Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Benefit more from exercise….Today's post:  Tuesday, 11-14-2017 

This information has also been out for some time as I remember reading of it before.

Not sure where I read of it originally.  But it was longer than a year or two ago I think.

Also,  I recently read similar research that when educated people and uneducated people did the same exercise, the educated people benefitted more than the uneducated people did.

Recently Mike Geary emailed out this reminder email of this effect.

It’s quite well done, both in reporting the original research, and adding Mike’s comments on making even better use of it to get more exercise benefits yourself.

The comments I’ll add will be about why this effect may occur and add more ways about how to get more exercise benefits yourself.

Here’s the email Mike sent:

“http://www.truthaboutabs.com/obscure-method-exercise.html

“Harvard Study Shows an Obscure Trick to Make ANY Exercise Program or Workout MUCH More Effective”

By Mike Geary, Certified Nutrition Specialist, Certified Personal Trainer
Author of best-sellers:  The Fat Burning Kitchen  &  Do This, Burn Fat: 101 Sneaky Weight Loss Tricks

“Hotel cleaning attendants got "tricked" by researchers into burning more fat in 4 weeks. They also lowered their blood pressure, and improved their waist to hip ratio. This article explains what factor caused these benefits!

I've read about this very interesting Harvard University study about exercise multiple times in the past, but I was just recently reminded about this study again while reading the fascinating book called 59 Seconds by Richard Wiseman.

Pay attention, because this actually shows a pretty powerful trick that you can use to literally make ANY workout or exercise program a LOT more effective and results producing.

According to the book 59 Seconds, here's how this study was carried out:

Researchers at Harvard University studied over 80 hotel room cleaning attendants from 7 different hotels.  The hotel room attendants naturally received a lot of exercise from their daily jobs, which included cleaning an average of 15 rooms per day at about 25 minutes per room.  This work involves a good deal of exercise in carrying things, scrubbing, lifting objects, vacuuming, and so on.

The researchers knew the hotel maids led an active lifestyle from their work, but also questioned whether most of the maids may not realize that their work was actually good for their health. 

The researchers set out to study the effects on the hotel attendants of making them very aware of how beneficial the exercise they got while working was for their health, and to see if this increased the results that they actually received from the exercise.

Basically, the question was... Would telling them that their work was great exercise improve their health, lower their blood pressure, and help them to lose weight compared to the hotel attendants that didn't realize their work was in fact "exercise"?

The hotel attendants were split into 2 groups:

1. This group was informed about the benefits of exercise and told how many calories they were burning while doing their hotel cleaning work each day. They were specifically told how many calories activities such as changing sheets, vacuuming, and scrubbing bathrooms were burning each hour.

The researchers also wanted this information to stick in their heads daily, so they gave the attendants a handout showing the quantities of calories they were burning doing each activity of their jobs.  They were also shown a poster daily that reinforced how many calories they were burning.

2.  The control group of hotel cleaning attendants was simply informed of the benefits of exercise, but were NOT told how many calories they were burning doing their work, and also were NOT told that their work actually constituted a good form of exercise.

The researchers studied the existing lifestyles of all of the participants in both groups as well as giving them various health tests, including weigh-ins.

The study was conducted for 4 weeks.  The researchers made sure that none of the participants had actually changed their exercise habits, smoking, or eating habits outside of work.  This assured that there was no external lifestyle factor that could have accounted for the results of the study.

In addition, the hotel managers assured that the workloads of both groups stayed the same throughout the entire experiment.

Here are the VERY interesting results:

It turned out that the group of hotel cleaning attendants that was informed daily about the calorie-burning effects of their normal work routines ended up losing a significant amount of weight, lowered their body mass index and waist-to-hip ratio, and decreased their blood pressure.

The control group of hotel attendants that was not told about the calories they burned while doing their work showed NONE of these improvements.

Wow... .! 

Remember that each of these groups received the SAME amount of exercise and did not alter their lifestyle, eating habits, drinking habits, smoking, or anything else.  The only thing that was different between the 2 groups was simply that the one group was constantly being reminded of how beneficial the exercise during their work was for their health and how many calories they were burning, and therefore their minds were busy believing in the benefits of it.

This actually doesn't surprise me... this is classic placebo effect at work here, and reinforces how powerful our brains are in relation to the results we get from exercise, food, supplements, etc.

How to use this info to burn more fat in your workouts, build more lean muscle, and improve your health more from exercise and nutrition:

There's a good lesson in this study.  If you strongly believe in your mind that the workouts that you are doing are drastically improving your body, your results will increase dramatically from those workouts. 

The trick I've used over the years is to really "get mental" during your workouts and believe strongly that the exercise you are doing is transforming your body into a lean chiseled machine. 

(This is assuming that you're actually doing legit workouts such as Truth About Abs routines and not just wasting time reading a magazine while pedaling away on a boring exercise bike or treadmill).

So, if you want to burn more fat, not only do you need to workout intensely (for your individual capabilities), but you also need to mentally visualize the results you're getting, the bodyfat you are burning, and really strongly believe in how powerful the workout routine that you are doing really is for your body.

Along the same lines, if your goal is to build more muscle, then you really need to strongly believe in your mind at how powerfully your workouts are helping you to build muscle.

And this can be applied to your food intake too!

Don't underestimate how powerful your mind really is... If you are eating truly healthy foods such as those detailed in my Fat-Burning Kitchen manual, make sure that you are also actively thinking in your mind about how those foods are dramatically helping your body, making you stronger, making you leaner, improving your energy and health, and so on.

Don't ignore this... this will drastically improve your results if you actively think about how truly healthy the foods you are eating every day are and how they are changing your body.  This is assuming that you actually are eating truly healthy foods every day.

Another benefit of this "mental programming" is that it trains you to actually want to avoid junk foods, because you want to be able to think about how everything you eat is improving your body instead.

So there you go... an interesting study that shows how you can legitimately increase your results from your exercise and nutrition by just actively thinking about the benefits of both every day!”

My Comments:

There are several things I think at work here and ways to amplify each one to improve your own exercise results:

Doing something that has extra benefits you actually would like to have instead of doing something you have to do but would stop instantly if you were able has two effects that I think are at play here. 

Doing the extra benefit things causes your brain to release more dopamine and serotonin according to studies I’ve seen.  You not only feel better mentally, these neurotransmitters have physical effects which likely DO increase the release of BDNF and the other muscle growth factors that improve your muscle control and burn more calories and build more muscle.

Doing something you have to do and are making yourself do tends to be done a bit more slowly and result in some periods of decreased effort.  You may be skilled enough to be time efficient but you don’t gradually get more capable.  But if you do things you believe have extra benefits, you are more likely to make an extra effort that over time will increase your strength or fitness.

Also, there is some self-image change that doing things you expect to benefit your health causes to occur!  And in longer term studies, people who now begin to see themselves as someone who takes actions to improve their health, DO eat and drink less junk and smoke less or quit and eat more vegetables and fruit!

Lastly, using extra effort to do just a bit more or do it better each time in your exercises causes you to become stronger in strength training exercises and more fit in vigorous short cardio exercises.

Focusing on the feeling in the muscles you are exercising and consciously adding extra effort on the last few reps of a few large muscle exercises is the key to getting stronger and using heavier weights and adding more muscle to burn calories.  This process is also faster to get good results than just going through the motions.

Similarly, going a bit faster each time or a bit longer at a fast speed between rests or a slower pace will gradually improve your fitness.  And, this process is also faster to get good results than just going through the motions.

Lastly, taking supplements that help you recover better by helping with antioxidants to recover from the high levels of oxygen use as you exercise and lower inflammation and to boost growth hormones can also help.

When you know that studies show these do work that too increases your belief in your exercises and making an extra effort while doing them.

DHA and purified omega 3 fish oil capsules help your exercises release more BDNF which builds nerves and brain cells and helps improve your neural control which in turn helps you improve on your exercises.  AND, these also lower inflammation to speed recovery!

Ursolic acid found in apple peels and rosemary and holy basil and many dried herbs is a compound that is NOT an anabolic steroid that causes you to retain or add muscle and may also increase the amount of fat you burn.

Labrada sells an ursolic acid supplement that is a rosemary extract.  And, Nature’s Way standardized Holy Basil extract also has ursolic acid.

NAC, n-acetyl cysteine, and alpha lipoic acid cause your body to make glutathione which is a strong anti-oxidant.

And the natural antioxidants of several hundred kinds from organic vegetables and fruits and raw tree nuts for those not allergic – and supplements of, natural alpha tocopherol and vitamin C and lycopene and vitamin D2 + K2 and selenium and others also work as antioxidants. These also have multiple other health benefits.

Curcumin, turmeric, and ginger also lower inflammation.

Conclusion:


The more you believe exercise will benefit you and the more you do to exercise in a way that causes those benefits and eat and supplement to support that, the more benefits you will get!  

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