exercise

Was everything I leaned in school wrong?

June 10, 2010 By John Kuzora

As many of you may know, my formal education was in nutrition not Exercise Science. As a student, I learned the conventional nutrition “wisdom” that was never to be questioned. One of the most strongly protected pieces of nutritional wisdom is that saturated fat is bad for you and will clog your arteries. But is this really true?

Almost every RD, MD, and Ph.D. believes it. Right? Not necessarily.

The role of saturated fats and heart disease is a hot button topic in nutrition today. This doesn’t filter down to the mainstream media, but many of the top minds in nutrition are re-examining this issue.

Just this month in the June edition of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition there is an editorial entitled “Are refined carbohydrates worse than saturated fat?” The editorial written by Dr. Frank Hu, a medical doctor and professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, contends that:

“…diets that are typically low in fat (particularly saturated fat) and high in complex carbohydrates led to substantial decline in the percentage of energy intake from total and saturated fats in the United States. At the same time, it has spurred a compensatory increase in consumption of refined carbohydrates and added sugars-a dietary shift that may be contributing to the current twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes.

The changed landscape in obesity and dietary patterns suggests a need to reassess the dominant diet-heart paradigm and related dietary recommendations, i.e., the strategy of replacing total and saturated fats with carbohydrates.”

This editorial references a study published in the May 2009 edition of the same journal that pooled the results from 11 American and European studies. In the study,replacing saturated fat calories with high GI carbohydrates actually increased the risk of heart disease!

Let’s look at one of the older studies often cited to support this hypothesis: The Seven Countries Study. Ancel Keys, a professor at the University of Minnesota, compared fat consumption in various populations with heart disease. The results were a nice and neat looking line graph. The data looked very convincing, but there was one huge problem. The databases Professor Keys used to plot the graph for the seven countries study contained data for 22 countries. When data for all 22 countries are plotted there is no correlation whatsoever between fat intake and heart disease.

The Framingham Heart Study is also frequently referenced, even though the data from this study shows no correlation between diet and serum LDL, HDL, or total cholesterol.

Yet Dr. William Kannel, the original director of the study, stated in a “clarification” of the results that even though there was no relationship between diet and serum cholesterol intake in the Framingham Study group, “it is incorrect to interpret this finding to mean that diet has no connection to blood cholesterol.”

Huh? The study found no connection between diet and serum cholesterol so how else can we interpret it?

Dr. William Castelli (Dr. Kannel’s successor as the head of the Framingham study) interpreted the data as “disappointing.” Here is his full quote, published in an article published in the Archives of Internal Medicine:

“Most of what we know about the effects of diet factors, particularly the saturation of fat and cholesterol, on serum lipid parameters derives from metabolic ward-type studies. Alas, such findings, within a cohort studied over time have been disappointing; indeed the findings have been contradictory. For example, in Framingham, Mass, the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower the person’s serum cholesterol.”
But even in ward-type studies that show an increase in bad cholesterol (LDL’s), there is also a proportional increase in good cholesterol (HDL’s). In addition, triglycerides are often lowered. Both high HDL’s and low triglycerides have been individually associated with reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. Any negative health impact from increased LDL’s is offset by this corresponding increase in HDL’s and decrease in triglycerides.

This would explain why in large population studies, a link between saturated fat intake and cardiovascular disease has never been shown. In both the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) and the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial (MR-FIT) no significant correlation was found between dietary consumption of saturated fat and cardiovascular disease! In both of these studies researchers admitted to being “disappointed” by the lack of results.

At first glance some studies will seem to support the ”saturated fat clogs arteries” hypothesis. For example, in one follow up analysis of the data from the Seven Countries Study researchers concluded in the abstract that “…saturated fat, vitamin C, and smoking are important determinants of all cause mortality.” But if you read thru the entire text you will see that the data showed no link between saturated fat consumption alone and age adjusted mortality. Only by grouping all three risk factors together (saturated fat, vitamin C, and smoking) were the researchers able to show a significant correlation.

“In controlled, long term studies saturated fat intake has never been linked to increases in cardiovascular disease or all cause mortality”

So what does this mean? Personally, I intend to stop worrying only about saturated fat and cholesterol. Other dietary factors, such as eliminating trans fats and other industrial seed oils, will have a much greater effect than reducing your intake of saturated fat and cholesterol.

Functional Training Myths

December 21, 2009 By John Kuzora

Functional Training Myths by John Kuzora – Kuzora Personal Training Raleigh / Wake Forest NC

From time to time I like to search the web and see what my competition is up to. I like to be aware of there training styles and philosophies so I can better identify the advantages of choosing us over anyone else. And I strive to keep my prices competitive so I also search for session rates and special offers.

Lately I haven’t been doing this as much, mostly because anytime I look someone up it seems like they’re of business. I have been fortunate to remain a strong and viable business during these tough economic times. And while technically my competition shutting their doors is a positive for my business I find no pleasure in others misfortune.

But recently a new client came to the studio to try out some of the strongman workouts we have been specializing in lately. We took him through a workout consisting of five sets of backwards sled drag alternate with one minute Atlas stone holds. The second circuit alternated the keg load with farmer’s walk. Kettlebell man makers were the finisher.

This is a brutally hard workout that improves nearly every aspect of fitness. It burns fat, builds muscle, increases strength, and improves both anaerobic and aerobic endurance. By any definition you want to use, it is a “functional workout.”

I bring this up because this gentleman has worked with one of my competitors in Raleigh who professes to specialize in “function fitness.” It sparked my interest, and I decided to do some research.

The primary claim on this website was that “functional” training builds a lean, flexible body that is resilient to injury while traditional weight training creates a muscle bound physique that is inflexible, unfunctional, and injury prone. In addition, this website claims that functional training workouts are shorter and less monotonous than traditional workouts.

I have many issues with this claim, including the use of the term “unfunctional.” Although I wasn’t an English major in college, I’m pretty sure this isn’t a word. But let’s just assume it was a typo and this person meant nonfunctional…

No one would describe Adrian Peterson, running back for the Minnesota Vikings as nonfunctional. He led the NFL in rushing last season and is following that up with another all-pro year.

Yet in an interview with Men’s Fitness magazine he speaks about how he built his incredible lower body power with barbell squats and lunges, very traditional strength training movements. And while he trains to be a better football player, a side effect of his workout is a very impressive, lean physique.

Adrian Peterson, All Pro NFL Running Back

And did his “unfunctional” barbell training make Adrian more injury prone? I doubt it. He is routinely tackled by men that outweigh him by over 100 pounds, yet he was able to play in all 16 games last year.

While I have never tested Adrian Peterson’s flexibility, this claim is just as ridicules as the others. One of my former clients is a scholarship football player at Penn State. He is 6’2”, 300 pounds and can bench press a Kia. Yet while I was training him he was also able to do a full split!

Jillian Michaels

Don’t think traditional weight training exercises are just for men. Jillian Michaels, celebrity trainer from “The Biggest Loser” also focuses her workouts on basic moves such as lunges and bench presses. Would you describe her as bulky?

Are traditional workouts monotonous? I think that depends more on the abilities of the trainer than anything else.

The bench press is one of the exercises that almost every functional training guru despises. But nothing adds muscle and strength to the chest, shoulders, and triceps as fast as this basic movement. And like it or not many men are looking to build their upper bodies. With many of them we may bench press twice a week. Yet almost every client raves about the variety. How do we do this?

Take a look at the following two workouts.

Workout one – Vince Gironda Volume Training

A) Bench Press – 10 sets of 10 reps

Load a barbell with 50-60% of your one rep max. Set your Gym boss timer to beep every minute for ten minutes. Every time it beeps do a set of ten bench presses. If you don’t have a Gym boss timer go get one. They are an amazing help when performing any type of timed or interval workout.

Workout two – The Chain Drop Set

A1) Bench Press with Three Chains – 5 reps

A2) Bench Press with Two Chains – 5 reps

A3) Bench Press with One Chain – 5 reps

A4) Bench Press – 5 reps

Load a barbell with a combination of plates and three chains. Make sure that you can perform 6-8 reps with the total load. Perform 5 reps and take a chain off each side. Immediately get back down and do 5 more reps. Continue until all the chains are off the bar and perform a final set. Rest three minutes and repeat two more times.

Both workouts include only bench press. Yet both are completely different. No one would feel like they did the same workout two sessions in a row if they were alternated.

Most of our female clients do some type of lunge or split squat every single workout. Most will also tell you that the thing they love most about training with us is that the workouts are always different. Why is that? Because we do over fifty different lunge variations!

One thing I’m not really sure about is why the functional training workouts this trainer puts clients thru are shorter than traditional training. My best guess is that shorter workouts allow him to see more clients in the same amount of time, creating more revenue for his business.