BioLogic Revelation

Fat Burning, Body Shaping, and Your Metabolism
In short, the more fast twitch and super fast twitch muscle fibers you have, the better your body composition, the higher your resting metabolic rate, and the more stored fat you burn twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week, even while you sleep. These are typically the initial concerns for most people seeking an effective workout. Once a BioLogic 10 Minute workout is complete and our hearts are still racing, our blood-sugar metabolism is immediately put into action as the glycolytic fibers strive to replace their burned glucose stores and begin the healing process. This of course immediately improves insulin sensitivity and the overall hormonal response. This instant response is a highly taxing event on calories in the blood stream (what we call "afterburn"), and--far more important--sustained practice will spark a marked increase in our fat-burning metabolism to fuel this cascading effect around the clock. Over time, through hypertrophy, muscles grow according to their genetic design, and (if you've corrected your food intake) excess fat stores are reduced to a degree that the major muscles begin to dictate the visible shape of your body. Revisit your visual of the sprinter/dancer to be reminded where you'll be headed. 

    On the other hand, long-duration, high-volume exercise primarily targets slow twitch fibers and other lower order fibers that store little-to-no glucose and primarily burn oxygen to fuel their contractions. So, though these long-duration workouts indeed get your heart pumping (to what many researchers have determined a dangerous degree) and burn recently consumed calories, once the activity ends there isn’t a whole lot of metabolic activity required to wind down. Slow twitch fibers are genetically predisposed to handle prolonged workloads with very low energy requirements, and the burned oxygen is easily replaced once we inhale it back into the bloodstream, so you'll be hard-pressed to find any "afterburn" here. Likewise, relatively few favorable metabolic processes have been triggered, and as you now well know, our bodies and critical life systems are often left worse for wear.⁵² 

    Before moving on to my overview of what I consider the more amazing benefits of the BioLogic Cascade, we need to clear up a couple of especially destructive myths concerning calorie-burning and it's role (or lack thereof) in fat-burning. Similar to running and other forms of endurance exercise--though they have their uses--treadmills, steppers, stationary bikes, and other "cardio" equipment do not burn fat or calories the way most of you have been told. The same goes for the plethora of sweaty, long-duration "aerobics" workouts. Unless they're employed for short-duration interval training (see HIIT in Chapter 1), they simply cause more harm than good to your invaluable fight or flight muscles and other body systems. Though cardio machines can play a minor role in your effort to achieve a more active lifestyle (see Section III), they're far removed from their mythical fat-burning and calorie-burning claims. For clarification, in reference to the aforementioned Great Requirement of proper nutrition and a more active lifestyle, it is "proper nutrition" that plays the lead role in the reduction of stored fat, not the "more active lifestyle" component. Increased activity is far more important to our efforts to counter structural decay and the diseases detailed in the Introduction (see Speaking of Emperors: Get off Your Throne), not the modest increases daily calorie-burning as you may have assumed. All we need is to apply some basic logic and simple math to see why this is true. As we proceed, don’t be ashamed if you've been duped into believing that cardio or aerobic training burns enough calories to effectively or efficiently burn stored fat during your workout in a sustainable, beneficial fashion. It simply isn't true.

    Those of us involved in fitness research groan every time we hear that medieval calorie-burning distortion of fact being further perpetuated. So if you do nothing else, please refrain from being misled into that hamster wheel ever again. In reality, most calorie-burning cardio or aerobic workouts performed in effort to burn stored fat do exactly the opposite over time, as they neglect your blood-sugar burning fight or flight fibers, and--as detailed above--almost exclusively employ your oxygen-burning slow twitch muscle fibers to perform the work. For that, as discussed in Chapter 1, these long-duration workouts lead to atrophy and eventual death of your invaluable fast twitch and super fast twitch muscle fibers--the obesity-fighting fibers that are most responsible for increasing your resting metabolic rate (and, more important, your insulin sensitivity), 24/7. Never forget that we can't effectively train our fast twitch and super fast twitch muscle fibers during a long duration cardio or aerobic workout. And when you don't ever use them, you most definitely lose them. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. 

    If someone you know swears that consistent cardio training has helped them lose significant fat stores, odds are that the real reason for the weight loss or size reduction was a dramatic correction in their diet and (or) a tragic loss in muscle mass. Similarly, many of the folks I've met who believe cardio or other endurance training played a major role in their weight or size loss had not only corrected their eating habits, but had also begun strength training. Those combined lifestyle changes get the credit for any sustainable improvements, not their cardio work.⁵³