Running Won’t Make You Lean (But It Will Make You Better At Running).

It’s that time of year again, when the new years resolutions and do something about the unnecessary Christmas weight gain.

Something I also see every year are the flocks of people opting to take up running as a means of getting fitter and lose weight. Something else I consistently see is that few of these people are still pounding the streets by March.

Running can be great. As a former soldier I’ve run countless miles over the years and the associated health benefits can’t be argued. Running is a skill and something everybody should be able to do to some degree!

If you’re an aspiring runner who’s looking for a new challenge or you’re looking at entering your first 5k, 10k or Half Marathon beyond that, a structured running program is obviously helpful towards getting you towards your goal.

However in a recent survey from ASICS, 40% of people stated that they run to lose body fat.

Steady-state running simply isn’t efficient for burning body fat. Here’s why:

The human body is extremely efficient at adapting to new stimulus. This is why people generally find running increasingly easier over a series of weeks. This is great for aspiring runners, not great for fat loss. In the case of running (or any steady-state cardio) your metabolism literally learns and reacts so that fewer calories are burned with the same exercise output. Basically, the more efficient your body becomes at a task - the fewer calories it burns carrying out the task.

Running at a moderate pace makes you better at running at a moderate pace - nothing more. Many people who take up running choose a route and stick to it. When that route becomes fairly easy, they might pick a longer route - not much is changing here regarding intensity. One of the most important variables with any type of exercise is intensity. If you look at the average runner, they pick a pace that they can maintain comfortably for the duration. Again; great if you want to run at a comfortable pace for a longer period of time - not great for fat loss.

Research at the University of Western Ontario compared short bursts of intense exercise, to long, less-intense cardio. One group performed 4 to 6 thirty-second bursts of high intensity training while the other group did cardio for 30 to 60 minutes. Despite exercising for a fraction of the time, the high intensity category burned more than twice as much body fat.

Muscle is ‘metabolically expensive’. This means the building and maintenance of muscle on the frame is proportionate to how many calories you will burn throughout the day. According to research in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research endurance training running and walking (longer duration, lower intensity) impairs strength and muscle growth.

Or to simplify it even further, the obvious observation that long distance runners have far less muscle mass than short-distance sprinters in the Olympics. A phenomenon that’s easily explained by the fact that muscle reduces running efficiency because it’s heavy and metabolically expensive (requires a lot of energy and calories). Whereas fat can store a lot of calories without requiring a lot, and comes in rather handy during excessive marathon-like distances – operating as the predominant fuel source when stored carbohydrate runs dry.

The aforementioned study also found that the commitment time for the continuous exercise group was 10.5 hours, compared to only 2.5 hours in the HIIT group!

Likewise, in 2010 researchers in same journal found equal aerobic and health improvements from 8-12 sets of 60sec sprints, compared to an endurance training group exercising almost 98% more.

To summarise:

If you want to improve cardiovascular fitness and endurance, strengthen bones or, just get better at running…running is great!

If you want to lose body fat…it's not so great.

Once your body adapts to the stimulus, the benefit is limited.

With fat loss, the solution ALWAYS comes back to the same thing - nutrition.

It’s been consistently proven that the most effective way to strip body fat is a combination of:

Sensible calorie restriction

Strength training (or metabolic conditioning)

High intensity interval training (HIIT)