Fitness and Physiology

04/21/2020

Caloric expenditure does not qualify the success of your workout!

What is a Calorie, and what is its role in your health and fitness? Visit www.fitnphys.com/ to learn more about Calories, metabolism, health and fitness!

04/03/2020

Burning Calories is important, but is it the MOST important?

The real question is: What is the definition, role and value of a Calorie? Once you answer that, you can ask yourself: Does that context fit what you're chasing after in your fitness outcomes?

Hit me with your Calorie questions! We've got a lot of cool Calorie-specific stuff coming out and I want to make sure I answer what's important to you!

04/02/2020

Calories can be an obsession for many. When you workout, you can't see or feel or measure all the things that are changing in your body, and the benefits and purpose to your hard work can often feel abstract. But if your watch or your phone gives you a metric like "calories burned" - and especially considering our societal attachment to calories from food and "low calorie" being associated with health - many people now believe that the purpose to exercise and nutrition is to make your calories go away.

How do you measure or qualify a successful workout? Let us know in the comments!

Be sure to visit fitnphys.com/ (link in bio) to learn more about calories and energy metabolism!

@ Fort Collins, Colorado

04/01/2020

I've heard some mixed stuff about exercise recently. Should you be exercising at a time like this? Outdoors in the fresh air, at-home workouts? There are some opinions on the internet that exercise can weaken and stress your immune system - so here are a few words about that!

Does exercise weaken your immune system? I've seen questions and claims across the internet lately that exercise can weaken your immune system because of oxidative stress and muscle damage causing inflammation and pulling resources from your immune system and spreading it thin. So if there's a viral...

01/02/2020

What are you resolving TO LEARN this year?

A lot of NY resolutions are physical goals: i.e., drop so many pounds, eat this many fruits and vegetables per day, go to the gym so many times a week, etc

Those are great! If I may, I'd like to suggest a learning goal!

If your goals this year are about weight loss, then I suggest resolving to learn about fat physiology, adipose behaviors, and/or lipid metabolism. Start small, but learning some basics can make an exponential impact on your ex*****on of your goals!
If your goal is to build muscle, then I suggest resolving to learn about muscle physiology and some of the recent research on hypertrophy.

Learning how things work will lay the foundation for successful follow through!

Visit our website and sign up to join our email list so you can be notified when our newest courses and videos come out so you can keep learning and crushing your goals!
.. Also, if I do say so myself: isn't this little muscle diagram animation really cool!?

12/31/2019

The way we approach and manage fitness is old and outdated, and needs to change.

If you're a personal trainer, what are the weaknesses you identify in the fitness industry, and what can we do about it?

If you're a scientist, how can we help fitness professionals to properly apply your research in their craft?

If you're a personal training client, what isn't meeting your expectations?

Why are gyms and personal training programs so often just a contract trap? What if you had to visit your physician and it was the same way?

The fitness industry needs to be better. Let me know what you think

12/30/2019

Where do you turn for knowledge? How do you know it's trusted?

The internet is a big place, and as an exercise scientist I see through so many of the convincing and bold fitness claims; that's why I started the podcast HIITCAST, to address the bro science that over-saturates popular belief and gym culture. Part of our founding principles has been to distill the latest research out there, and to educate our clients. Now, we're raising the bar and producing even more, and even better content for you!

2020 brings with it a few new video series: The FITNPHYS Research Report, and a dedicated series to our popular podcast segment: Bro Science Bu****it. We're going to report to you the latest findings in current health and fitness research, and we're going to answer your questions and address the latest trends that are on your mind. We're also introducing some updates to your favorite podcast, HIITCAST!

Our goal is to help you learn exercise science so you can be empowered and independent from the bold and wild claims all over the internet and social media!

Let me know in the comments below where you currently turn for your health and fitness knowledge!

12/12/2019

What's the role of dietary protein in your exercise recovery strategy?

I've spoken about the anabolic window in previous posts, and how your post-workout consumption of protein may not be as urgent as gym culture pressures you to believe. But after a recent conversation with some of my students, I realized how simply stating that the anabolic window isn't worth stressing over can result in more questions and uncertainty by many people out there. People are still urgently eating protein after a workout, not because they believe in the anabolic window, but because it's a framework that they can structure their nutrition upon. This got my students asking, "even if the anabolic window is a bogus principle, is it doing any harm?"

What are your thoughts on this? Or even further, are there other outdated yet benign principles in fitness that you notice are still being applied in gym culture?

11/26/2019

If you can understand the difference between acute responses and chronic adaptations to exercise, you will have a foundation to help you out-smart around 85% of the bro science myths that dominate gym culture 💪
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I've been studying fat metabolism and metabolic flexibility for over 10 years, and most of the questions I get on a regular basis and a lot of the misunderstood principles I see across social media happen when "responses vs adaptations" get confused. So much of the bro science out there has superficial truths mixed in, but it's unfortunately applied in the wrong context, resulting in a very convincing yet skewed piece of fitness advice.
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It's our goal at Fitness & Physiology to be your ultimate source of health and fitness education, to deconstruct the myths and trends, and help you understand how you can independently manage your own health!
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DM us, or leave a comment with some of the health and fitness related questions your have or the things you hear around the gym and social media! @ Fort Collins, Colorado

11/22/2019

You are born with a certain distribution of Type 1 and Type 2 muscle fibers, but with training there can be some shifting.
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But what I find most fascinating about the accessibility of muscle fibers through training, is your ability to recruit new and larger Type 2 muscle fibers to overcome heavier and harder stresses and resistance. You have, RIGHT NOW, a greater strength and power than you see in your day to day physical activity. And sometimes (typically under extreme stress), your motor neurons recruit some of those hard-to-reach muscle fibers, tapping into greater force production for your muscle. This results in a cascade of nervous system, metabolic, and hormonal reactions toward improving your health and fitness!
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Whether you're an endurance athlete or not, it's good for you to, every now and then, lift something really heavy. It's not necessarily about bulking up, or getting those gainz - rather, it's about training your body toward greater accessibility of your muscle fibers. It's about health, aging and not losing muscle, and being strong when you need it. @ Phoenix, Arizona