I might touch this up and make it into an academic quality paper. Then I can use it in job interviews as a writing sample as part of my job interview presentation. But for now I will just keep it casual. It is 100% accurate but I am not going to page for page source hunt.

When in a gym (provided you have been going, evil eye to you know who) you see others running around with lifting belts. At some places like Home Depot you see the stock people in them as well.

                                                                                         

Do weight belts work and how? Yes they do work, here is how. Look at the lumbar spine cut away picture at the top. We humans walk upright, and need our spine to give support yet be flexible to absorb shock, while also able to provide range of motion so we do not walk like robots. The spine as you know is many disks stacked on top of each other, with a spongy disk in between each to provide cushioning. The only real support your spine has are muscles the erector spinae and the transversospinalis groups. Think of your spine as a bunch of stacked soup cans held together with rubber bands.  The figure 12 picture shows how this looks.

When you wear a weight belt it will compress the fluids and tissues in your abdominal cavity together giving increased support the the lower spine. This relieves the Erector muscles of much of their burden as the fluid pressure hold the spine in place.

This can work against you while trying to reach fitness goals. People who wear a lifting belt all the time during resistance exercise deny the erector group stimulus to adapt to. The rest of the skeletal muscle adapts and become stronger, but the erector and other spinal muscles remain in an less or even de-conditioned state. This creates a dangerous imbalance vastly increasing the changes of injury. 

The proper times to wear a lifting belt is. 1-when a power athlete is in a peaking phase and is training an 3 Rep-max range or higher. 2-When athlete is doing conditioning that requires heavy repeated lower spinal loading while near an exhaustive state. The exhausted spinal muscles could relax and cause a disk to herniate. 3-When the athlete is recovering from low back injury. The belt will keep the disks and muscle in proper alignment for healing, while client does no spine loading exercises. Once the low back is recovered sufficiently the athlete may return to spinal loading exercise under the supervision of a doctor or physical therapist.

Athletes and exercisers must be trained to self monitor loads on the body to decrease the chances of injury. Everyday life and many athletic events do not have people wearing weight belts, so the law of specificity says to decrease injury, allow the spinal muscle to exercise and adapt along with the target muscle groups.

A near always asked question by new exercisers is what should I do first my cardio or my resistance training. Like all experts I will answer with the positive and absolute statement of "it depends." MUHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Actually it pretty set in stone depending on your goals. In freshman level classes you learn the SAID principle. Specific Adaptation to Implied Demands. Simply means you body will adapt to exactly what you do, no more than it has to. Knowing this we can plan how to include exercises that give you the most bang for buck as they say.

Most my clients are seniors or the obese. To maximize weight loss, and regain lost physical functioning, I insist on doing resistance first. Here is why. Once warmed up your body will be most capable of doing what you do first, meaning better output potential, the ability to work out a bit harder.  Ability to work harder means more adaptations. Building a pound of muscle is 35 calories used perday even if you sit on your duff! They used to tell differently, they used to say do cardio first. Now that we know more that is not the case.  Can you lose weight doing 30 mins cardio at 60% heart rate followed by 3 sets of ten resistance? Yes you can, but....

Second reason is for weight loss, doing your resistance first delete your glycogen reserves, your carbs, the sugar in your blood. So when you go on to do your cardio next, your body must use more fat as fuel and attempt to conserve carbs. Your post exercise burn. EPOC Post Exercise Oxygen Consumption will be higher. That is like free fat loss after your work out. Think of it as interest earned on your workout investment. Your body soon learns it will need to be more active, and will attempt to save carbs to work out, carbs are the preferred fuel over fats or protein. So while just going about your day, you are burning fat, more fat than those lazy bones that do not work out.

Athletes need to do the focus of the day first while having fresh legs to get the most out of the work out, and to be fresh to avoid injury. Like where I am training for distance I run first then do resistance MWF, and an abdominal circuit T-TH. I need to get used to high output at the end of the race with depleted blood glucose. I am not really an athlete, but you get the picture. Where a football player (NFL type) would do explosive sprints or lifts on days opposite of skill drills. A five mile run is pointless, and asking for injury.

Typical work out

10 mins warm up circuit jumping jacks, elbow to knee, free hand squats, stair steps, ect ect ect

resistance exercises like off the floor lifts, lunges, overhead presses, bench or cable presses, pull up or lat pulls, about 20 mins

30 mins cardio of what ever gets you going

10 mins stretching to cool down. (no, we also no longer stretch before working out, this is found to weaken the muscle before it ever works, causes micro tears before activity)

At first I was thinking 'Thanks a "heck" of a a lot CBS, as if enough people don't already have an excuse to not exercise, you come out with this!"

But it is true, many trainers are totally incompetent. One of my past supervisors was beyond incompetent, and took it to a new level.

Regulation is not the answer. Look at all the law suits filed against doctors. Clients need to follow the buyer beware rule. Know if their traienr has a degree and is certified by a real agency. No gym I know will hire someone from Expert Rating, sheez!

When I go back to school, and if I go for a masters in Health/Fitness I think a decent thesis project just popped into my head.

With endurance athletes whose events last more than a hour part of the strategy is not just keeping them hydrated, but keeping their electrolytes in balance. You can become toxic from water if your electrolytes get out of balance. So when sweating for prolonged time, you lose the sodium.

When a doctor counsels a hypertensive patient one of the first things to cut back on is sodium.  Switch to the dash diet, medication, ect ect.

They just released a study where conditioned people and untrained people both ate a cheese burger, fries and soda. Their blood lipids for the first hour was not pretty. But within 90 minutes the conditioned folks had normal blood profiles again, while it took over two hours for the untrained people to return to normal blood profiles. So a similar study already exists. SO on second thought I will probably stay with my original plan.

I am considering a study on sleep apnea. People with disturbed sleep patterns are typically overweight or obese.  I hypothesise that even six weeks of very moderate exercise will improve sleep patterns. That alone will add to life span and life quality.

ACSM Action Plans for fitness of people of all levels

A gym out to tick off lazy people!