Why Boot Camps Don’t Work???
Boot camps stress on cardio, yes cardio is a great thing, but in order to maintain your goals of weight loss and definition you HAVE to eat right and lift weights! Lifting a 5-8lb dumbbell in your bootcamp is not sufficient enough, and the amount of repetitions you are doing are too high in order to stress the muscle enough so it can grow, which is the point in lifting weights. More muscle = increased metabolism = fat loss! When you follow lifting weights by cardio, like in bootcamp workouts you eventually enter an aerobic state, which burns up your glycogen (carbohydrate) stores! Once those are used up your body relies on easily accessible protein to use as fuel!! This is BAD! This is called catabolism, almost as bad as cannibalism! Because your body starts eating up your own muscle for energy! What all this means is this, when you were lifting those little tiny weights too many times followed by cardio and you did this for an hour or longer, you didn’t benefit your muscle in any way! After 20min-30min all your carbohydrate stores are done!
Will you lose weight doing boot camps? Yes, but it isn’t just fat, you are burning fat and muscle and you will very quickly reach a plateau! Why would you want to do that, when muscle is what speeds up your metabolism? I don’t know, answer yourself on that one! I am just here to inform you about what bootcamps are truely doing, it is a money market for trainers. Hey, they charge all of you $20 each time and if there are 30 of you that is a quick and easy $600 in ONE hour of work! Do you think they really care about your results?
Boot camps aren’t all BAD, in addition to a weight training regime and a great nutritional plan!
MORE on WHY TOO much cardio is bad??
In the “Abs Diet,” by David Zinczenko, he explains this perfectly!
He studied researchers who compared cardiovascular training to weight training and which brought about the best caloric burn, most people say cardiovascular, which is true, while you are actually engaged in the activity, but when you stop what happens, Zinczenko goes on to say….
“It turns out that while lifters didn’t burn as many calories during their workouts as the folks who ran or biked, they burned far more calories over the course of the next several hours. This phenomenon is known as the afterburn- the additional calories your body burns off in the hours and days after a workout. When researchers looked at the metabolic increases after exercise, they found that the increased metabolic effect of cardio only lasted about 30 to 60 minutes. The effect of weight training lasted as long as 48 hours.”(Zinczenko, 46) Why is this? When you workout you create micro tears in your muscle fibers, while your body is repairing itself it’s metabolic processes are sped up and this can last up until your next workout even! That is pretty remarkable research!
Another thing to remember is this, each pound of muscle can burn up to 50 calories a day at rest and a pound of fat can ONLY burn up to 12 calories a day at rest! So again, why do we want to burn our muscle by going to a boot camp training session, when you can actually build muscle and burn more calories by engaging in a resistance training regime?
Take home message: Boot camp workouts focus only around cardiovascular training! Cardio is NOT bad, it has many health benefits, but too much cardio is counter-productive when a goal of weight loss and fat loss are in mind!
Thank you,
OCTRAINER.NET
(C) Sept 2008
Posted with permission
