have thrown us off the trail of how best to exercise in our limited available time.

Get off the machines, go outside and move.