- (panting) Morning Trainiacs.
Oh, wow. (grunting)
Holy.
One thing people always ask me is, (grunting)
Terin, how do you stay so sexy?
In all seriousness, I'm 11 days
from getting vaccine number two.
Just got back into hard training
after a failure earlier this week
and pulled off nine times, but two minutes at 310 watts.
And then right at the end, 15 seconds of a big surge
up around 550 Watts, and it hurt.
So nobody asks that question, but one question
that actually is asked online is:
what is better for weight loss, running or cycling?
And on the surface you might think, well,
running burns more calories so it's running,
or you can bike longer than you can run,
so then it's biking.
I think there's a whole bunch of different factors
that first go into what constitutes weight loss
that you want to have
and then what are the characteristics
of running versus cycling
so you can help determine which is going to work best
for you.
I got sweat my eyes.
I got sweat right in my eyes on that last one.
All right, let's talk about how to look as good
as your favorite blonde, slightly chubby Canadian YouTuber.
First, there's two requirements in order
to cause weight loss and keep it off
in a way that doesn't mess up your system long-term.
The first is that you do need a calorie deficit.
You need to be burning off more calories than you consume.
And this is very simple.
You need to calculate roughly the amount of calories
that you burn on a daily basis.
I like using a website like MitoCalc,
because this is accounting for a lot of the differences
between what your diet might be
and what your exercise level might be.
And this is going to give you roughly an idea
of how many calories you are burning off throughout the day.
Eat a little bit less than this,
you will likely lose weight as long as you are satisfying
the second condition,
which is you need to have a healthy body system.
Now, a lot of fitness influencers online
might say that it is just strictly calories in
and calories out, and only that will cause weight loss.
In a very basic sense, yes,
but when we talk about weight loss that is able
to sustain itself for years,
there is this requirement to stay healthy.
So there's one fitness person online that I know really,
really well, and recently I've talked to them
about what they're going through right now,
and they are encountering health concerns
where they're training as much, if not more
as they had previously,
their diet hasn't changed at all,
and this is somebody who eats the same
just about every single day,
but they went and gained about 10 to 15 pounds
and are having a very hard time reducing that weight
while cutting calories.
This is similar to what I'm going through right now.
So the cause of this might change from person to person,
but it can be things like hormones not being balanced,
so you're retaining a little bit of fat,
which happens when your hormones get out of balance.
You can have really high stress levels in your body,
which tends to hold a lot of inflammation and waterweight.
There are a few different reasons why your body just might
be clinging on to a lot of weight, but in general,
you need to have an overall healthy body system.
And one of the things that can cause this to not be the case
is when you go on strict calorie deprivation diets,
where you might see a fair amount of weight loss
and stay at a low weight for one, two, maybe three years,
but it's something that your metabolism
is eventually going to catch up with,
or your body systems might not function
at their ideal level.
If you're like most people in a lot of cases, though,
if you're like superhuman pros,
they can get away with these things,
but in a lot of cases even pros, they tend to have times
where they dip down a little bit in weight,
and then they come back up
because they know that that's healthier.
One of the first things that's different between running
and cycling is the calories that you burn per hour.
Remember that I said that you need a calorie deficit
in order to lose weight?
Well it's going to be easier to have a calorie deficit
if you are burning off more calories, theoretically,
I'll get to why that isn't necessarily the case.
So what I've done here is this is a calculator
that you can actually go and download,
and this is going to calculate roughly how many calories
you're going to burn during exercise,
how many calories you need to replace for your nutrition
during exercise, for swim, bike, run, and triathlons
of all different distances, sprint, Olympic,
half Ironman, Ironman.
You put in your details into this,
and it's going to give you a rough guideline
of a nutrition plan for your training and your racing.
You can get that by going
to MyMotive.com/triathlonNutritionGuide.
You just have to put in your email address and it's free.
So what I've set up here is an easy ride,
a very low intensity ride.
So I'm cycling roughly 27 kilometers in one hour.
Now this is going to burn roughly about 816 calories.
Now this isn't customized to everyone.
This isn't bang on accurate.
There are differences between everyone,
but it's saying that I'm burning roughly 816 calories.
Now let's switch this to running and let's say
that I'm going for an easy run of 12 kilometers.
Again, this is very, very easy, a nice light pace.
So we're talking at that point 918 calories.
We're burning a little bit more.
And the reason for that is that you have to carry
your body weight while you are running.
So that impact is causing you to use more energy,
to keep yourself upright.
So hour per hour, roughly the same intensity
for the same intensity you're going to burn a little bit
more per minute while you are running.
So that is going to help you lose a little bit of weight,
in theory.
A second thing that we need to consider is that
it isn't just about the calories that you burn
during a workout.
There are actually some workouts that can change the amount
of calories that you're burning outside of a workout,
those being HIIT workouts,
high intensity interval training workouts.
If you do a really hard HITT workout,
there's a process that comes after that workout
called post exercise oxygen consumption.
Because during that HIIT workout,
you're doing some of the efforts
without as much oxygen as you need,
your body ends up going through this process
and it ramps up your metabolism in the 24 to 48 hours
after the workout, so just while you're lying around
and going about your daily business,
after a high-intensity workout,
you're actually going to increase the amount of calories
that you're burning, just being sedentary.
And you might say how does this end up playing
into running versus cycling?
Well, you can do running workouts at high intensity interval
training efforts, just like you can do biking,
but it becomes a little bit more ballistic
and a little bit more dangerous with running.
So you ended up increasing the likelihood
of getting an injury if you're doing too many
of your high intensity interval sessions on the run.
The next thing that we want to compare is the intensity
that most of the exercise is done with it.
More often than not, it's a lot easier for athletes
to bike at a lower intensity, and it's actually very hard
for most athletes to run at a lower intensity.
So what happens is a lot of the bike intensities
that aren't really high intensity interval sessions,
are kind of down here, I'll look at it
as like high zone one, low zone two
for a lot of the general rides.
Whereas even the low intensity runs are right at the top
of zone two and most people left to their own devices
are going to run actually at the top of zone three.
So you might be saying, hey, isn't this great,
because most runs, they tend to burn a little bit
more calories as it is at the same intensities,
but people tend to run even at higher intensity
so you're going to burn even more calories.
Yeah, that is again theoretically the case,
but when athletes tend to exercise a lot over
and over and over when they're above their zone two
threshold, what they do is they building up
a high amount of lactic acid and stress hormones.
Remember when I said at the beginning
that an increase in stress hormones can lead to
your body being more likely to hold onto additional weight,
to inflammation, to water retention, to fat.
Yeah, that's, what's going to happen if you consistently
over and over above your zone two threshold.
So you might be burning more calories
thinking that you're going to lose more weight,
but it might be all for naught
because you're going too intense more frequently on the run.
The next thing is that to get long lasting,
healthy weight loss,
you need to get a proper calorie deficit.
And this means that sometimes you're in a calorie deficit,
sometimes you're in a calorie surplus.
And in general, you tend to trend down,
but you don't have big surges in your calories.
You're able to control your calories a little bit more.
In my experience, running is a little bit harder
to do this with, because with the run,
most people tend not to want to eat a lot before the run
because it kind of tears apart their stomach,
if they aren't yet trained to run with food
in their stomach.
So in a lot of cases, people aren't eating that much
before a run.
Also while athletes are running,
they tend not to eat a lot because again,
it's fairly difficult because they're breathing heavier
and putting food or any sort of calories
in their stomach during a run,
it tends to add a little bit of discomfort
so people tend not to do it.
Cycling on the other hand, it's quite easy to eat something
and then go out for a ride and it's also quite easy
to eat while you're in the middle of that workout.
That calculator that we did at the beginning of the video
indicated that you need to replace about 25% of your
calories during the workout.
And most people have no problem doing that.
Now again, you might be saying, well,
isn't this a good thing for running
because we're going to be burning way more calories
than we're consuming.
It is in theory again, a good thing,
but when we have long sustained periods
of extreme calorie deprivation,
which is the case, when you go out for a fasted run
or a run that's under-fueled,
what more often tends to happen is again,
the body has a huge amount of stress
so it ends up retaining a little bit of weight.
And what we see in studies is that these large amounts
of calorie deficits for small little periods of time
around exercise tend to cause people to overeat
later in the day because they get cravings
to make up for that extreme deprivation earlier in the day.
So, whereas with cycling, it's easier to have
a more moderate calorie deficit.
With running a tends to be a little bit harder.
The bottom line is that both will work.
Exercise is like the best thing that you can do
for your overall health, your mental wellbeing,
your physical wellbeing, your body weight,
your body composition, and more than anything,
what you need to do is find something
that you know works for you, and in a lot of cases,
that's leaning more towards what you enjoy.
So if you enjoy running more, run more,
if you enjoy cycling more, cycle more.
Don't stress about getting it exactly right,
but just know that there are some of these factors
that you have to keep in mind,
that if you are running, maybe err on the side of caution
with your intensity and keep your heart rate low,
make sure that you are eating enough
so you don't overeat later in the day,
make sure those possibly detrimental things
that could undo your weight loss with running
don't necessarily happen so that you can get
the best of both worlds.
Now with all of that said,
if you want a guideline for what to eat for workouts,
with what to do day to, we have an app for that.
You can go to app.MyMotive.com where you can get
all of your training for,
running races are coming in there soon,
triathlons are in there right now,
your strength training, your yoga, and guidelines
for what you should be taking to get the most
out of every single workout nutritionally.
And if you aren't already subscribed,
hit the subscribe button below.
Later Trainiacs.