Why Cheetahs Can Eat So Much.

I know this title might seem somewhat off, but a recent trip to the San Diego Wild Animal Park further solidified my thoughts on the best way to burn off fat.  While taking the tram ride, I have to say we had one of the best tour guides I have ever had experienced there.  He was remarking on all sorts of random facts on the different animal and plant life at the park.  For example did you know that the Ruppells Vulture is the highest flying bird at 37,000ft and has never been diagnosed with cancer?  Pretty cool.

But I thought even more relevant to readers of this blog is the fact that cheetahs can eat just as much food as lions do.  Even though lions greatly outsize the cheetah, they still eat about the same amount of food per day, yet the cheetah is very lean.  Why is this?  The cheetah has a very fast metabolism.

Now it is important to recognize that a cheetah and human's physiology will be different, but still an interesting point.  The reason the cheetah's metabolism is so high is because they run at such great speeds.  After hearing this I immediately thought of my clients. This is exactly what I try and tell individuals trying to lose weight.  Look for ways to speed up your metabolism, which is most likely slowed due to poor dieting over the years.  Cheetahs run incredibly fast to catch their foods.  This is such a shock to their bodies that the response is increased metabolism to keep up.  We can do that too.

On a side note, when you drop your calories for long periods of time, such as in most diet programs, the metabolism will react by slowing down to attempt to match the calories coming in.  If this is maintained the metabolism will continue to slow.  Then once off the diet and you start eating more again, your metabolism will gradually increase but not at the rate it slowed.  This means that you now start gaining weight faster than you previously had.

So back to boosting your metabolism.  Even though cheetahs and humans are different they both can have a similar result to moving fast.  When humans exercise at high intensities, over time it will increase your metabolism.  This can be done with cardio training, resistance training, or some combination of each.  This is the program that we try to reinforce at SDPT.  Burn significant calories during the workout and increase metabolism to fight the effects of a decrease in daily calories.  Without doing this you will lose weight initially but find it harder to lose weight down the road.

Now that you hopefully see the importance of higher intensity exercise let's put it into practice.  So what is high intensity training mean?  If we are looking at cardio training the goal is to reach 85% of your max heart rate.  You can use a heart rate monitor for this or you can estimate.  If you scale your intensity based a 1-10 you would want to be around an 8.  This is much harder than most people want to workout.  By hitting these intensities you will significantly burn more calories and boost your metabolism.

I recently came across a study on resistance training and metabolism.  Researchers compared traditional weight training vs. high intensity weight training.  Traditional training is perform an exercise, resting, and repeating.  High intensity training referred to performing a heavy lift for 6 reps, resting 20 seconds, repeat as many reps as possible, rest 20 seconds, repeat as many reps as possible.  This was performed with fewer exercises and fewer reps than the traditional training group.  They found that the high intensity group increase their post workout metabolism by 22.6% which was 4 times as much as the traditional group.  This equalled an extra 432 calories burned the following 22 hours after the workout.  Not bad!

When you are putting together your workout program try high intensities when appropriate.  You should not be a beginner attempting this however.  Work on general conditioning and endurance first and then try high intensities.  To change it up this week try one H.I.I.T cardio workout and one strength training workout.  For your cardio warm up for 5-10 minutes with your favorite type of cardio.  Then perform 10 sixty second bursts with 2-3 minutes of light recovery.  For your strength training try performing a circuit of 6-10 exercises using weights that you can only perform 6-8 reps of.  I promise you will notice a huge difference if you have not been working out this way.

You Stay Healthy San Diego!

Mike Deibler MS, CSCS
San Diego Premier Training