Josiah Lorentzen

This blog is coming from frustration.  There is a new fitness joint in town that has talked to more than 1 of our members at QCCF about the length of their workout compared to QCCF’s. Saying that there program is not just merely a 5-10 minute workout but an hour every day.  

Here’s what I have to say.  I am by no means a scientist or think that I have fitness completely figured out but here is what I do know.  

1. Body Composition

Clearly probably the single most important thing to 90% of my members, so lets start there.  

There is a ginormous amount of confusion and misinformation that spreads in the area of exercise and weight loss.  Across America there is a fitness boom amongst people and yet we continue to get fatter and sicker.  Why? 

In Short: Thermodynamics (Calories) was invented by a man named Carl von Noorden from Germany in the early 1900’s.  For some reason we have adopted this as absolute truth in the area of weight loss and it is leaving people working out for long durations and starving themselves to get lean.  

W/out getting into too much science I’m going to give you a quick statistic and you do with it what you want.  

It takes a 250lb man 20 flights of stairs to burn the calories from 1 piece of bread…What are the chances that that same man doesn’t eat the equivalent to a piece of bread after climbing 20 flights of stairs?  - “Why We Get Fat” - Gary Taubes

We say skip the bread and skip the stairs. 

Programs like the one talking negatively about QCCF brag about the amount of calories they burn in a workout.  They will then put them on a restricted Calorie diet to make them lose weight. (Sounds like starvation to me) Does it work?  Sure.  Is it sustainable? Absolutely not.  

It’s about rate of return.  Eat Real Food (And Plenty of It) and workout as little as possible to be in the best shape of your life.  

The average member at QCCF works out a total of 45 minutes/week not counting their warm up and sees HUGE Results.  45 minutes/week?  That is sustainable!

2. What is fitness/health? and how is it measured?

Health can now be concisely and precisely defined as increased work capacity across broad time, modal, and age domains. Work capacity is the ability to perform real physical work as measured by force x distance / time (which is average power). Fitness is this ability in as many domains as possible.

Science is about measurement and prediction. Without measurable, observable, repeatable data concerning the fundamental physical units of kinematics (mass, distance, and time or MKS) there is no science of human performance. This is true of the planets, automobiles, and exercise. - Greg Glassman (Creator of CrossFit)

If fitness/health is measured by work capacity (force x distance/ time.) Why would I repeatedly do 1 hour workouts day after day?   As a QCCF’er we are going to get efficient in working in all domains.  We want to measure our work capacity.  How much weight can I move and how fast can I move it.  

“I would venture to say that this “person” has never completed ”Fran” 21-15-9 of Thrusters and Pull-Ups in sub 3 minutes.  I think he would have a new respect for the 5 minute workout if he had. 

Why take an hour to complete 100 push-ups, 100 Pull-Ups, 100 Squats, 100 Sit-Ups when we can do it in sub 20 minutes?  Same amount of work at a higher intensity in a shorter amount of time..  What yields better results? 

Thats my rant.  

Quad City CrossFit

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I think it could be that simple. Just sayin…