Biggest loser
23 November 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I was flipping back and forth between two loser TV programs last night, the American Music Awards and The Biggest Loser. Terrible and more terrible yet; I missed the end of each when I feel asleep out of boredom. I thought the Big Loser was a two hour final but apparently it was only an hour. There were a couple of interesting comparisons on how the Loser losers dealt with obesity and my own experiences as a trainer of bodyweight-challenged individuals, to coin a politically correct term of my own. First off, I predicted the first time I saw the show that Matt, the ex-wrestler from Iowa would win. I dont know that he has but by week 12 (does anyone know the total time period for the show?) he had lost 109-pounds. Great job by a great athlete. Anyone who has worked with elite athletes is aware of a phenomenon called muscle memory. What this means is that it is easier to recover a physiological condition that you once possessed far easier than it is to achieve a physical condition youve never attained. If a man once had a 19-inch rock hard arm but now through lack of use and inactivity its shrunk to 15-inches its a hell of a lot easier to get that arm back into shape and back to a rock hard 19-inches than to take someone with a 17-inch arm and try and push that arm to 19-inches in the same timeframe. Far easier to re-obtain that which you had and lost than something you never had (physiologically) to begin with. Matt wrestled in the big leagues, Iowa or Iowa State, I cant remember which. This is akin to playing football for Notre Dame. Wrestlers are Masters of their Domain when it comes to weight loss and work ethic. To wrestle at the level he once did tells you four things: this guy knows the meaning of gut-busting effort, has a high pain tolerance, understands the degree of denial necessary to lose bodyweight and at one time was in superb physical shape. When a genetic wonder like this decides it time to get back into shape its not a matter of when but if. I thought it highly illustrative of how great an athlete this guy is when weighing 315 and fat as hell he whipped the ass of the Nazi Prison Guard personal trainer in a forty yard dash. That sure wiped the smug smile off her face: she thought she was going to humiliate the fat people in one more mindless torture when the giant fat man left her in the dust on national TV. When Karwoski and I picked our obese folks we purposefully wanted untrained individuals, I wanted to come as close as possible to picking folks at random out of the phone book. I selected my six participants out of the 1st eight interviews I conducted of the two I turned down one was not fat enough (205 at 5-10) and the other could not make the scheduled times. Kirk bought up the subject when he said, You know if we really wanted to get incredible results, lets pick a bunch of out-of-shape athletes and whip them back into shape. I said, no, we want this to be a true test, i.e., lets make it as hard as possible (on us) in order to show how effective our methods are. The toughest test would be to take totally untrained individuals, folks with zero athletic background; people whod never lifted weights or formally exercised and get results for them. In addition, rather than whisk contestants off to a mansion for 12-15 weeks, lets make sure they have real jobs, hard jobs that demand overtime and hard labor, families, responsibilities, kids and all the rest of it. In addition lets pick some old people, over 50 and over 60 (notice there are no older people on Biggest Loser) and finally lets limit the amount of training to no more than seven cumulative hours per week. One Loser competitor in a previous show proudly bragged how hed put in six hours of training in a single day. That type of unlimited training time has no applicability to real people living real lives. Our little experiment has passed day 49 and even with our self-imposed limitations only foods purchased from the grocery store, only walking for cardio exercise and purposefully limiting the progressive resistance training to three exercises done for three sets each for 30-minutes three times a week results have been outstanding. When we hit day sixty well share each individuals progress to date. Matt is the man; I love the guy: cream always rises to the top.
SEE YOU FOLKS ON MONDAY NOT BLURB TOMORROW OR FRIDAY.
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