Thanks Joel, this is very interesting and helpful. I have also listened to the Dr K, Vince and yourself interview that you sent out a couple of days ago. While I find the all elements interesting, one particular thing really grabs my attention. This is point number 5, or the improper use of rest periods. In the interview it was mentioned that intervals with an action / rest ratio of 1:5 to 1:20 could help with overcoming a carb ‘blowout’ and that Tabatas uses a 1:1/2 to achieve a significant improvement in anaerobic capacity and VO2Max. It seems to me that there is a set of “Golden Rules”????? So I am sitting here thinking OMG what are these rules!!!!
Click Below to Watch a 30 second introduction from Dr. K
The Limiting Factor You Don’t Even KNOW About
by Dr. Kareem F. Samhouri, CSCS, HFS
Metabolic Fat Loss & Fitness Expert
Simply put, everything you do, including every effort you put forth during exercise, originates in your body’s central command center, the Central Nervous System (CNS).
And for 99.9% of exercisers, the unfortunate reality is this: your central nervous system is operating at a very elementary level, and it’s absolutely holding you back from experiencing the most rapid fat loss results.
How and why?
Bottom line: most people simply do not understand how to properly communicate with their nervous systems, and as such are missing out on at least 60-80% of the metabolic potential of every single exercise they do. In fact, even advanced trainees tend to be “under-achieving” by at least 30-50%.
Can you just imagine how much faster you’d progress if you were able to double or triple the metabolic effectiveness of each and every exercise you do? The answer: A LOT FASTER.
Going back to the problem, inefficient nervous system communication results in:
- poor signaling leading to decreased force output and sub-par muscular contractions
- less overall motor units recruited
- less weight used for every exercise, set, and rep (for a workout requiring 10 sets of 10 reps, that inefficiency is compounded 100 TIMES over)
- overall less work done in any given session
- neuro-muscular fatigue occurring before muscles even receive the necessary stimulus to grow and/or strengthen
- fewer calories burned
- overall decreased metabolic effect of exercise even when the same effort is put forth (the same effort for 1/4 of the results)
- dramatically slowed results
- dramatically less fat loss
On the other hand, an extremely efficient nervous system results in:
- greater signaling, leading to greater, faster, more intense contractions
- increased loads used for every single exercise, set, and rep (compound that improvement 100 times over for a workout requiring 10 sets of 10) – and that’s just one workout – imagine the effect this will have over 4 weeks worth of workouts!
- increased motor unit recruitment
- more stimulus from the same work
- greater strength gains
- greater lean muscle gains
- greater metabolic cost of every single exercise you do
- more calories burned (acutely/immediate)
- exponentially greater fat loss over time
Legitimately, the difference in the rate of fat loss between the above two examples is the difference between getting in incredible shape for summer and being self-conscious all the way through August.
This is also the difference between hitting and maintaining your ideal body weight easily versus struggling for the rest of your life—period.
Do you realize this means you’re probably struggling to lose weight right now because your nervous system is operating far below its capacity?
Essentially, you’re working twice as hard for 1/4 the result—and I hate to see that happen!
The fact is this: Most fat loss programs do not even consider the role of your nervous system in program design, and as such, at best improve nervous system communication from ‘Poor’ to ‘Fair’. Even if you consider yourself “advanced”, you probably still have room to at least double your nervous system signaling efficiency, and therefore your results.
Bottom line: If you really want to dramatically hasten fat loss results, then you absolutely MUST learn to improve your nervous system signaling from ‘Fair’ to ‘Good’ to ‘Great’-all the way to ‘Excellent’.
And here’s the best part – it can be done in a very short period of time with the appropriate plan of attack, and you’ll do it while you lose fat at an accelerated rate.
But before I teach you how it’s done, you first need to understand exactly WHAT is holding you back from experiencing your true metabolic potential-and there are 5 major contributors (each taking a major toll on nervous system efficiency):
1. Muscle Imbalances
2. Incoordination
3. Sub-sensory pain signals in your joints
4. Inflammation & resultant decreased circulation
5. Improper use of rest periods in exercise program
Let’s go over these, one by one, so you have a better understanding…
Muscle Imbalances:
Whenever your body senses imbalance, it tries to correct for it. This means top to bottom (arms to legs), side to side (left to right), and back to front.
If you’re not balanced in all 3 ways, your body will naturally stop growing and strengthening in an attempt to regain balance and prevent injury.
As a practical example, many exercisers suffer from major imbalances from front to back. Their quads generally dominate their hamstrings, and their “pushing” muscles (chest, anterior shoulders) quite often overshadow those of their back (lats, rhomboids, etc). Essentially, these types of imbalances are actually like pulling the fire alarm for your body.
In effect, you’re screaming at your body and telling it to stop growing, stop strengthening so the weaker muscles can catch up. Unfortunately, unless you KNOW that’s going on and actively take steps to strengthen those imbalances, those muscle groups never catch up and progress declines or altogether stops – and this goes on indefinitely.
In the end, calories that should be going to fuel strength and lean mass gains get shuttled toward fat storage. Simply put, no matter how hard you work, you simply cannot outsmart your nervous system.
Incoordination:
There Are 2 Kinds Of Nerve Signals: Efferent & Afferent
- Efferent (like ‘exit’) are nerve signals that exit from your brain and go down to your muscles & joints – these signals create movement.
- Afferent are nerve signals that begin at your periphery (i.e. skin, muscle, joint, etc.) & work their way back up to your brain – these signals provide feedback after movement occurs to tell your brain what actually happened.
Until your joints are properly positioned and muscles receive constant, uninterrupted communication from your nerves, both your efferent & afferent signals are like a loose wire. They are firing off, haphazardly, and your body is having to work twice as hard to control movement.
Poor movement control = Poor coordination
Poor coordination = Poor strength
For example, incoordination may cause your forearms to work harder as you bench press, instead of the target muscle. The result: your forearms tire first and your chest is never fully stimulated. The same is true on a lunge; your back leg will get tired before your front, and that’s not even where you’re supposed to “feel” the movement.
Building a bridge between efferent & afferent signals will allow your coordination to improve, making advanced exercises easy, and improving the overall fluidity of every movement you make. In other words, you’re nervous system will be effectively communicating with your musculature and as a result your body melts fat and builds muscle.
Sub-sensory Pain Signals In Your Joints:
Your body is constantly in pain, or, in other words, pain is very much relative. You see, the types of nerve cells that respond to pain are never dormant; they are always awake, and they monitor the amount of activity at various areas of your body before reaching ‘threshold’ and setting off a chain of events resulting in palpable pain (pain that you actually “feel”).
When joints are maligned and exercises are done in the wrong sequence, there is a slight increase of pain receptor activity that takes place. Unfortunately, these nerve receptors send a message to your brain to turn muscles OFF and focus on eliminating the pain. That’s why we go limp when we have back pain, for example.
Now think about how much harder it must be for someone with overdeveloped pecs and a weak back to do shoulder raises. As the imbalance grows, there will inevitably come a point where “rounded shoulders” caused by the aforementioned imbalance will actually force the deltoids (shoulders) to turn off, and the upper back (trapezius) will then take over the movement.
From there, your upper trap attaches to your cervical spine, which creates and even bigger problem and more nerve signaling that’s turning off muscles as your trap pulls your spine out of place…yikes!
The end result is a vicious cycle until you eliminate the issue altogether.
Inflammation & Resultant Decreased Circulation:
Following any workout your body is inflamed, or at least it should be. Tiny little tears take place in your muscles, and this is what allows you to burn calories as the damage is repaired. Meanwhile, your muscles grow.
When there is more inflammation in your biceps, for example, than your triceps as a result of muscular imbalance between them, and one muscle is being over-shortened while the other muscle is over-lengthened, your lymphatic (healing) system will have a harder time getting rid of the swelling. Once it does get rid of swelling, your lymphatic vessels are supposed to dump the fluid into your veins.
Your muscle pump system (opposite muscle groups actually work like a pump to assist the venous system with the return of blood to the heart) becomes ineffective. Your venous system, as a result, has to work harder, and your veins end up blocking your lymphatic vessels from ‘dumping’ their fluid and sucking up more.
Swelling persists. Over time, this will lead to more compression on nerves, and decreased blood supply to them as well. Just like everything else in our bodies, our nerves need blood and oxygen to function at their best.
And if they’re not getting it, guess what happens? That’s right, nervous system inefficiency and decreased communication between nerves and muscles, leading to decreased fat loss and overall results.
Improper Use Of Rest Periods In Exercise Program:
Rest periods, when used properly, often do not rest your body at all. In fact, there’s a such thing as ‘active rest’ and ‘passive rest,’ but most people don’t know how to choose which one they need during various points in their workouts:
Active Rest – continue exercising, rest that particular muscle group
Passive Rest – sit still and do nothing
- When training for muscle building (i.e. bulking) passive rest periods are an intricate part of the program.
- When training multiple energy systems in your workout program, passive rest periods are essential to success with your second, third, and fourth sets.
- When training for endurance, circuit-style training is best, because it is a submaximal level over a prolonged period of time. Naturally, this will lead to endurance, and you will be preparing your body for your particular goal.
- When training for fat loss, there has to be a balance between strength, energy system work, and endurance in order to become successful. You have to build enough endurance to endure longer bouts of exercise without losing intensity, while you have to build enough strength to raise your metabolism. It takes a carefully designed program to consider all factors for rest periods in a top-notch fat loss program.
Here’s The Bottom Line…
You – yes, you – likely have quite a few “issues” that are holding you back from experiencing two to three times the fat loss results you’re currently experiencing. With my new program, Full Throttle Fat Loss, I teach you how to address the ROOT problem, so that you can correct these issues and lose fat faster at the same time.
Full Throttle Fat Loss becomes available on Tuesday, September 6th, but don’t worry, I’m not going to leave you hanging with just today’s information.
In fact, tomorrow I’m going to be back with another article to teach you THREE ways you can start immediately improving central nervous system efficiency while overcoming each of the 5 “problems” we addressed today.
The question you have to ask yourself is this: “Is setting myself up to double or triple my current rate of fat loss—whatever that may be—through a completely untapped medium, something I’m interested in?”
If so, stay tuned for some serious “solutions” coming at you tomorrow.
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I truly believe this is some of the most game-changing, revolutionary information to hit the fitness industry in years, and that’s exactly why I’m sharing it with you. I will be posting the second part of this article tomorrow, but for now, please post your comments and questions for Kareem and I to answer below.
Bring on the questions and comments!
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Thanx….for such informative stuff.
Good morning Dr. K. Thank you for this interesting report. Excuse me for my english, cause it is not my mother languge. Anyway, I saw the NBC video in which you show some exercices you do with a 25 pounds plate. I don’t have any equipment home but I would like to test the series right away. I heard you saying it could be replaced by a “tax book”, which I don’t know what it is (forgive me my english vocabulary restriction). What I whant to know is: Isn’t there a way of doing the exercices you recommend without any equipment? And is the program “Duble Edged” always dependent of some kind of equipment? Hope to hear from you. Thank you again! Oscar.
Good one Joel! Are the differences Kimberley mentions between the range of ratios in the interview and those for Tabatas dependent on whether the aim is endurance or strength?
Hi Dr K,
Very interested in your paras on lymph system. Many people have damaged lymph systems and in the past were often told to avoid exercise because their lymphatics couldn’t remove the inflammation you describe. Happily the opposite is now known to be true – exercising seems to help the lymph system to regenerate, even if it can’t get back to “normal”. As a cancer survivor myself with lymphoedema which has reduced from 22% excess volume to 4% with weight bearing exercise (and fat loss) and low level laser therapy, I’m really keen to know how techniques you recommend for people with normal lymph systems can help people like me to get a stronger lymph system. Your program could really be great news for us. I can’t wait till next week!
Hi,
This is what exactly I was looking for, sounds great. Can one improve nervous co-ordination by exercise ? How? I am not aware any medical expert has a solution.
This is a lot of info and I’m still not sure if I quite get it, I’m gonna read it again and hopefully when the program comes out everything will be clearer :) it’s a bit more difficult for us international dudes reading the sciency parts :)
Love It. Very good info. Havnt heard anything this holistic from physio’s here in Australia. Looking fwd to tomorrows stuff.
Love your stuff, Dr. K! And thanks Joel for having him speak at the Transformation Domination Live event, the whole weekend opened up a whole new world for me. Everyone has a different piece of the puzzle to offer. This latest by Kareem is pushing the envelope and can’t wait to see what he has to add tomorrow. Thanks Dr. K and Joel for making this accessible to everyone!
I am really excited to see what this program is all about. I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism about a year ago and I seriously need all the help I can get to lose any kind of weight!! I can totally identify with alot of the muscle imbalance examples (back leg giving out before the front leg during a lunge, etc). I’ve been trying all kinds of exercise programs with no results. Needless to say, it is very frustrating when I “feel” like I’m giving exercising my all but I’m left with the same body :-( I soooo excited for this program to be unveiled. I am hoping that it is the answer to my prayers. I recently got engaged (actually 5 days ago) and we want to have children soon however, I won’t let that happen until I lose this weight…aaaargh! No need to add pregnancy weight on top of my already padded body…lol! Thanks so much for these very informative articles. I look forward to reading them everyday!
Definitely interested in more info on this. Inflammation is one of my biggest problems and did not know there was a way to address this for my workouts. I just assumed this was always something I had to put up with working out and my body has just been overworked. I would like to understand how it relates to more fat loss I hope the answers to these issues can easily be addressed! Looking forward to tomorrows info.
I love your paragraph on pain induced inhibition…
Im a physical therapist and recently wrote a paper on the topic looking at how pain and inflammation alter motor control and subsequent movement patterns at various joints throughout the body in an effort to create more effective exercise interventions for my patients and clients…i was so wrapped up in the therapeutic end of it i never even considered it implications for weightloss!!
I have tried some systems but they don’t seem to address women hormonal issues from a complete hysterectomy. I bulk up from the weight training, but cant seem to lose the fat on top with the multiple days of cardio i do.. do you have any suggestions i can apply now?. Stacey
Hi Kimberly,
Glad you’re so excited about this stuff. In general, here are the Golden Rules:
1) Extreme Intensity means long rest breaks to properly recoop
2) High intensity, repeatedly, means longish rest breaks
3) Moderately high intensity, longer duration means medium rest breaks
4) Pure endurance work means little to no rest breaks
When trying to consume sugars as fast as possible, you need to consume as much glycogen as possible – sprint work does this best, but it takes A LOT of recovery time to get the full effect.
make sense?
great question!
@Oscar – Hey Oscar,
bad english? i disagree!
actually, I skipped over this quickly, but I said a thick text book, like one from school. anything that basically creates an unstable surface should do the trick…
as for DEFL and the equipment question – no, no equipment necessary – i show you how to substitute just your body weight or household items in the members’ area…
that said, if you want to get the equipment ahead of time, here’s what we use (very minimal):
Dumbbells (medium weight)
Plates (like for a barbell)
Medicine Balls (medium weight)
Dyna Discs (little blue, inflatable things – can easily be traded for couch cushions)
hope this helps!
have a great day,
Kareem
@Dr S – hey Dr. S,
Great to hear from you and I love your enthusiasm!
Congratulations on getting down from 22% to 4% – that’s really, really great :-)
As for the implication with lymphedema, provided that doctor-approval exists, should be the same scenario. Taking pressure off of the venous system and utilizing your muscle pump system should result in greater removal of lympatic waste into the veins… & greater ability to pump that fluid back up towards the heart.
I’m excited to help you on this journey and look forward to hearing more from you!
@rajendra – coordination will ABSOLUTELY improve with this method. that’s one of the founding principles…. i’m just as excited as you are!
@Lucky – don’t worry Lucky. just ask me questions if you have them… and, yes, it’s easier on the inside – trying to summarize some really important and complex points for you hear – video helps with this part b/c it creates a conversation between us.
thanks for your interest and please stay in touch,
Kareem
@Demorree – Charge on Demorree! What a cool name, by the way :-)
If you liked today, I’ve really got a treat for you tomorrow!
@Amy – my pleasure, Amy. I’m really glad you enjoyed TD Live so much – it sure was a great event and life-changer for a lot of people.
Keep up the great work!
@MB – Hey MB,
First of all – CONGRATULATIONS!!!
I’ve been married for nearly 3 years now… and they are 3 of the best years of my life – you have a lot of happy times in front of you, and I want you to know I’m here to help you work your way to mommy.
This IS the missing link. You are correct.
Looking forward to working with you soon,
-k
@Michelle B – Hi Michelle,
I think that tomorrow’s article is going to really help clarify what’s muddy for you here – just finished writing it a few hours ago, and it’s some of the best content I may have ever created. I look forward to sharing it with you.
@Chelsea – Hey Chelsea,
that’s cool you just wrote an article on this! that’s a topic that deserves more exploration in both fields… great job!
yeah… I believe the implication is even greater on weight loss b/c it requires that much more signaling for your body to progress beyond it’s whole body equilibrium, rather than local to one or two joints… make sense?
A couple of years ago, when I first identified this, I noticed my clients starting getting results twice as fast. As cool as that was, this wasn’t the best part… 3, 4, 5, 6 months in, they were still getting results at the same speed as when they started.
To be honest, I think this is breakthrough ‘fitness technology’, so to speak, b/c it truly integrates what’s natural with what’s not…
what do you think?
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