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Unleaded Conditioning Tip #15 [15 of 99] by Mark Hatmaker

 


[Excerpted from the upcoming Unleaded: Whole Hog-- The Support Manual.]

Unleaded Conditioning Tip #15

When you want to lose fat, move more, but don't train more.

Yeah, I hear ya, sounds like a paradox, or at the very least a Zen Koan that is more intended to confound than impart wisdom.

But I assure you the opening statement is truth.

A verified scientific fact.

One known by the Old School Boxers, Wrestlers, Combination Men, Rough n Tumblers of yore.

Little ado was made of “cardio” in 18th and 19th century thought and yet we wind up with staggering feats of endurance in treacherous environments with little [if any] “dedicated training.”

We see enviably lean and mean physiques in early physical culturists decades before the advent of anabolic “helpers” hell, not even a scoop of creatine in sight.

Often the assumption is that these early hellions simply trained harder and longer but…the record does not bear that out.

A careful examination of these feats of “in the field” endurance or designated “gym” strength training seen without the bias of 21st-century hindsight that attempts to “explain” what was through the lens of “What we know now” reveals a tale that is in stark contrast to how we train for strength, leanness and fat loss now.

The Current Formula

21st Century Athlete wishes to get stronger, faster, and lose body fat.

So…

·        Gym time is put in.

·        Often copious time with hard CrossFit style sessions.

·        If the mirror or the needle on the scale does not provide us with what we want, the prescription is to double down on effort, time and intensity.

And yet, often, that mirror and scale still don’t quite deliver what we would like considering the effort input.

So, what’s going on?

We’ll get to that, but first…

The Old School Formula

Our Old School Athlete, Boxer, Wrestler, Combination Fighter, Apache Scout wishes to be stronger, faster, leaner and meaner.

So they…

·        Engage in short duration intense effort and then stop.

·        They go live life.

·        That’s it.

Well, actually there is more to it than that, see these two historical essays for background.

Men That Gave Jack Dempsey Pause & An Education

Dempsey’s Falling Step, Battle-Axes & “The Enemy Line”

The key being the final bit of the Old School Formula “Go Live Life” was at a time when life required more movement.

Be that…

·        Foot travel

·        Carrying milk from the barn

·        Garden Work

·        Dancing at this Saturday Night’s Hoedown

·        And the myriad attendant movements required of a job of old.

·        Be it lumberjacking or housewife, more movement was required of ANY standard task then—be that movement high or low grade, movement was required.

Often, today, the only real movement outside of our “training” is from car to house, from car to store, from couch to phone.

Not much else.

Let’s examine this in light of today’s Unleaded Conditioning Tip.

Unleaded Conditioning Tip #15

When you want to lose fat, move more, but don't train more.

The paradox resolves itself when we realize that short intense training sessions raise our cortisol profile [our stress hormone] so that we can respond to the effort.

Once we are out of the effort requirement we want to keep cortisol as low as possible as it is catabolic, that is, “muscle eating.” [BTW-Your heart is a muscle, don’t keep stressing yourself over time be it training or simply empty thought stressors.]

The Old School Prescription says go back to living your life, which was one of assumed movement where activity continued but not at a training level that required elevated cortisol.

Keeping cortisol elevated eats into the strength, muscle aesthetic gains you are working for and counteracts the “fat burning” process.

When you cut calories, your body has a lower capacity to recover from hard training.

When you keep cortisol elevated, as when adding more training sessions or lengthening sessions, fat loss halts or slows greatly.

Old School thought states, “Burn white hot for that short duration of the training” and then allow low-grade activity/effort to do the rest of the fat loss/leaning magic.

What we now call NEAT [Non-Exercise Thermogenesis.]

Old School thought would burn intensely as we do in 20–30-minute Unleaded Sessions and then leave it to chores or Warrior Walking to keep the furnace stoked.

Once one adopts this Old School Wisdom one can revel in the ease of leaning and fat loss, get chores done, as a matter of fact see chores as yet another opportunity to prime the pump.

I for one, have been living this Old School way for 8 going on 9 years now.

I have, in essence, never worked less hard to get solid results—aesthetic and performative.

For more on the Old School Way to get results in sub-30 minute training sessions that are historically accurate and backed by science see our Unleaded Conditioning: Whole Hog  available at our store.

If you dug this consider browsing the blog for thousands of pages of like material.

Or try our podcast Mark Hatmaker: Rough n Tumble Raconteur.

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