Why You Should Not Count Calories…Myths Busted

Many people think weight loss is simply about cutting calories. They believe that to lose weight, you must reduce calories (either eat less or burn more), to gain weight you must add calories, and to maintain weight you keep calories constant. To these folks, calories in, calories out is the only thing that matters. They usually oppose my program because they assume that I “deny” the importance of calories in weight loss.

Well, they’re wrong. I don’t deny the importance of calories. Calories absolutely count. And if someone has lost weight, they have necessarily expended more calories than they consumed. That said, there are some major misconceptions about calories, body weight, fat loss, and health. These calorie myths are often rooted in truth but presented in black-or-white terms that are useless at best, harmful at worst, and do little to help the average person lose body fat.

Let’s dig right in.

Calories in, calories out is all you need to know.

Simple is nice. Simple is good. But overly simple is dangerously inaccurate, so let’s break this statement down.

What does “calories in” refer to?

Calories in — what we eat. We can’t metabolize sunlight or oxygen. We can’t feast on the souls of the damned. The food we eat determines “calories in” entirely. Simple.

“Calories out” is where it gets confusing. There are several components to “calories out”:

1. Resting energy expenditure — the energy used to handle basic, day-to-day physiological functions and maintenance
2. Thermic effect of food — the energy used to digest food and process nutrients
3. Active energy expenditure — the energy used during movement (both deliberate activity like lifting weights, jogging, and walking plus spontaneous activity like shivering and fidgeting)

Not so simple, is it? There are a lot more variables to consider.

Oh, and about those variables…

Calories in and calories out are independent variables.

That would be nice. You could drop energy intake and maintain your resting metabolic rate while burning the same amount of energy digesting food (even though you’re eating less of it) and working out. The fat would melt off at a predictable, constant rate. Anyone with basic arithmetic skills (or a calculator) could become a successful weight loss coach and very few people would be overweight.

In reality, the amount and type of calories we eat affect the amount of energy we expend:

• During calorie restriction, the body “defends” its body weight by lowering resting metabolic rate and reducing spontaneous physical activity. To keep weight loss going, you often have to lower food intake even more (to counteract the reduced metabolic rate) and remind yourself to fidget, tap your feet, twiddle your thumbs, and shiver (to recreate the missing spontaneous movement). And you have to do it again when the body readjusts.
• Whole foods take more energy to process and digest than processed foods. In one example subjects either ate a “whole food” sandwich (multigrain bread with cheddar cheese) or a “processed food” sandwich (white bread with cheese product). Both meals were isocaloric (same number of calories) and featured roughly identical macronutrient (protein, fat, carb) ratios. Those eating the multigrain sandwiches expended 137 calories postprandially (after their meal). The white bread group expended only 73 calories, a 50% reduction in the thermic effect of food.
• Protein takes more energy to process and digest than other macronutrients. Compared to a low-fat, high-carb diet, a high-protein diet increased postprandial energy expenditure by 100% in healthy young women. And in both obese and lean adults, eating a high-protein meal was far more energetically costly (by almost 3-fold) than eating a high-fat meal.

Calories in affects calories out. The two variables are anything but independent of each other.

Weight gain is caused by eating more calories than you expend.

Calorie fetishists love pointing out that weight gain requires overeating. That is, everyone who gains weight necessarily ate more calories than they expended. Okay. We’ve established that everyone agrees on this. But it’s just restating the issue. It doesn’t tell us anything new or useful. It’s merely descriptive, not explanatory.

To show you what I mean, let’s do the same thing with other phenomena.

Why was Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated? Because someone pointed a sniper rifle at him and fired it.

Why did Usain Bolt win the 100 m final in the Beijing Olympics? Because he crossed the finish line first.

Why is the restaurant so crowded? Because more people entered than left.

These are technically true, but they ignore the ultimate causes In King’s case, they fail to discuss racism, the civil rights movement, or the motivation of the shooter. They don’t mention Bolt’s training, genetics, or his childhood. They don’t discuss why the restaurant has attracted so many customers — new menu, Valentine’s Day, graduation? They simply restate the original statement using different words. They just describe what happened.

I’m interested in what truly causes us to eat more than we expend and/or expend less than we eat. I don’t care to merely describe weight gain because that doesn’t help anyone.

A calorie is a calorie.

Look. I loved Carl Sagan. Like everyone else, I got chills when he’d wax poetic about our place in the universe and our shared origins as “star-stuff.” But just because steak comes from the same star-stuff as a baked potato, isocaloric amounts of each do not have identical metabolic fates in our bodies when consumed.

We even have a study that examined this. For two weeks, participants either supplemented their diets with isocaloric amounts of candy (mostly sugar) or roasted peanuts (mostly fat and protein). This was added to their regular diet. After two weeks, researchers found that body weight, waist circumference, LDL, and ApoB (a rough measure of LDL particle were highest in the candy group, indicating increased fat mass and worsening metabolic health. In the peanut group, basal metabolic rate shot up and neither body weight nor waist size saw any significant increases.

Does this invalidate the relevance of energy balance? Of course not. Since the peanut group’s metabolic rate increased, they expended more calories in response to added calories, thus remaining in balance. But it does elegantly and definitively invalidate the simplistic notion that all calories, especially added calories, are treated equally by the body.

Weight loss and fat loss are the same thing.

People don’t want to lose weight. “Losing weight” is common parlance, but we really want to lose body fat and retain, or gain, muscle. And studies indicate that the macronutrient composition can differentially affect whether the weight lost is fat. It’s not just about total calories.

Take the 2004 study from Voltek that placed overweight men and women on one of two diets: a very low-carb ketogenic diet or a low-fat diet. The low-carb group ate more calories but lost more weight and more body fat, especially dangerous abdominal fat.

Or the study from 1989 that placed healthy adult men on high-carb or high-fat diets. Even though the high-carb group lost slightly more body weight, the high-fat group lost slightly more body fat and retained more lean mass.

Just “weight” doesn’t tell us much. What kind of weight? Are we losing/gaining fat or muscle, bone, sinew, organ? Are we increasing the robustness of our colons and the number of  bacterial residents (who, though small, carry weight and occupy space) from added prebiotic fiber intake? These factors matter for health. I’d argue that they’re the only factors that actually matter when losing or gaining weight because they offer insight into our health and body composition.

Exercise helps you lose weight only by burning calories.

Most people think of exercise as a way to mechanically combust calories. And that’s true, to a point. Exercise does “burn” calories, and this is a factor in weight loss. But it does lots of other cool things to our physiology that can assist with improving body composition, too.

Compared to something high intensity like burpees or something aerobic like running a 10k lifting free weights doesn’t burn many calories when you’re lifting them. But it does improve insulin sensitivity, which reduces the amount ofinsulin we secrete for a given amount of carbohydrate and increases our ability to burn body fat. It increases muscle mass, which uses calories (protein). It strengthens connective tissue, which also uses calories. It even preserves metabolic rate during weight loss and boosts it for up to 72 hours post-workout. All these changes affect the fate of the calories we ingest.

If calories burnt were the most important factor, then the best way to lose weight would be to hammer it out with as much endurance exercise as you can withstand because that’s the most calorie intensive. But studies show that combination training — aerobic and resistance training — leads to greater reductions in body fat than either modality alone.

Even aerobic exercise isn’t just about mechanically burning calories. It also targets the reward regions of out brains ucing the allure and spontaneously lowering our intake of junk food.

Counting calories allows us to accurately monitor food intake.

You’d think that, wouldn’t you? Most foods at the grocery store have labels. Even restaurants are beginning to emblazon menus with calorie counts for each item. As humans, we implicitly trust the printed word. It looks so official and authoritative, and it spells out with great specificity exactly how many calories we’re about to eat.

Except studies show that’s not the case. Whether it’s the nutritional information provided by restaurants, the calorie counts on supposedly “low-calorie” pre-packaged calorie counts are rarely accurate. Food manufacturers can even underreport calories by 20% and pass inspection by the FDA.

Maybe that’s why people have so much trouble sticking to their allotted number of calories. If only reality would bend to the will of the label!

You may roll your eyes at some of these ideas because they’re so preposterous, but consider where you’re coming from, where you’re reading this. This is how the general public – and, often, the experts and physicians advising their patients and writing policy — approaches the question of fat loss. Sure, not everyone immersed in conventional wisdom holds every one of these myths to be true. And when they’re actually faced with the statement, few will claim that a calorie of steak is metabolically identical to a calorie of white sugar or that weight loss is the same as fat loss. But when calories in, calories out is the first line of attack against excess body fat, these are the kind of myths that become entrenched.

It’s important to take them head-on.

No one wants to be fat. The obese know they’re obese. They’ve had “calories in, calories out” drummed into their heads for years. If it were really as simple as eating less and moving more, they wouldn’t be obese. And yet here we are. That might be the biggest danger of the continued propagation of these myths — they convince people that they’ve failed at something simple, basic, and central to being a healthy, moral human being.

7 Things to Promote Weightloss All Day

The best part of mornings is that they’re so full of potential! No matter whether you laced up your sneaks yesterday or overindulged on a co-worker’s birthday cake, it’s a fresh chance to get closer to your health goals. To keep that get-fit momentum going all day long, start your day off right with these morning habits that will motivate you even more.

1. Get Some Sun Basking in the sun’s rays can help you drop pounds, according to research published in the journal PLOS ONE. Study authors had 54 participants wear wrist monitors that recorded their exposure to morning light for seven days. During that period, participants kept food diaries to track their calorie intake. The people who spent more time in morning light had lower BMIs than those who were in the dark, no matter their age, activity level, or what they ate. Why? Morning light helps regulate your internal clock, which aids your sleep schedule (crucial for weight loss). Morning sunshine also contains higher levels of blue light, which has the strongest effect on your circadian rhythm. You only need 20-30 minutes of morning sunlight between 8 a.m. and noon to get in on these benefits!
2. Sleep In This one goes hand-in-hand with the previous tip. Spending more time on those precious Zzzs can help you eat less and have fewer cravings than people who skimp on sleep. Researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin tracked the sleep of 10 overweight young adults who were at risk for obesity and who self-reported fewer than six and a half hours of shut-eye each night. For the first week of the study, they stuck with their regular sleep schedules. For the second and third, the study authors had them bump it up to eight and a half hours. On average, they slept around an additional 1.6 hours and experienced a 14% decrease in appetite and a 62% drop in cravings for sweet and salty junk. If you’re groaning each time your alarm goes off, try to rearrange your schedule so you can spend a little more a.m. time in bed.
3. Get In A Mindful Mood Mindfulness is a key strategy when it comes to weight loss. It’s all about taking a focused, intentional approach to your life by really tuning in to your body and mind. Even better, it can stabilize your emotions, potentially making you less likely to give into stressed-based eating. Researchers at the University of Utah had 38 people between ages 20 to 45 fill out a survey that measured how mindful they were naturally. For two days, participants rated their emotions throughout the day in addition to tracking their physical and cognitive arousal before sleep to measure anxiety. Those who were naturally mindful had experienced less irregular mood swings. Rather than trying to kick-start this habit when faced with your first meal, begin your morning with mindfulness instead: Take a few minutes at the start of each day to sit quietly and focus on the rhythm of your breath.
4. Change Up Your Commute Driving to work is easy, but it may not be best for your waistline. A study published in the journal BMJ shows that people who walk, bike, and take public transportation have lower BMIs and body-fat percentages than those who depended on their cars to get to work. The University College London team of researchers collected the BMIs and body-fat percentages of more than 7,000 people. Participants then completed a survey about how they usually got themselves to the office. The women who used a method other than a car had a BMI that was around 0.7 less than the others, which is about a 5.5-pound difference on the scale. Note that this doesn’t exclude public transportation! Even walking to the closest bus stop or train station can be beneficial.
5. Go High-Protein While the jury’s still out on whether breakfast is essential for weight loss, a healthy dose of protein in the morning looks like it can help you drop pounds. Scientists at Biofortis Clinical Research and the University of Missouri department of exercise physiology and nutrition gave 35 women from the ages of 18 to 55 three different breakfasts. One was just a glass of water, while the others clocked in at around 300 calories each (and had equal fat and fiber counts). One of those had three grams of protein, while the other had 30 to 39 grams, which is more than two-thirds of the RDA. Those who had high-protein breakfasts felt less hungry and ate 175 fewer calories at lunch. Protein takes a long time to digest and pushes your body to secrete the gut hormone Peptide YY, which helps increase feelings of fullness.
6. Work Up A Sweat Obviously, working out at any point is going to be a good thing! But besides giving your metabolism a boost that lasts well into the day, a study in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise found that women who exercised in the morning were less distracted by pictures of delicious food. They had 17 participants with healthy weights and BMIs and 18 obese participants walk briskly for 45 minutes in the morning. Apart from not being as interested in pictures of unhealthy food, study subjects were more active throughout the day, no matter their weight.
7. Pack The Day’s Snacks Avoid the afternoon dash to the office vending machine with this one: Take just a few minutes each morning to make sure you’ve got enough snacks to take you through the day, suggests Keri Glassman, MS, RD, a Women’s Health contributor. When you’ve just woken up, it’s easy to underestimate how much fuel you’ll need throughout the day and just throw an apple in your bag. Instead, budget extra time to whip up some quick, healthy snacks that will keep you on the road to weight-loss success. Even better, just throw them in your bag after prepping them the previous weekend.

10 Things You Need to Know about Exercise

Regular physical activity is important, and everyone pretty much agrees, but life gets in the way. Most of us end up trying to fit exercise in around a busy schedule rich in sedentary behaviors. We’re sitting all the time. We’re spending countless hours at jobs we may not necessarily love. Responsibilities pile up and time slips away before we notice it was even there. We need to make our exercise count. We need to get it right. So today, I’m going to lay out the ten most important rules for successful exercise. These are the rules I use to form my exercise philosophy. These ten items have helped me get fitter, healthier, and happier than I ever have been, and I think they’ll help you out, too.

You might not need to follow all ten rules. And not all rules apply to all training regimens. That’s fine. But in my experience, both personally and as a professionally, the people who get the most out of their workouts adhere to most of these rules.

Do the thing you love.

Some fitness people like to talk tough. They’ll say things like “pain is weakness leaving the body” or “if you’re enjoying yourself, you’re not training.” I get where they’re coming from because hitting the truly elite levels of performance does require enduring pain and sacrifice and unpleasantness and, frankly, momentary bouts of abject misery. But even the triathletes subjecting themselves to crippling pain do so out of love. There’s some hate there, too, but love is the foundation.

The biggest benefit to doing something you love for exercise is that you’ll actually do it. Since the most effective and beneficial exercise is the one you can stick with, this is one way to ensure you obtain the benefits.

There’s not a ton of research on the matter, but what little exists suggests that “forced exercise” isn’t even as helpful as “voluntary exercise.” In mice with colitis, for example, forced treadmill running exacerbates intestinal inflammation enough to kill mice while voluntary running attenuates it and keeps them alive. And in a rodent model of Alzheimer’s disease, voluntary exercise was superior to forced exercise at plaque deposition and memory impairment. That’s pretty huge, I’d say.

Do what you love. You’ll actually do it and it’ll probably give you better results.

Get a workout buddy (or buddies).

Besides the workouts themselves, one big reason CrossFit has become so popular and so effective for so many people is the group dynamic it offers. You’re not just toughing it out on your own anymore. And it goes beyond having a spotter. With CrossFit, you have a tribe of likeminded individuals pushing each other, shouting encouragement, suffering and succeeding together. Research confirms the benefits of this kind of camaraderie in the gym:

• Working out in a group boosts the stress reduction we get from exercise.
• Just working out in the presence of another person reduces the perceived effort of the exercise.
• Train with someone who’s stronger/faster/fitter. If you think your workout partner is doing better than you, you’ll, work harder.
• Guys might also want to work out with a lady nearby, as exercising with a member of the opposite sex has been shown to also reduce perceived exertion. I’m not sure if the same applies to women working out near men; I’d expect it might.

You don’t have to join a CrossFit box. Simply gathering a friend or two for regular workouts will do the trick. And hey, social contact is a nice bonus!

Work out outside.

Taking in a sunset snuggled up with your sweetheart is amazing. Going camping for a half week really recharges your body and soul (and resets your circadian rhythm ). Simply being in green space has health benefits. But we’re not only meant to passively and calmly experience the great outdoors on a regular (as close to constant) basis. We should be physically engaging with them, propelling our bodies through three dimensional space at high speeds while immersed in fresh air, and unfiltered sunlight.

Exercising outdoors makes exercise more enjoyable. The more enjoyable it is, the more likely we are to do it. There are also psychological benefits, according to a 2011 meta-analysis. Outdoor workouts resulted in greater revitalization, increased energy, and more positive engagement with the activities, along with less depression, anger, confusion, and tension. I mean, the love of exercise in an outdoor setting even smashes the division of species and phyla. If a slug will do it, you have no excuses.

Incorporate play to make the workouts fun.

One surefire way to make exercise more enjoyable – and thus more sustainable – is to play. Instead of pounding out an hour on the stationary bike, go mountain biking. Instead of doing box jumps, play leap frog with a friend (or do leapfrog burpees). Instead of lifting weights, lift oddly shaped objects or oddly shaped people. Instead of running aimlessly, go play sports where you run to get places and catch balls and make baskets.

By framing your workouts as a “fun activity,” they become their own reward and you’re less likely to reward yourself  with junk food afterwards. Oh, and fun is really fun.

Make your workouts meaningful and purpose-driven.

A big problem that prevents people from working out is that it all feels so meaningless. And let’s face it: going to the gym to lift some weights just so you can put them back down or walking on a treadmill for an hour without going anywhere feels pointless on some base level. It wasn’t always this way, though. Humans used to perform physically demanding tasks on a regular basis in order to live, eat, and thrive. It wasn’t “exercise” or a “workout,” but it made us fit, strong, and fast just the same.

Most of us can’t create a life where regular exercise is a prerequisite for survival (nor would we want to), but we can inject meaning and purpose into our movements. Simple things like working with your hands and building useful things, helping friends move, cleaning up a park or nature area, commuting to work on bike or on foot, or doing physical labor can give you a great workout and produce tangible and useful results. Those probably aren’t enough to get you as fit as you’d be lifting barbells or running sprints, but you can do both and still retain the sense of meaning.

Find flow.

Have you ever had a workout that feels effortless until it’s over at which point you collapse under the weight of suddenly realized exertion? That’s flow. When he scored 13 points in 33 seconds, Tracy McGrady was deep in the flow state (or “the zone”). Software developers seek flow to improve their coding.Meditationis stationary flow. That guy wearing shades in the gym, flexing for the mirror in between sets on the pec deck? He’s probably not experiencing flow.

How do you do it?

According to the father of flow research, Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, we must engage in doable but difficult challenges that tap into our individual curiosities and interests while giving immediate feedback. Luckily, an engaging workout tends to promote the flow state fairly easily as long as you’re looking for it. Try eliminating distractions that pull your attention from the task. Instead of running on a flat track, for example, go running on a trail that forces you to dodge rocks, jump roots, and pay close attention to where your feet go; the time will fly by and you’ll probably go longer than you would have on the track. Jogging with a podcast in your headphones can be nice, but it’s important to lose yourself in the task at hand sometimes.

You can always flex in the mirror after your workout.

Savor how exercise makes you feel.

Exercise is psychedelic. It expands and alters consciousness. It’s an escape from the drudgery of real life, of bills and deadlines and stress and neurotic thought-loops.

It’s a narcotic, literally causing your brain to produce  endogenous opioids and cannabinoids that get you high. Good workouts reveal the extremes of subjective human experience. We get butterflies before a big lift or a particularly grueling sprint and feel the real anxiety of knowing you’re about to push your body to its limit. We know the joy of victory (even if it’s against your last workout’s self) and the crushing dejection of defeat. The ups, the downs, the all-arounds.

A good workout relaxes you. All is right with the world after a heavy lifting session or a hike in the back country. Food tastes better. The sunset’s prettier. Work stress is somehow less pressing.

You’re confident after a workout. “Yeah, I just lifted that.” You feel sexier, too, because you’ve proven to yourself and the world that you know how to use and inhabit your body.

Even the unpleasant aspects of exercise – the sweat sting, the burn of the quad, the intense mental effort required to lift this weight or run that hill – should be savored. Drawing away from the pain is pointless; it’s there. By meeting it head-on, by enjoying it, we co-opt it for our own devices.

Know these feelings. Savor them. They may not be “fun” or “pleasant,” necessarily. That’s not the point. They’re proof that you’re still alive and that these workouts are doing something.

Release your attachment to the outcome.

High-level endurance athletes are often obsessed with the outcome. During events, they strap the outcome onto their chest like a baby carrier and it would help me reach the finish line. If they don’t have the outcome – the finish line – they often can’t face all the grueling torture required of elite endurance athletes.

But that’s no way to live. Detaching yourself from the outcome and focusing on the journey to wherever it is you’re going has proven to be a game changer health, happiness, and ultimately fitness. When you can immerse yourself in the journey, in the exercise itself as you’re doing it, great stuff happens. You hit the flow state more easily. You find yourself having fun again when you work out. You discover that training can be an end in itself, and your workouts are reinvigorated and more fruitful.

Keep your goals, of course. Just don’t forget to savor the journey and don’t let yourself fall to pieces in despair if the outcome differs from your expectations.

Decide if you’re training or just exercising.

Which is it: training or exercising? Are you interested in being active, moving your body, getting generally fitter and stronger, staying fit, staying strong without adhering to any specific performance goals? Then you’re exercising. You have goals. They’re just more diffuse, like “get healthier.”

Or maybe you have a specific performance goal, like “deadlift 500 pounds” or “compete in Master’s marathon and actually compete.” Then you’re probably going to be training, which means a training program consisting of progression, regimentation, and maybe periodization. Training is stricter.

They’re both great, depending on your goals, but exercising when you should be training or training when all you really need is to exercise can make you miserable and render your workouts ineffective and meandering. So make a decision so you can achieve your goals.

Try something new.

We are novelty seekers. It’s kind of what drove us to walk the entire globe, explore new surroundings, test our limits, and become the apex predators on this planet. That hardwiring affects our relationship with everything- the media we consume, the games we play, the hobbies we spend time on, the relationships we forge, and the exercises we do.

One way trying a new workout or exercise can help is by boosting enthusiasm. If you’re bored with your workout, you’re bored. You’re going through the motions. You’re doing the minimum and getting minimal results. If you’re excited about what you’re doing in the gym, on the track, or on the trail, you’ll be more into it and you’ll get more out of it. Novelty seekers often feel bad about their desire for something new; they shouldn’t. They should indulge it, especially when it comes to movement.

And when it comes to strength training, it might even be more effective to change up the exercises you do than simply increase the intensity (weight, volume, etc). In a recent study, researchers tested the effects of exercise variation in both beginning strength trainees and early advanced trainees. Compared to varying the intensity, varying the exercises yielded significant strength and hypertrophy gains in both groups. In the words of the lead researcher, changing up the exercises you do in the gym “seems to produce a more complete muscle activation hypertrophying all of the heads of multi-pennate muscles.”

As I said earlier, you don’t have to do everything on this list.

But it wouldn’t hurt.

Exercise…..The Inevitable Injury

Almost everyone I know has a chronic injury of some sort. Maybe it’s a lower back that needs extra warming up before a long day, a knee that gets stiff on cold nights, or a tweaked shoulder that prevents good overhead positioning. They’re usually not crippling, debilitating, or otherwise serious infirmaries, but they are injuries that can limit quality of life and performance. And all those people, to a degree, got their injuries from training. My understanding is that this is true for most people who exercise regularly. Injuries happen to everyone. They are inevitable.

A recent survey of CrossFit athletes found that 73.5% had experienced an injury during training, 7% of which required surgery. But before the anti-CrossFit crowd starts gloating, realize that this injury rate is similar to Olympic lifting, powerlifting, and gymnastics and lower than contact sports like rugby. Similar polls in runners find that in a given year, 13% of runners experience knee injuries, 8% get Achilles tendinitis, 7% suffer hamstring pulls, 10% deal with plantar fasciitis, 10% have shin splints, 14% report iliotibial band syndrome, and 6% get stress fractures. There’s no way around it: engaging in extracurricular bouts of physical exertion, also known as working out, carries some risk. Not working out carries its own set of greater risks. As many personal trainers and coachd have said, injuries are a matter of when, not if. And some of these injuries can become chronic injuries that stay with you for the rest of your life.

But why single out workout injuries when painters are falling from ladders, people are getting into car accidents, high school basketball players are tearing their ACLs, and desk jockeys are getting carpal tunnel syndrome? Those are unavoidable. Painters have to work on ladders and software developers have to type to eat. High school kids are going to play high school sports. People drive to get to work, pick up their kids, run errands. Accidents will happen.. With training injuries, we make our bed and choose to fall out of it. We try for that extra rep when we know we probably shouldn’t. We attempt the Hardbody Bootcamp WTFs as Rx’d even though we’re completely gassed. We choose to train for a marathon. These are choices that I have made and I feel good about.

There are also regulations in place to protect people as they go about their days supporting the machine of civilization. We want people driving to work safely, so we have road signs, traffic signals, and lane dividers. We have workplace safety legislation to prevent excessive maiming of employee limbs. High school sports have referees and rulebooks. But once you step under the bar or strap on those running shoes, you’re on your own. Whatever happens is up to you alone.

We’re going to work out. We’re going to stay active and move our bodies and challenge our limits, but we don’t want to get injured. How do we limit these injuries? How do we make good choices?

Barring discussion of specific exercise techniques, like “keep your weight on your heels” or “break at the hips, not the back” or “land on the mid-to-forefoot when running” (because those are beyond the scope of this post and would turn it into a book), what can we do? What should we watch out for? What shouldn’t we ignore? What should we ignore?

Trust your gut. You are the Only one who knows YOUR body.

Most of my injuries were preceded by a gut feeling that I should stop the workout. It’s not always a physical signal, and actual pain isn’t necessarily involved. It’s a subtle sensation that something is amiss and proceeding would be a poor choice.

What’s odd is that I can’t remember an instance where ignoring that feeling turned out well. As far as I can remember, it always ends with a tweak, sprain, pull, twinge, failed rep, or worse. It’s never been worth it, and yet I’ve done it so many times. I bet you have, too.

So stop it. Heed those hints we get from our subconscious.

Train the deadlift, maintain the squat.

That’s what human movement expert Gray Cook recommends. Not everyone needs to place a heavy bar on their back, squat down, and stand up. But everyone should be able to squat unassisted and unweighted, whether it’s to poop while abroad play blocks with your kid, or perform a nice morning yoga stretches. The comfortable squat is a good barometer for being human.

Determine why you’re doing what you’re doing and whether it’s worth the risk.

That triple set of 20 burpies performed at the end of a long stressful work week would make a sweet Facebook post. But is it really worth it, or would a few sets of a high knees alternating with squats achieve similar things while drastically reducing the risk you incur?

Do you really need to deadlift 500 pounds? Some people, yes. Most, no. Most would be more than strong enough with a double bodyweight deadlift.

Are you chasing big numbers or fast times or that marathon for a good reason? Get down deep into the nitty gritty and expose your true motivation. You may find that it’s still worth pursuing, but at least you’ll know for sure.

Don’t dread your training.

Mortal fear on the eve of a Tuesday workout is a bad sign, folks. You can certainly approach your training with a bit of apprehension, but all-out existential dread? You might want to reevaluate why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Leave some in the tank.

Not every training session has to be a breakthrough workout. Not every training session can be a breakthrough workout. You can’t go to failure every time.

Just back off. Don’t get the extra rep. Leave one, two, maybe even three in the tank when necessary

Develop a bone broth habit.

Get into the rhythm of making bone broth on a regular basis. Or, make a bunch at once and freeze it for later. If you need a recipe get with me. But even if bone broth isn’t a strong source of bone-relevant minerals, the collagen alone is important for keeping joints pliable, lubed up, and resilient, and the glycine in the gelatin can make your sleep more restorative and counter any potential inflammatory effects of specific muscle meat amino acids. Drink about a cup a day.

If you can’t do the movement unweighted, don’t do it with weight.

This is a pretty simple concept that many people ignore because adding weight can help you force your joints past a difficult spot. That’s just gravity exerting greater pull on you; it’s not evidence of improved mobility, and it’s probably not all that safe.

Learn the difference between pain and soreness.

Training can hurt. It can “burn” during the session. It can lead to extreme soreness for days after as the microtears in your muscle fibers repair themselves. But it shouldn’t cause pain. Pain indicates malfunction. It means danger. It suggests your tissues are rupturing, are about to rupture, or have already ruptured. Get to know pain so you know when to hold back and when to push through.

Don’t train through pain.

Once you’ve encountered and known pain, don’t ignore it. If you get a sharp stabbing pain in the back of your left knee during passive knee flexion, skip squats today. It simply isn’t worth it. There’s always tomorrow (or next month, if the pain’s bad enough).

Incorporate single arm and leg training.

Squats and deadlifts and overhead presses are great, but have you tried lunges, single leg deadlifts, and dumbbell presses? They work many of the same muscles as the bilateral movements while being a bit safer and forcing you to develop balance, mobility, and stronger stabilizer muscles.

Do a variety of exercises.

Repetitive motion breeds injury, whether you’re working at a mouse and keyboard for 8 hours a day, throwing fastballs, jogging the same route at the same pace, or doing the same four exercises for years on end. If all you’ve ever done is pullups, the occasional chinup won’t kill you. And it may even help.

If you’re at all hesitant about your technique, get evaluated by a professional.

Even though I said I wouldn’t discuss technique or form, this is more of a general recommendation. Chances are you’ve spent a lot of your life sitting in chairs, standing in heeled shoes, and doing other activities that impair your tissue’s ability to move freely and fluidly. You may need an expert’s eye before you can expose those tissues to training stressors in a safe way.

Want to do a basic glutes, quads, and hamstrings program but your squat feels off? Don’t just power through it. Get a pro to look at your form and give you some tips.

Today, I want you to take a good long look at the way you’re training. Be honest with yourself: is it worth the risk? Do the rewards justify the threat of injury?

You can have a healthy workout regimen. Just be smart and know your body. Injuries will happen….it’s inevitable. However, it’s YOUR responsibility to stay healthy. If your trainer is pushing you to hard, speak up!  She doesn’t know your body like you do. Bottom line…..be the best BEAST you can on any given day!!