Technological breakthrough? Could this wrinkle revolutionize our approach?
4 August 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I had a great talk yesterday with Alan Antin the Director of Marketing at Polar Heart Rate Monitors and he indicated that Polar monitors now have the ability to register heart beats below 100. This is hugely significant as this now allow us to access daily caloric expenditure with an amazing degree of accuracy. Lets back up and see how this new technological wrinkle could vitally impact the design and execution of our training and eating templates.
One of the major problems in fitness programming is determining the critical energy balance equation. The energy balance equation is how many calories we consume over the course of 24-hours in relation to how many calories we oxidize within the same period. If we consume more calories than we burn we are in positive energy balance whereas if we oxidize more calories than we intake we are operating in a negative energy balance. The problem, to this point, has been were flying blind when it comes to establishing our own individual energy balance tip-point. We might have a general idea of what we think our EBE might be, but without a neutral source to identify the metabolic set-point, who can say with any degree of certainty? If you dont know your particular energy balance set point, determining food intake becomes a metabolic crapshoot.
The problem is complex: five folks all the identical height and weight will have five widely different metabolic realities; a heavily muscled 200-pound individual with 11% body fat will need far more maintenance calories then a sedentary 200-pound person with 30% body fat. Fitness experts more often than not (assuming they are sophisticated enough to know or care) use a generalized weight chart formula that allots the identical number of calories for fit or fat. This is a metabolic catastrophe as the lean individual is allotted too few calories and thrown down the black hole of catabolism (and as a result loses precious muscle mass) while the obese individual is allotted far too many calories and as a result adds even more body fat.
One giant gym chain made a lot of noise recently by offering resting metabolic rate (RMR) testing as part of their evaluation procedure for new clients. This was done by breathing into a Douglas Bag connected to software using sensory technology to calculate O2 consumption using a modified Weir equation measured with Amtek analyzer and a dry gas meter. The problem was the calculations were dependant on the user being stress free, caffeine free, food free, (No food four hours beforehand) exercise free, supplement free and nicotine free. Expensive and cumbersome, I had readers report wild report cards and, in the end, what seemed to be a breakthrough was, in this mans opinion, another expensive technological dead end.
Previous generations of the Polar HR monitors would cease counting calories when the users heart rate dipped below 100-beats per minute. Alan indicated that this technological shortcoming had been eliminated and this now opens up a whole universe of fitness possibilities…For starters lets strap on our heart rate monitor for 24-straight hours and find out how many calories we oxidize during that period. Our hypothetical 200-pound individual with 11% body fat might discover that he burned 2,656 calories to fuel his 178-pounds of lean body mass; our 200-pound person with 31% body fat doing likewise might discover that they oxidized 1,579 calories to locomote their 138-pounds of lean body mass. Now we have a frame of reference to construct a specified nutritional eating and exercise template. The lean guy, a linebacker for the local high school football team, wants to add ten pounds of mass before summer practice commences in ten weeks. Knowing that he needs roughly 2,800 calories a day to maintain, we reverse engineer his training and nutritional approach. His prescription would be to add 500-calories per day over and above his 2,800 calorie RMR. If he is smart, the additional calories are comprised of lean protein and fibrous carbohydrates.
Since it requires 3,500 calories to construct a pound of muscle tissue, adding 500-calories per day (500 calories x 7 days a week =3,500) he can add a pound of pure muscle a week by eating 500 additional calories per day. In ten weeks he packs ten additional pounds of mass without acquiring any additional body fat. This degree of precision tips the energy balance equation to the plus side and allows him to add muscle (it is a physiological impossibility to add muscle if the energy balance is negative) - yet he is smart and doesnt overwhelm his body with too many calories that will inevitably end up shuttled off to fat storage compartments located around the body.
The obese individual attacks the problem from a different angle: since going below 1600-calories per day in order to create an energy deficit is neither safe, healthy or sane, this prescription is somewhat counter-intuitive: maintain the 1600 calories food intake but clean up the calories by replacing calories derived from fat (9-calories per gram) with lean protein and natural carbohydrate calories (4-calories per gram) this trick of the trade allows the individual to literally consume twice the sheer food volume without adding a single additional calorie. To create the requisite energy deficit we use the caloric cost of exercise to shave off body fat. This degree of precision is impossible if you dont know the idiosyncratic energy balance tip point. Another advantage of this methodology is the ease of administering follow-up tests; once you get your groove on, administer follow up 24-hour tests every 3-4 weeks. No big dealno need for expensive trips to the laboratoryjust strap up for 24 and see whats up. The resting metabolic rate is a shifting target and adding muscle (a metabolically active tissue and requires 30-40 calories additional calories per day to feed and maintain) or successfully stripping off body fat can significantly change the BMR. Period tests will alert you if the training or eating parameters need be adjusted mid-steam.
By self-administering the Polar test we can subtly alter both training and eating, allowing us to make rational in-flight corrections based on science and hard numbers. We can say good bye to guesswork and deal with concrete reality. The naysayer Luddites will point out that the Polar calorie counter is actually a guesstimate but with five separate inputs (height, weight, age, sex, and degree of fitness) the absolute accuracy is within 5% (or less) and will remain relative to itself! Once the baseline has been established youll be able to work against the initial benchmark to leverage improvement. Im fired up to try this new technology and see how my imaginings stack up against reality Bobcat, are you out there? You recently purchased a new Polar does your model read below 100-beats per minute? Check in and let me know as you might be our 1st test pilot.
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