Fitness is one of those things that everybody wants, but only attainable by a few. Everybody has their own idea of what fitness is. It could be the aesthetic of fitness, of having a lean body with little fat. For some it could be performing well in physical tests. For most people, it is having a well-functioning body that is able to keep up with the demands of daily life, and also one that is maintained for good health even till old age.
For me, I like to keep things simple. A good proxy for fitness is strength.
Why build Strength?
Building strength is the key to building muscle. Muscles are remarkably hard to build, even for a man with good testosterone levels. A person who maxes out both training and nutrition can only hope to gain 1kg of muscle after a month. That might sound like a lot, but that’s across your body. Chances are you are going to observe your limbs packing on some mass and even new muscle striations, but your overall physique won’t change until many months later.
How is building muscle essential for fitness? It is the key to burning fat. Many people who start off seeking a lean physique make the mistake of targeting a lower weight with the idea that “lower weight = less fat” They will probably ramp up their cardio activity with an aggressive calorie-cutting diet program. This is the first step towards feeling like a failure with no results.
I don’t deny that many have found success in such a strategy, as I have personally witnessed the effects of healthy eating with frequent cardio in National Service. But it is not the easiest way to lose fat since it literally took the discipline of a military life to ensure its results for me.
If it is hard to understand how lifting big, scary weights can be easier than running in the park, let me work out the math for you. A 30min cardio session can burn about 300 calories. 300 calories is what you can find in the smallest cheeseburger from McDonalds. You can burn slightly more if you push harder, but you won’t increase it by too much. And if you REALLY push yourself with High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), you can burn calories for the next 48 hours. But that only amounts to 80 calories, give or take. To summarize how cardio burns calories, 1. you burn calories only when you exercise 2. you need a lot of time and effort to burn not a lot of calories. This is in contrast with building muscle. The thing about muscles is that they are more metabolically active; they are always consuming calories, even when you do nothing. Nothing is easier than doing nothing. The more muscles you have, the higher your base calorie demand. You will be burning calories ALL the time, and that is the trick to fat loss. Instead of quenching everything to the caloric floor, you raise the caloric floor.
Do I not do Cardio then?
When taken to the extreme, cardio can work against your fitness goals. Excessive cardio coupled with dieting can throw off your hormonal balance. Your body will think that its entering into a time of starvation and will try its best to resist weight changes. You will start to feel hungry all the time and your energy levels might even start dropping. This is not a sign of fitness, it is a sign of long-term exhaustion.
But that is only an example of the extreme. Cardio has a very important place in fitness. It builds and trains you to use your cardiovascular and respiratory systems. The key to good cardio is to know what it is good for. We have established that there are better ways to burning fat than cardio, but that doesn’t mean that cardio is useless. You need cardio to train endurance. You cannot run a marathon just by lifting weights. You have to progressively run longer distances to run these kind of distances.
Cardio also trains you to be more agile and mobile. Sometimes we have to move quickly over long distances e.g. walking up a long flight of stairs, chasing after a bus etc. If you have good cardiovascular health, these activities should be easy and not result in you panting for air.
Also, cardio trains your body to be more efficient with each breath and to be smarter in using its energy throughout the day. This means more stable energy levels and perhaps even a sharper mind on those slow, hot, mentally draining afternoons.
How do I make sense of all these?
Coming back to the introduction, why use strength as a proxy to fitness? Isn’t endurance and agility also important metrics to health? By increasing strength, one guarantees the increase of lean body mass. This has a stabilizing effect on one’s health by recomposing the body mass from fat to muscle. This is arguably one of the most effective ways for people to get rid of fat.
I am a pretty lazy person myself. I want to take the path of least resistance, and that path for fitness is gaining strength. It is by gaining strength that I saw myself physically transform. And this new body allows me to tackle the more difficult goals of endurance and agility as a body that is better built is better able to take on the stresses of cardio exercises.
It is liberating to not care about calories (as long as I am eating a balanced diet made from minimally processed foods), and the weighing scale. Because gaining strength introduced another problem entirely: the shortage of calories to fuel the increase in strength. Also, instead of losing weight, now I seek to gain muscle. By focusing on eating more protein, I have cut down on junk food. (It is remarkably difficult to eat 1.5g per pound of your body weight in protein, you will feel full all the time). In a sense, I am letting go of false proxies of fitness and finding the secret way to a healthier life. By sticking to a simple goal of gaining strength, attaining fitness and a great physique seems not only doable, but inevitable.