The Fallacy of the 10 Minute a Day Fat Loss WorkoutQ and A from another trainer Q: I just wanted to get your advice on something (or a second opinion from a fellow peer). One of my clients found this "gimmicky fitness professional" on the internet, of course, boasting about his program and selling all this stuff on there. He's recently bashed the "Biggest Loser" TV show and ripped into "Weight Watcher's", as well as others. He asks for questions and invites people to post on his site, so I tried sending him a message, or blog, a couple times but he erases them. [real nice] He doesn't seem to have any idea what he's talking about and has even misspelled terms and misused some principles right on his site. LOL His "breakthrough routine", that disturbs me, because he claims to be a fitness professional (like us), was a 10-minute-a-day fat-loss workout. Now, he has a video for this workout on YouTube, I found, and it comes out to about 3 minutes and involves no weights just pushups and squats with bodyweight (for the most part). This really pisses me off because my client found it and was asking me to explain it. I had no problem discussing it with her and explaining it BUT my problem was the other people out there that will come across this. Now, here's what I'm asking you for, if you will. As another professional, I am curious what you think of a 10-minute-a-day fat loss workout consisting of pushups and squats with bodyweight only. This guy has misused EPOC to explain his theory. I was just wondering your honest opinion so I can pass the info along to my client as a second opinion. I'm not worried about what information I gave her, was just curious what someone else well-educated thought. -Anthony A: Anthony, this is interesting because I just got done with a recorded interview with a trainer out of Spain and the same concept came up. While you and I could talk for an hour about this, I'm going to try and focus on the main points for your client: The 10 minutes a day of strenuous activity may be enough to maintain fitness levels... maybe an in shape client could try this if they were traveling and didn't have time to make it to a gym. Your right, EPOC (essentially the amount of calories we burn AFTER the workout) has been exaggerated. And of course, the original EPOC research and the distortion of the EPOC research is very sexy for the fitness marketers trying to sell products encouraging very short workouts (a marketer's dream). Those short, high-intensity workouts are dangerous for the sedentary group these fitness marketers are targeting. They’re injuries and heart attacks waiting to happen. With all of this said, each trainer must communicate a fine balance between duration of exercise VS. intensity of exercise with their clients. This ratio and how we apply really depend on the specific client, how old they are, what their goals are, and what their injury status is.
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