Hi Everybody!
I’m starting a new 90-day training cycle/challenge and want you all to join me. It’s not a body transformation challenge or any type of money-making scheme. It’s just an offer to provide some accountability while I engage in something that I do all of the time. So I’m throwing a little challenge out there to my friends to pick some sort of goal you’d like to achieve in the next three months. Then, together, we’ll help each other achieve it. It doesn’t need to be anything specific. It can be to improve a sport, lose weight, gain strength, lower your blood pressure, learn a language, do a birthday challenge or kick sand in the face of the bully down at the beach. All that matters is that it’s something that you can’t currently do so that you’ll have to change your current regimen in order to achieve it.
It’s not my idea, actually. Jon and Bryan down at the office have been brainstorming about how to make Beachbody the fittest business in the world. This isn’t for bragging rights. It came about through extension of all the customer success stories. These are infectious, and got Jon thinking about how to get more people involved; just because it’s cool. So what we’re going to try is essentially is the core of what works so well for Beachbody, straightforward motivation and accountability.
My challenge will be recorded on my blog, where I'll share all sorts of tips, travails, and such. There’s no official start date but May 1st, the start of “national fitness month,” seems as good as any.
http://steve-edwards.blogspot.com/We’ve also started a message board where all the Q & A will take place. You’ll find it here:
http://forums.teambeachbody.co...8299664/m/4221048961And over the course of the challenge I’ll be publishing weekly mailbags. So let’s get started. Today we’ve got the three most popular questions asked, so far, by our employees.
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1.Figuring out the P90X Nutrition Plan - When it says we need xxxx calories
(based on page 5) (RMR + Daily Activity Burn + 600 = energy amount) does
that mean that many calories are needed to maintain current weight? So in
order to lower weight, one should lower the calories to loose weight? How
many is too low? (never go below the daily activity burn calories total,
right?)
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Unlike our entry level programs, the X diet is not geared towards weight loss. Of course, you might lose weight, but X is a fitness performance program first. Weight loss is only a by product.
If you don't fuel your workouts you will overtrain and your results with stagnate. So while you may choose to eat less doing 90x you'll never want to drop more than a few hundred calories per day.
That said, the calculators are only approximate. There is no way without scientific monitoring to calculate an exact caloric need count because all the the systems in your body that count for your BMR are constantly changing. The fitter you get the more calories you burn. This is the reason that the most common advice we give on the boards to keep results coming is to add calories.
You can restrict calories in the beginning of a program and see results. This is generally how it works. But at some point your body will require more calories--even more than you may have ever eaten--to support your new muscle mass and keep your results curve pointed skyward.
Our general guidelines have our customers reducing calories at first, mainly taking away the junk food in your diet. Over time, you'll add calories back in, this time in the form of healthy foods. Eventually, you'll be much fitter than you've ever been and you'll also be eating more calories than you've ever eaten. But instead and soda, processed foods, and other junk, your diet will consist of nutritious foods to fuel your now-finely-tuned system.
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2. What would you recommend for:
Woman late 30's-early 40's
133 lbs. 24% body fat
Wants to lose 15 lbs and go to 20 % body fat
Does not understand the eat 5 meals a day philosophy. And not sure what to
eat when. I showed her P90X and she was told to eat 1200 calories to loose
it, and said it was too many calories. How do you adapt P90X for lower
calories? In Power 90, it says you must go into deficit of 3500 calories to
lose 1 pound. So for her to loose 15 lbs she should decrease calories
by52,5000 or 583 per day. How do we know what her daily calories are per
day now for us to say decrease by 583 per day? And if she is not eating
much we need to tell her to eat more regularly, right?
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This pick and choose calculation is not taking rationale into play. Let's go back to some basics.
First off, no one should eat less that 1200 calories per day unless you're on some type of fast. If you try and attempt 90X you'll do more damage to your body than you can recover from and go into a long plateau where you workouts never improve because your body doesn't have the reserves and is in a panic survival mode.
If you want to eat 1200 calories per day start with an easier program until you get some base fitness, then switch to X and add calories.
No matter how many calories you eat it's best to break them up over time. Our first rule of diet is to eat small "meals" (snacks is more like it) every few hours while you're awake. This enables your body to better utilize the fuel its getting. Your body will run better and, over time, get less hungry because it won't have hormonal spikes that eating large meals and then starving creates. Eating small meals often is the most efficient way to make sure what you eat is used in the proper ways.
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3. Is it true that if you are exercising too high you are just burning
calories and not fat. And this will hurt your possibility of losing weight?
Should we all stay in a certain zone to loose weight?
Insanity and the other test groups, bring their heart rates up high for long
periods of time. Isn't that contradictory to the above philosophy?
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This is a complete fallacy. You should workout as hard as you can during each workout.
The "fat burning zone" is a misnomer. It referes to your body using stored fat as fuel during low-level outputs. Burning blood sugar (glycogen), which happens at a higher heart rate, is the only way to make significant body composition changes in a short period of time. This is why ALL of Beachbody's programs are based on increasing your ability to train above your anaerobic threshold over time. The ability to do this creates huge demands on your system and is the key to all of our programs.
There is a time to attempt low-level exercise over long periods of time but it's only to increase the body's ability at fat mobilization, which is important to endurance athletes. The only time we advise this type of training is during our doubles workouts, which are all for our graduate programs for people looking to push into another level of fitness.
To create body comp changes, you should train as hard as you can. Add weight whenever a set becomes easy, increase speed, decrease rest, and do whatever you need to do to continually increase your heart rate over the course of the workout.
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That’s it for today. There will be plenty more where that came from. So think of a goal and join in the fun.
And, as usual, don’t just train hard, train smart,
Steve
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Mailbag Archive
http://forums.teambeachbody.co...s/a/frm/f/8082987037The Straight Dope
http://steve-edwards.blogspot.com/ 
Answer