109 | Fitness in Fat Loss with Reed Jarvis

Thanks for tuning in today's episode of the Real Health podcast. We are featuring special guest, future doctor Reed Jarvis, on today's episode as he adds a ton of value to your life and to your health as we talk through the top strategies to improve fat loss and muscle gain this month. Today, he's gonna be specifically focusing on strength training and cardiovascular training to improve your health outcomes. Again, thanks for listening to another episode of the Real Health podcast.

Welcome back to the Real Health Podcast. Today, I have the opportunity to join us on our series through fat loss February. Previously, we've discussed the six tips to begin your fat loss journey as well as the three hormones that lead to weight loss resistance. Today, I'm gonna be going through fitness and fat loss and talking about the difference between cardio and strength training for fat loss. But before we begin, I would want us to go through and talk about how fat loss works so that we get a better idea of how we can use fitness to hack our body into being able to burn more fat using less time and to be more efficient.

So for fat loss to occur, to break it down really simple, is you have to burn more calories in a day than you consume. So we have to be expending more calories throughout our daily activities than we are eating every single day. And your body burns calories four different ways. The first one is your basal metabolic rate, which is- that is the calories that you burn during rest whenever you're not exercising and you're doing nothing. That is just your body living.

The second one is the thermic effect of food. This is calories that you burn digesting food. Protein rich foods have the highest TEF, so one way that we can burn more calories using the thermic effect of food is by consuming more protein and prioritizing protein in all of our meals. The next one is exercise activity. These are calories that you burn from workouts.

That's the one that we're gonna be focusing on the most today. And the next one is your non exercise activity thermogenesis. That is your daily movements, such as walking or, walking around the office and going about your daily task. The way that I would break this down is for exercise activity is 500 calories that you burn from cardio versus 500 calories that you burn from strength training. One is just burning calories and the other is building.

So to get into depth more on that, first, we're gonna talk about cardio. So cardio burns more calories typically than strength training in the moment, but it does not increase your metabolism long term. There are two main types of cardio. The first one is low intensity steady state. That would be like walking, jogging, or cycling at a conversational pace.

The benefits of this is it's easy to recover from, it burns fat at lower intensities, and it improves your cardiovascular health. An example of low intensity steady state cardio would be, like, walking on a treadmill. You can set the incline to 12, and set the speed to three, and you do it for thirty minutes, twelve- three- thirty treadmill walking. That is really good to be low impact and help your body burn calories and burn fat, and it doesn't require a lot of effort. Another thing you can do is you can walk on the stair master for twenty to thirty minutes, two to three times a week.

Those are both perfect examples of low intensity steady state cardio. Another type of cardio is HIIT training. That is high intensity interval training, which is short burst of max effort cardio followed by a period of rest. The benefits of this is it spikes metabolism. You're able to burn more calories in less time, and it also increases your mitochondrial density, which helps improve your fat oxidation.

An example of this would be a twenty second sprint followed by forty seconds of rest, and then you would repeat that for 10 routes. So low intensity steady state and high intensity interval training. Now the downsides of relying only on cardio, for your fitness regime or just doing hours of endless cardio for fat loss is you can actually lead to having muscle loss as well, because too much cardio without proper strength training, in addition to that, can lead to muscle breakdown. Also, too much cardio can lead to metabolic adaptation, and what this means is as you do cardio more and more and more and more, over time, your body will become more efficient at doing whichever cardio you choose, so you will burn fewer calories for the same amount of effort. Another downside of relying only on cardio is you're not stimulating muscle growth, and you're not able to build lean muscle while losing fat, and we're not able to achieve what we want to see, which is body recomposition.

So cardio doesn't stimulate muscle, and it means that your body will stay the same shape even as you lose weight and burn fat. So moving on from that, what we wanna talk about more is strength training, and here's why. Strength training helps build lean muscle, which helps keep your metabolism high and leads to better and more prolonged fat loss over time. And here's how strength training works for fat loss, unlike cardio. Strength training helps build and even or preserve and even build your lean muscle as you're losing weight and losing fat.

So it increases your basal metabolic rate, which means that even when you're not strength training, you're able to burn more calories at a resting state. It also increases excess post exercise oxygen consumption, and that is a big term and a term that a lot of us are probably not familiar with. But that essentially means that your body is burning more calories for up to forty eight hours even following the strength training workout. So the difference between strength training and cardio is whenever you're doing cardio, you might burn more calories during the cardio session, but the second that you are done or you leave the gym, the caloric, the amount of calories that you burn drops off pretty pretty quickly. But whenever you're strength training, your body is even continues to burn calories for up to forty eight hours after you leave the gym.

And the third one, which we talked about this previously on the last podcast, is strength training can help improve your insulin sensitivity, which means that your body is able to use carbs more efficiently instead of storing them as fat. So here's why having more muscle matters in regards to fat loss and body recomposition. Having more muscle, if you have a pound of muscle, it burns six calories per day at rest, whereas a pound of fat burns two calories per day. So, essentially, more muscle equals a higher metabolism, better fat burning even when you're not working out, a higher BMR, which means that your body has the ability to continue to burn fat and burn cardio even whenever you are not working out. So strength training improves your fat burning potential over a longer period of time compared to cardio, which is a short or, extended period of higher cardio, or higher calorie expenditure, but does not help with our fat loss long term.

So what would be the best approach when choosing whether we should do cardio or strength training to hack our body, boost our metabolism, and lead to more fat loss. The best thing to do would be to pride prioritize your strength training and use it as the foundation of your training and use cardio as a supplement. So we want to focus on our strength training, build more lean muscle, and use cardio as a tool to where we can burn more calories throughout the week. A combination of both is ideal, but if you choose to only pick one, then I believe strength training wins every time. So an example of a training structure that you could use today for fat loss is to use three to four strength training sessions per week.

We want to target each muscle twice a week, so you could do two upper body days, two lower body days, so that we can build lean muscle, induce hypertrophy, and help reap the benefits of strength training. And then, you can also supplement two to three cardio sessions on top of that every week. You can choose low intensity steady state or high intensity interval training. It does not matter. It's whatever you prefer.

If you are wanting something that is easier for recovery, I would choose the low intensity steady state using the examples we gave. Or if you're wanting something quick and effective, I would choose the high intensity interval training. And, also, what we wanna be doing every single day is we want to aim for 10,000 steps. And the reason behind this is it helps boost our non exercise activity thermogenesis, our NEAT, so that we're able to burn more calories during the day even whenever we are not spending time at the gym. And finally, we want to prioritize your protein and your nutrition because fitness for fat loss is super important.

And if we use fitness the right way, we can use it as a tool to boost our metabolism, lead to more calorie expenditure. However, like I said before, if we are not focusing on our nutrition, counting our calories, and making sure that our caloric intake is below our energy expenditure, then you will not be able to burn fat. Even if you are eating a paleo diet, eating, making healthy choices with your nutrition, healthy food still has calories. So we have to focus on using, or counting our calories to make sure that we are still in a caloric deficit, and that will lead to fat loss. So to recap, the biggest fat loss mistakes is too much cardio, spending hours a week doing cardio with not enough strength training.

Eventually, your body will become more efficient at doing cardio, which will lead to you not seeing the same results and might make you discouraged. So we want to include more strength training and use cardio as a tool. Another mistake is not prioritizing your protein intake. Not prioritizing your protein will not allow you to build or maintain your lean muscle, and we're also not reaping the benefits of the thermic effect of food, the calories that your body uses to digest that protein. And finally, is thinking more workouts or longer cardio sessions equals faster fat loss.

This is a, it's a journey. It's not a quick fix, but over time, you will start to see higher metabolism, more fat loss over time if we, every day, we prioritize our strength training, build more lean muscle, and use cardio to burn more calories. So cardio is a tool. It is not the foundation. Make strength training your foundation, and strength training is ultimately the, strength training builds the body that burns the fat.

And fat loss is not only about burning calories, but it is also about optimizing your metabolism. If you enjoyed this podcast and you feel like, if you enjoyed this podcast, I encourage you to listen to our previous podcast on fat loss and how we can optimize our metabolism and optimize our hormones to boost our fat loss. If you would like a resource that dives in deeper into, if you would like a resource that dives in deeper to this, podcast that's written out for you, you can go to the realhealthco.com/resources, and you can download our resource guide and use it to follow along with this podcast and use it as a way to look back at as you continue on your fat loss journey. So I hope this podcast was able to serve you and provide you with more information and more knowledge to make you feel more prepared on how you should approach your fitness when trying to lose fat and achieve proper body recomposition.

Well, hey. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of the Real Health Podcast. We appreciate doctor Reed Jarvis for adding a lot of value to obviously this week's episode. Tune in next week as we talk about about how toxins impact your inability to lose fat.

Our passion is to add value to your health care journey. Anything that we do, we want to do it within a community to help as many people as possible. Thanks for listening to episodes of The Real Health Podcast. If you could like, if you could subscribe, and you can share, it would help our mission to reach as many people with real health that produces real results for real people.