Walking Off The Fat Without Lifting?

[quikky]

Coach,

I a friend that strongly believes that simply walking will burn off fat with absolutely minimal effects on LBM. His argument is that walking, I think he said around 60% of max heart rate, after a short period of time, after going through glycogen, just taps fat for energy, and this essentially results in 95% of calories burned being fat. He believes you can maintain 90%+ of your strength while losing weight, without lifting weights, simply by walking.

Based on everything I've seen, it seems that the standard approach is to lift weights while losing weight in order to minimize LBM loss. However, I have not seen a concise explanation why, biologically, this must happen.

How I understand it, is that our body adapts to strength training by creating new LBM. However, the body does not keep this level of LBM if no stimulus is provided. So, if you lose weight without lifting, your body loses LBM as well, since it has no reason to keep it. This is how people often become skinny fat. I don't, however, know if my understanding is correct, or what the more biological explanation is.

What is the precise counter to my friend's argument?

[Mark Rippetoe]

The precise counter to his argument is that it doesn't work. He'll know this soon enough. Right now, it's not a sufficiently interesting question to type about.

[Tom Narvaez]

Bodybuilders have long used tons of very slow, boring ass cardio to work off fat without losing a lot of LBM/strength (think stair-stepper at low settings for ~2 hours...per day). It goes without saying that don't actually stop lifting, though.

[morbidlyfat]

He believes you can maintain 90%+ of your strength while losing weight, without lifting weights, simply by walking.

If he's weak enough, he'll surely be right.

[jillingworth]

Oh for the love of all that's holy. This is another of those screwed up, we were all better when we were hunter-gather's, piles of pseudo-science disguised as something the fools can digest.

Listen, if you are a hunter-gather or a subsistence-level farmer, you can be awfully thin and apparently healthy without lifting weights. You won't be strong, but you might be healthy. But, and this is the big part, you have to eat bats, chen-am seeds, grasshoppers, mice, your toe-nails, and whatever the hell else comes your way. And you are always walking. Like way more than an a cubicle worker could ever hope to do.

Tell your friend to stop reading psuedo-science until he/she has a real background in science. Oh, and eat a steak and lift something heavy.

[grubinski]

I had a friend that went from over 300# to 190# (at 6' 6") by walking very fast on a treadmill for ~2 hours a day. This was after he had an angioplasty done, and had been scared into exercising seriously. He had a fatal heart attack (or arrythmia, I'm not a doctor) and died shortly after completing one workout. My TOTALLY wild speculation is that that the dietary habits that went with the exercise may have put him into a mineral imbalance or something that screwed up his hearth rhythm. But that's just a hunch on my part, and he's still dead.

He **did** manage to lose over 100 lbs this way. I'm not saying it's healthy, but it's possible.

[devnull]

Your friend believes this with all his heart, because this is exactly what he wants to believe. Because of this, there is no point in arguing.

If you want to poke holes at his argument just for fun, point out that your average body holds about 2000 calories in glycogen stores. Going through all that glycogen would take him hours and hours and hours, not to mention that it will make him hungry as hell. He is correct to say that he will maintain 90% of the strength that he doesn't have.

Don't forget to mention that there is a source for energy on his body that is more readily available than fat, which is muscle mass. Hours and hours of slow cardio are extremely catabolic, which means that a huge chunk of what he thinks is 95% fat is actually his muscles wasting away.

At the end just pull pictures of 100 meter sprinters an of 10,000 meter runners. I think this depicts the contrast of what high intensity training and long cardio sessions can do to your body better than anything else.

[quikky]

The precise counter to his argument is that it doesn't work. He'll know this soon enough. Right now, it's not a sufficiently interesting question to type about.

The problem is, he won't know it doesn't work because he is not the one following his own advice. Let's call this friend Jim.

What happened is a few of my buddies, about a year ago, decided to get into better shape. They started doing some short high-intensity cardio workouts with Jim. After about a half a year of this, they wanted to get into strength training. I introduced them to SS, and they have followed it for about 5 months. When I say followed it, I mean they did all the exercises as prescribed, and tried to eat. I know, NDTFP, but considering these are your typical guys, making them gain at least some weight (one gained about 12lb, the other about 7lb) was the best I could convince them to do. Hey, at least I made a couple guys do some below parallel squats, and gain a bit of weight, right?

Well, after this period of massive, monstrous, weight gain, they decided they need to burn some fat off. I knew I wasn't going to convince them to stay on the program and keep gaining strength, however, I thought they could at least continue to lift weights, just doing less volume. However, at this point Jim has strongly suggested they could instead just walk the fat off. My advice has been ignored, even though my previous advice and help doing SS led them to make, even considering the sub-par diet, good strength gains.

Now, while I could let them "know soon enough" on their own, I wish I could present a convincing argument, especially from someone with a bit more credibility than myself, that this is going to result in LBM loss that doesn't not need to take place and that this fat loss could be done better.

...And therein lies the reason for the question.

[Alexandros Brod]

You can maintain 90% of your strength just walking if you are currently completely sedentary and untrained

[mattypee]

The body's reasonable response to low intensity activity and a calorie deficit:
"Holy shit it's winter and I'm hungry. I better calm the heck down and get ready for 4 months of being under the snow with no animals around to hunt and eat"
The body's reasonable reaction to little to no exercise and a calorie surplus:
"Winters coming, no animals about, I better keep this fat for later"
The body's reasonable response to plenty of food and intense activity:
"Hell yeah, its bear wrestling time! Better get big and attract women for sexytime."

Another idea is that theres 9,000 calories in a Kilogram of fat.
A treadmill in slow mode uses what, maybe 300 calories an hour?
9000/300 = 30 hours on a treadmill to burn a kilogram of fat, assuming your diet and weight were steady before starting.
I certainly do not have time for a second full time job, for which I will not get paid, and which will be boring as hell.

In an SS workout I think you're more likely to be burning 600 calories (at least, theres no solid values), and then as much again recovering afterwards.
much better bang for your buck.

Although, yeah, if your friend has 7 hours a day to use the treadmill, long walks might be best for them, who knows. tell him to do that.