Metabolic Conditioning doesn’t work…

“Have you heard about the new metabolic conditioning classes? They only take 30mins, that’s why I’m doing them.”

… is what I overheard in the gym about two weeks ago. Ever since a lot of people got back from the International Fitness Conference ‘metabolic effect’ is the thing all my clients and gym-rats have been asking me about. It usually starts:

“Hey, have you heard about the new fitness craze? Metabolic conditioning…”

Hold on there, Buttercup. New? The 1990’s just called and they want their science back. Any PT, Coach or other athletic trainer worth their salt has been incorporating metabolic conditioning training in their fat loss/conditioning programmes since at LEAST the early 2000’s (in its currently understood format, I’m not going to pretend for a second that it wasn’t happening before then). It might not have been called met-con (yep, we’ve abbreviated it), but it was there.

So, what is this ‘metabolic conditioning’? Well, it’s essentially a re-branding of HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training). HIIT is the magic bullet! HIIT is the thing that’s going to melt the fat off your ass, increase your aerobic/anaerobic work capacity and make you look instantly sexier.

With HIIT, it has been shown that when performed within certain parameters it can increase your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) for, in some extreme cases, up to 24-48hrs post exercise. So what is your BMR? This is the amount of calories that your body expends to basically just exist.

Now, BMR increases as lean body mass (i.e. muscle) increases. BMR is shown to decrease as we get older and lose lean mass. BMR is also shown to increase, for short periods of time, after certain HIIT protocols.

So the magic with Met-Con is to increase our BMR and therefore allow us to burn more calories by just existing, so if all else in our life remains the same (calories in) our waistlines should shrink.

Let’s look at the benefits of Met-Con over ‘traditional cardio’ in terms we can all understand: Jaffa cakes! For our example we shall use a lady of approximately 60kg.

BMR is approx. ¼ jaffa cake every 10 mins.

Running a ten min mile will burn 1.8 jaffa cakes/mile.

Walking a mile in 20 mins would burn just under one jaffa cake.

Remembering that BMR is essentially you lying on a couch vegetating whilst watching X-Factor, if you immediately jumped up and ran one mile (I don’t recommend that), you’d make a net calorie loss of approximately one and a half jaffa cakes. If you just walked the mile, you’d make a net calorie loss of three quarters of a jaffa cake. Running the mile earns/loses you an extra three quarters of a jaffa cake than walking the same distance. To earn a box of jaffa cakes you’d have to run 6.67 miles in an hour, so in 10K speak that’s slightly more than a 10k in less than an hour.

In terms of luxury chocolate gateau, a slice of Tesco’s finest gateau weighs in at around 8 jaffa cakes worth of calories. So to burn that off you’d need to run 5 miles in 50 mins.

So why have I bored you with chocolate cakes?

A minute of burpees will burn between 8-14 calories a minute. Let’s be conservative and use the 8kcal/min. So ten minutes of burpees (cue evil laughing!) would burn around 80calories or 1.7 jaffa cakes. Who can do ten minutes of burpees? (Well, I can, but that’s just showing off). Doesn’t look good for burpees does it?

But who do you think would have the leaner, sexier body? Someone who can do a ten minute mile, or someone who could do ten minutes of burpees?

I use burpees as an example of a metabolic conditioning whole body exercise, which is what you should be doing in a Met-Con style workout (no calf raises here!).

In a well-structured 30 min workout, with a warm up, lots of burpees and a cool down, on paper we’d most likely burn less jaffa cakes in the 30 minutes than someone who ran three miles in that time.

But… those burpees stress the body a hell of a lot more than running. The burpee workout will increase your BMR and the running will most likely not. In fact, if you’re running and using some kind of extreme calorie deficit diet it’s more likely that your body will think you’re being tortured and LOWER your BMR in a bid to survive (and it will cannibalise lean muscle mass before fat mass because if wants to save that fatty energy store for if things get even worse!).

It’s not fair to look at the 30mins the workout takes because we need to take a whole system view and see what effect the workout has on the system. AND… the more astute amongst you may have noticed that I’ve rigged the jaffa cake count in favour of the running workout, using high end figures to make it look better whilst using low end figures for the burpee workout. So don’t for one minute believe that the difference would be that great (using favourable figure for both actually puts burpees slightly ahead in the 10 minutes stake, IF they are performed correctly!).

So workout for workout, whilst the burpee workout burns less in the 30 minutes, it has raised the BMR and will continue to burn jaffa cakes, whilst the running workout will not. It is the jaffa cakes burned AFTER the workout that make Met-Con style training more effective than Long Slow Distance running.

Now, if you add resistance (i.e. weights) to a met-con workout, you can multiply the amount of jaffa cakes you’ll burn by a major factor! A study in a Tennessee university showed a very experienced Kettlebell practitioner could burn up to ½ jaffa cake per minute with a 24kg Kettlebell. If we use this type of activity in a correctly programmed HIIT workout, just imagine how many boxes of jaffa cakes you could ‘earn’ in a week!

“But dude, you gave this article an offensive title that suggests you aren’t onboard with Metabolic Conditioning?”

Met-Con is typically a type of HIIT training. HIIT training for fat loss (which is why most people do it) relies on two things, Intensity and Interval. Most HIIT classes I see are actually HIT classes; one of the I’s is missing. If the intervals are programmed incorrectly then the intensity will naturally drop as the student cannot maintain a high level of work output. If the intensity is too low the student is just wasting their time.

Intensity has to be high. It can be high with bodyweight exercises, and if you want/need to make it harder you add an appropriate weight (too heavy a weight can be bad as it can also lower work output). For intensity to be high, technique has to be solid!

Yes, I know technique deteriorates as we get tired. And for safety reasons, once technique has deteriorated to a certain degree you should STOP!

If you decide which exercise class to attend because it’s the shortest, then you’re sadly deluding yourself. Technique trumps all, technique keeps you safe and technique allows you to increase the number of reps/load. These things will lead to increased work output.

If you can’t hold a technically sound plank for at least 30 seconds you have no business thinking about doing push ups. If you can’t do a push up, you have no business thinking about burpees. Until you can do 10 technically sound burpees back to back, you have no business thinking about taking on burpee intervals.

“Quality beats quantity”

“I don’t care how hard or fast you can do it poorly, I care about how well you can perform.” – David ‘Iron Tamer’ Whitley

The reason I have a problem with Met-Con classes is because most people doing them don’t have the entry level strength or movement patterns to do the exercises well. This isn’t their fault, but the fault of the marketeers who sell the idea of improving fitness in two 30 minute workouts per week. They prey upon people’s desire for a quick fix, distort the science, and sell snake oil to the masses. Yes it can work, but only when the foundations have been laid. Metabolic conditioning is something that should be done once a basic foundation in nutrition, strength and technique has been established! (Notice I said the ‘N’ word!)

So before you decide which fitness class to attend, take a good long think about it and how it relates to your goals.

Be Fit, Be Strong, Be Happy!