1min high-intensity exercise 3x a week improves fitness as much as 3x aerobics (2016)

If you didn't compensate anymore as much for lowering the calories out you're obviously going to gain weight.

So, sure, exercise helps at a certain point. But, take into account:

* If you're fat, your base metabolic rate is insanely high. Obese people are easily at 3000+ calories needed _just_ to maintain that mass.

* If you're fat, it's going to be almost impossible for you to do sessions where you burn 500 calories, simply because you're out of shape and possibly exercising injures you. Running isn't exactly good on your knees if you're overweight. Realistically, you'll do 200-300 cal sessions, at best, every day.

* If you're fat and you manage to burn these 500 calories... Good job, but that's less than 20% of your daily intake. Not eating something is infinitely more simple and efficient.

Our bodies are incredibly efficient at exercising without using lots of energy. Unless you do it for long and hard enough that you reach huge numbers of calories burned, diet is the most important component of losing weight.

well, doh, if you eat the same and use less you will gain mass. It's not because (lack of) excercise, it's because diet not fitting lifestyle

Excercises help in burning more calories so you can actually eat some tasty food from time to time without getting fatter and not going crazy from eating only low calorie stuff and that's about the only effect for weight loss...

EDIT:: added my experience

I was riding mountain bike, and went to competition here and there. And then I stopped for many months, got back and rode the same speed. For real I thought I was going to die, it was almost a black out and panic. Never again risking with "coming back with intensive training" .. just no.

He is hands down the best of all time and is totally in a league of his own. He trains constantly. His entire life revolves around it.

Assuming you're not looking to become an endurance athlete, is conditioning muscles for endurance something one should aim for? Why?

"Improved cardiometabolic health" sounds like something everyone - including us sedentary workers with families and not much free time - might benefit from. Being able to achieve health improvements in short training sessions would appear to be a really important option.

Is there any science here, or just anecdata from elite athletes, who are often terrible judges of their talent? It's really hard to judge this stuff.

This is actually incorrect. It's not well known, but the science is actually very clear about this. HIIT is much more effective then long term continuous exercise for VO2 max. This has been shown across Several studies.

Many coaches and training programs don't incorporate the science into their training regimes. So so called "experts" don't really know. You'll be surprised how ingrained the belief is and it's hard to turn it around if you've been under the belief for years that you need to do long continuous training routines to improve cardio.

Roger Bannister the first person to clear the 4 minute mile used HIIT exclusively for his training and he's the first person to change the science around this. The myth, however, persists and you still see people plugging in miles and miles into their training routine when HIIT works better.

Eliud Kipchoge, WR in marathon, seems to only be doing one hard faster than race pace workout each week. Call that the HIT. The others are slow or race pace. What actually stands out most to me is the specificity of running close to a race pace marathon every week. https://www.sweatelite.co/eliud-kipchoge-a-typical-week-of-t...

Then on the other end of the spectrum, the Ingebrigsten family of runners seems to put an emphasis on quality. But even though they do more faster running they keep a lid on the intensity to avoid training to exhaustion. It actually reminds me more of the "Grease the Groove" concept where the faster running may be more for neurological reasons. https://www.outsideonline.com/health/running/culture-running...

Anyway, neither of these two training models seem to have much in common with HIT. The bulk of the workouts are easy intensity and they are both seemingly ware of the dangers of high intensity. That's where injuries come from and so there can't be too much of it.

Jay implied this was a change throughout the peloton, but you can still see old school strategies doing well (Bernal for example does huge volume in base from strava).

https://www.publish.csiro.au/RD/RD20326

The CSIRO has been researching for decades as to what the best bang for buck is with regards exercise.

My hypothesis is that the equation that weight loss is related to calorie intake minus expenditure, but I think the conclusions one draws from it fail to take into account how much the body can control expenditure.

My body seems to naturally drift up in fat weight, very slowly -- probably around a pound per year -- no matter how much I eat. If I cut calories a lot, I can lose fat. After that, my fat level drifts back up to the old target weight pretty quickly, and then up slowly again. I'm pretty sure if I plotted my fat from the time I became an adult, it would be a pretty straight line, with short-term dips and recoveries for diets.

Losing weight sustainably would mean resetting that target somehow. I don't know how. Changing my diet and exercise levels don't seem to do much for fat levels (but do more for my general fitness and health).

While the thermodynamics aren't assailable, it turns out that the calorie system is in fact quite fallable and bad!

There's a lot of good material on why, I like this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJQxadvsmEQ

But simply put:

- Our system for measuring how much "calorie" is in any given food is extremely problematic and unrelated to how the body captures energy

- Our system for estimating how much "calorie" a human body uses is extremely problematic and error-ridden.

- Our systemized ignorance towards the relationship in the body between energy storage and energy consumption, as well as all the factors influencing this system. The same advice or strategy simply doesn't work the same way for two people. But our advice and labels can't capture that.

As we engineers know "garbage in, garbage out". Well, when all of the data in this system is garbage, it's no surprise that the function outputs garbage.

You are also correct - caloric deficit is not very sustainable long term for a large number of people.

There is ongoing study to figure out why — for example, why some people are much less able to stick to a diet, or have constant food cravings, and so on. That’s not at odds with what you’re questioning. The focus is on those areas because the requirement of a caloric deficit for weight loss is one of the most reliable observations we have so far.

Weight loss is complicated because of the added dimension of satiety. If I eat proteins, vegetables and fats without counting I'll be around my baseline. But with sugar and carbs it's impossible to not overshoot without being terribly hungry. Also with less insulin sensitivity found in obese/pre-diabetics people, ingested food can not be efficiently used and end up stored, leading to the vicious cycle of being tired and still hungry.

Arguing that calories in doesn't matter is nearly on the level of Holocaust denialism, as the main picture evidence there is of the effects of calorie deficits.

Food (calories in) is just a form of energy your body is capable of utilizing. Fat is just a physical medium to store energy for use in your body. For your body to move and perform actions (live), you require energy. All things considered at this scale, if you expend more energy than you consume, you'll ultimately either die (due to lack of energy) or use other forms of energy in your body (e.g. fat).

This is of course the 30,000 ft view and there's a lot of complex biology and chemistry going on but it's pretty straightforward if you believe the law of conservation of energy is correct and our bodies aren't doing some sort of nuclear physics to process energy and instead relying on various forms of chemical and physical energy.

As you point out, it's not so cut and dry though in practice. There's a time component here and our bodies get quite clever. We build up efficiency of certain tasks over time requiring less energy usage. We resist building muscle because it requires more energy to maintain. Some food's energy density isn't perceived very well by our bodies and we remain more or less hungry irrelevant of potential calories making it more difficult to maintain a calorie deficit/diet based solely on our bodies senses. Many nutritional information products don't accurately measure calories of food, sometimes making it difficult to use as a base metric (theres a lot of errors in these measurements, especially by small food producers/providers). We also have incredible difficulty trying to estimate how many calories our body is actually expending because it's a fairly complex system (the "calories out" part of the equation) although there are some figures out there to help you estimate these within some general ranges depending on factors like age, diet, fitness, activity and so on--it's not perfect but it's something to work with quantitatively.

The benefit of calorie counting though is that there are fairly basic physical and chemical principles at play that make it a useful tool in weight loss and management. Even if a bit variable (both the in and out) and sometimes inaccurately represented, it gives us something fairly quantitative to work with, measure, and change around to control our weight. We can measure it and change other variables in our lifestyles to, over time, manage weight. It works and the statement is valid but it's not simple to use by any means, there's a lot one needs to learn over time to better learn how to measure their in/out and overall body feeling based on these factors.

If you worry about macros (eg. hitting your proteins) you can get even better results by building muscle (which increases your metabolism and make you burn more fat) and avoiding a bunch of health issues likely linked to eating modern processed crap.

That said, the phrase: > without making your calorie intake less than your expenditure you will not loose weight

is correct and not a meme. It's just that your expenditure is hard to track and can be influenced by a lot of factors.

What I found that works wonders is to: - 1. keep your diet and fitness regimen as constant as possible, no matter what it is - 2. swap food with lower calories and higher protein intake, while trying to avoid processed food - 3. increase exercise without adding food - 4. measure your weight every morning at the same time - 5. do that until you stop gaining weight and your weight is constant for a few weeks - 6. reduce calories by doing step 2 or 3 again until you start losing a bit of weight - 7. keep doing it until you hit your target weight

I did this to lose weight years ago and it worked well. The main advantage is you don't have to worry about counting calories.

Last year instead I just went carnivore (admittedly, I did it to sort out other health issues, the weight loss was a welcome side benefit) and I found myself feeling full (thanks to the higher fat intake) and eating a sensible amount of meat, which helped me lose 10kgs over ~10 weeks. I'm sure not eating carbs (ketosis) also played a role.

I have a hard time believing this. Here is the first link from googling "cico weight loss studies":

https://legionathletics.com/cico-diet/

it's only a "meme" to those that have been convinced by people who are trying to sell you a specific diet/lifestyle (most commonly fasting or low carb)

This is not a "meme", it is almost universally accepted science by nutrition scientists at this point. This includes both theoretical reasons, as well as actual, legit studies with human subjects.

> Calories seems to be the catchall metric pushed around, but it seems to be as much about what you eat, not just eating less.

Not sure what you mean by "it" when you say "it seems to be as much about what you eat."

> Whether calories is the thing that matters is the question.

Matters for what?

If you mean in the strict sense that you are able to control someone's total food intake, then yes, you can induce any amount of weight loss you want by limiting their caloric intake.

If you mean "matters" in terms of getting real people in the real world to actually lose weight? That's a much more complicated question, because the number one variable that controls the amount and duration of weight loss is how long you stick with the diet.

Any "diet" that causes a caloric deficit will cause weight loss. Some do this by directly counting calories and targeting a lower number. Some do this by causing you to eat foods that make you fuller, thereby making you limit the amount of calories without thinking about it. You can even take medication that just cause you to not be hungry, which is the most effective in some sense.

The thing is, most diets are hard to stick to, or at least most people don't stick to diets. I personally counted calories as I found it the "easiest" in some sense (though I also had to learn a lot about how to eat in a more satiating way so not to be hungry.) I used that to lose a lot of weight. I've now regained a lot of that weight, partly planned (as part of a bulk), partly unplanned (I got injured so stopped training, and then decided to focus less on weight control and eat more, knowing that I would gain weight in an unplanned fashion.)

I think I finally figured out why I hate CICO so much: it's usually presented in a motte-and-bailey style. It's used to dismiss more-complex advice or observations and presented as if it's all you need to look at to model weight loss and gain to a useful level, then when it's pointed out that the terms are so vague, hard to actually measure, and don't address the effects of feedback loops on metabolism, that it's like trying to model the behavior of aircraft with gravity but without lift, and therefore damn near useless, the fallback is "well it's still technically true, blah blah blah". Sure, it's technically true, it's just... not very useful on its own, and constantly bringing it up as if it's all that matters is grating.

Is it a medication that increases energy expenditure? Something that boosts your metabolism?

Huberman lab and The Drive podcast that I have listened to have had several academics in this field discuss the divergent effects of different modes of training.

> With particularly high rates of knee and ankle sprains and strains, neuromuscular training and pre-strengthening programs, which have been previously demonstrated to be effective among young athletes, may be particularly worthwhile in prospective participants

Some people find success in organizing their life to get enough exercise in the natural way, as part of activities of their day, but I think the popularity of HIIT in recent days clearly indicates there's also lots of people who want to optimize for minimum of time spent on exercising. Myself I'm one of such people.

Maybe not 500lbs but somebody could certainly eventually deadlift 400lbs from 3x8 minutes once a week, as long as they keep it intense and keep increasing the weight. I say that as someone who can deadlift more than 400lbs after many years of practicing around 30 minutes/week. If you're lifting hard, a week is barely enough time for the body to recover anyway.

What's harder to refute is the loss of weight due to calorie restriction which is mostly physics. This is what the gp is talking about.

That's only one side of the equation.

It is a basically proven fact (and largely implied by physics) that `calorie intake - expenditure = net weight change`. That is pretty much beyond dispute.

It is also true that some things affect expenditure, and it seems likely that most people have a "set point" that your body attempts to return to. This is also almost certainly changeable, as people have managed to change it in the past. (And this is less surely true than other things known.)

So yes, it's entirely possible to eat "inconsistently" and not have net weight change, your body is probably subconciously causing you to eat less after you eat large meals, and vice versa. Or possibly causing you to expend more energy after large meals.

To add to what someone else said, you probably ate below your threshold to be able to maintain your weight. You can't guess this, the only way to get an accurate ESTIMATE on how much you actually ate in calories is to measure. Even pros over/under estimate what they eat in terms of calories

“ Ultraprocessed foods — such as refined starchy snacks, cereals, crackers, energy bars, baked goods, sodas and sweets — can be particularly harmful for weight gain, as they are rapidly digested and flood the bloodstream with glucose, fructose and amino acids, which are converted to fat by the liver.”

Also, weight gain/loss should be measured on a weekly scale rather than daily. You might feel like your eating isn't consistent but it could be on a weekly-basis. For example, you might barely eat one day but eat 3500 calories the next. That seems like inconsistent dieting but in actuality, they average each other out.

Just consider how much flatulence varies meal-to-meal, that's largely produced by calories guests living in your gut "burned" instead of you.

The trouble is it's a complex ecosystem hosting many lives, controlled by hormonal knobs affecting behavior/activity-level and energy storage, and the makeup of the food hugely affects how much is absorbed and at what rate.

Everyone knows firsthand when over-eating a massive meal of hard to digest foods there's a substantial amount of energy deposited in the toilet... And wild pigs / pet dogs don't get excited about eating human feces for lack of caloric value.

It's just an upper bound, nothing more.

But 500W is a significant effort for an untrained person, particularly somebody of smaller stature.

FWIW, I'm an avid recreational cyclist and my 1-hour power fluctuates in the 250W-280W range at 68-70kg body weight. My all-out sprint power is over 1000W, but not by much. 2000W is enough to win elite sprints, both on the track and on the road.

Reading the power charts from https://intervals.icu of 43,000 male cycling enthusiasts:

- 70% of cyclists are able to sustain 500 W for 15 seconds

- 50% of cyclists are able to sustain 500 W for 30 seconds

Only the top 5% cyclists have an average 15 second power exceeding 1000 Watts.

Most fit people have pretty good intuition about their bodies. They choose appropriate workouts, they don't run at high intensity too long and give themselves a stitch when they're meant to be doing endurance training, they know what it feels like to be lazy versus what it feels like to need a lower intensity rest day, they enjoy at least some of the exercise they do. When a sedentary person starts exercising on their own, they often don't know the benefits of training at a lower intensity, and adopt a "no pain no gain" approach, which is counterproductive if it doesn't build on a solid foundation of good habits.

I had exactly opposite experience. Time cost is rather major thing. Especially in the beginning, because it makes organizing your day much harder. Add an hour of anything and suddenly you dont have time to shop or cook or socialize or simply for your favorite hobby. Small time investment make it easier to transition and change lifestyle.

And second, allowing myself to cheat and skipping does miracles for my ability to keep the activity long term. Whenever I set hard requirements on myself, following up became impossible in the long term. And since the attitude is all or nothing, it dropped to nothing.

And third thing that does miracle for gaining long term habit is to prioritize pleasurable exercise, the one I actually like, rather then theoretically most effective one that sux.

There is a huge difference between killing yourself over your lunch break/before dinner at home, and then taking a quick shower, and having to cut more than an hour out of your day because you need to drive to the gym, kill yourself for a very short period of time, then take several minutes to recover enough to feel you can safely drive home as a gross sweaty mess because you're far too uncomfortable showering around a bunch of strangers at the gym, and then do that multiple times a week. That's not just a commitment, that's a complete daily habit overhaul. Your life is now dominated by having to go to the gym.

Folks who decide "yes, I think I can spend 15 minutes a day, three days a week, on this" at home, with some expert advise from reputable fitness coaches who run also youtube channels, without any of the time investment, inconvenience, and complete upending of daily routines that comes with attending a gym, might have a different success rate (and we'll never hear from them. If they keep it up, they just get in a bit better shape and move on with their lives).

Last summer I was sprinting stairs every 3 days for a month to prepare for a week of multi-pitch climbing (with huge approaches) in the Canadian Rockies. I whipped myself into pretty good condition for the trip and my body held up, but it wasn't until after that week of climbing mountains every day that I felt like I was in properly awesome condition.

This.

We cannot tell, from the experiment, how much of a difference each high intensity section in the 10m contributes.

This doesn't mean that zone 3 and 4 are useless. Most endurance athletes do most of their high intensity in these zones because the stress of zone 5 is not manageable over time.