Nutrition Tip of the Week no. 4

From now on, I will be posting one of these tips each week, courtesy of Dr John Berardi, the brains (and brawn) behind Precision Nutrition. Enjoy, and click on the link below for more info on PN.

Tip #4
Revving Up Metabolism
by Dr. John Berardi

I recommend more calories than most do. That’s because there’s no such thing as a stagnant metabolic set-point. Instead, metabolism chases intake. So, if you want a bigger metabolism, you need a bigger food intake. And if you’re worried about fat gain with this approach, just use outcome-based decision making and adjust energy (calorie) intake every two weeks based on your results. Not much ‘damage’ can take place in only two weeks. So if you end up boosting your metabolism, you’ll be thanking me eternally. And if it turns out you’re consuming too much, you can just adjust down.

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Look out for another nutrition tip next week.

Interval Training

Well, I’ve said I’d write about my interval training programme. Intervals are a method of cardio training where you work at a hard(er) rate for short intervals, interspersed with equal or longer ‘rest’ intervals at a lower level of intensity. These high-intensity workouts burn loads of calories, but they also raise your metabolism after you finish working out, a phenomenon called ‘afterburn’. Interval training also boosts your aerobic fitness much quicker than exercising at a steady state does. The key, though, is to work hard enough in your ‘hard’ intervals, and easy enough in your ‘recovery’ intervals.

So how hard should you work? There are a couple of ways of measuring exertion. The more scientific and less subjective way is to use a heart rate monitor and work at a percentage of your maximum. If you are going to do this, it is vital that you correctly calculate your maximum heart rate. If you’re sedentary, the old formula of (220 minus your age) would give you a rough estimation. If you’re quite fit though, a better formula is (205 minus half your age). However, both of these can give wildly inaccurate results and if at all possible, you should arrange a proper test. Once you have your maximum it is worth taking into account your resting heart rate so that you don’t under- or over-estimate your actual work thresholds. So if you wanted to work at 70%, for example, rather than use Max HR x 70%, you would use:

(Max HR – Resting HR) x 70% + Resting HR.

An excellent book on heart rate training that teaches you how to do all of this is “Heart Monitor Training for the Compleat Idiot”. See the review on my book page for more information.

The other, more simple way to guage effort is to use the Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) scale. The scale looks like this:

• RPE 1–2: Very easy; you can converse with no effort
• RPE 3: Easy; you can converse with almost no effort
• RPE 4: Moderately easy; you can converse comfortably with little effort
• RPE 5: Moderate; conversation requires some effort
• RPE 6: Moderately hard; conversation requires quite a bit of effort
• RPE 7: Difficult; conversation requires a lot of effort
• RPE 8: Very difficult; conversation requires maximum effort
• RPE 9–10: Peak effort; conversation not possible

In a completely non-scientific observation, I have found that the RPE scale equates quite well with my heart rate, so RPE 3 is at around 30% of my maximum heart rate and RPE 8 is at around 80% of my maximum heart rate. But I don’t know if this applies to other people with varying levels of fitness. If you’re using RPE and don’t have someone to talk to, try talking to yourself, reciting the alphabet, counting in Spanish, or singing along to your iPod until you get a feel for what the different rates of exertion feel like.

So what kind of intervals should you be doing. The length of time at the hard interval will depend on the intensity. So for example, you could do 30 seconds at RPE 9, but not 3 minutes! And you could keep that up for a while provided you have a decent recovery, between two and three times as long as the hard interval. If you’re going to have shorter recovery times, you may need to bring the hard intensity down a bit. The number of intervals will also depend on your general fitness levels. As you get fitter, you may want to add a couple of intervals, for example, or reduce your recovery time. Personally, I get bored easily so I like to mix it up. It also challenges your body in new ways which tends to produce greater gains. I do four different interval programmes, taken from The Metabolism Advantage (see book page for review and more information). These are:

Interval Workout A:

Warm up: 1 minute @ RPE 3; 2 minutes @ RPE 4; 2 minutes @ RPE 5

Intervals: [30 seconds @ RPE 9; 90 seconds @ RPE 3] x 6

Cool down: 3 minutes @ RPE 3

Total time: 20 minutes

Interval Workout B:

Warm up: 1 minute @ RPE 3; 2 minutes @ RPE 4; 2 minutes @ RPE 5

Intervals: [1 minute @ RPE 8; 1 minute @ RPE 3] x 6

Cool down: 3 minutes @ RPE 3

Total time: 20 minutes

Interval Workout C:

Warm up: 1 minute @ RPE 3; 2 minutes @ RPE 4; 2 minutes @ RPE 5

Intervals: [90 seconds @ RPE 7; 3 minutes @ RPE 3] x 4

Cool down: 5 minutes @ RPE 3

Total time: 25 minutes

Interval workout D:

Warm up: 1 minute @ RPE 3; 2 minutes @ RPE 4; 2 minutes @ RPE 5

Intervals: [30 seconds @ RPE 8; 30 seconds @ RPE 3] x 15

Cool down: 5 minutes @ RPE 3

Total time: 25 minutes

Anyhow, that’s about it for interval training unless you have any questions. Nutrition Tip of the Week tomorrow. ‘night all.