Metabolism-boosting tactics

February 16, 2006 6:15 AM

Does anyone have any tried and tested tactics for raising metabolism? (I know, I know...)

I'm interested in pepping up my metabolic rate.

My resting heart-rate is about 60bpm (down from 70bpm around 4 years ago), and I work out quite a lot (martial arts, fartlek sprinting a couple of times a week, cycling 8 miles every 2 or 3 days, resistance training every 2 or 3 days). However I'm not losing body fat. I've been stuck at a consistent 15% according to my electronic fat-measuring scales for the last 3 years. In fact, this has been consistent even during periods of injury when I cannot train. I do suspect my exercise routine could be upped, but when I do that I tend to get over-tired or injured.

I shall be changing my workout to include more longer-distance, lower heart-rate exercise, and reducing my caloric intake too. But I'd like to hear from people who've tried to boost their metabolic rate (by whatever means) and the successes and failures people have had. I'm after fat-loss, and I'm prepared to work to get it.

Tactics I'm planning on following in addition to diet and exercise routine changes, include: eating more in the morning and less in the evening; exercising (weights followed by 30-plus mins aerobic) in the morning; possibly doing 2 or more hours of cardio once or twice a week; several small meals a day (I'm aware this is not fully proven to boost metabolism); and I may even start drinking tea (yuck). Maybe I'll look at cycling my diet and cycling my exercise routines; both tend to be "as and when" right now. Any experiences of this?

I've read the following threads here:
Does your body have to be in ketosis to burn fat?
Metabolic variation
ECA stack experiences
What is the safest diet pill?
Food binge
I hunger!
Ask.MeFi posts tagged "metabolism"

A few pre-emptive qualifications:
I reckon my body-fat scales are reasonably accurate.
Drugs are bad, m'kay, but they make for some interesting stories :-)
I appreciate that none of this is medical advice. I'm more looking for personal stories so I can understand potential pitfalls.

Muchos gracias.

posted by ajp to health (12 comments total)

Eat smaller meals more often. 5-6 smaller meals every 3 hours or so.
posted by madman at 7:00 AM on February 16, 2006

how much free time do you have?

your resting heart rate being as low as it is is going to make it slightly more difficult to really get some great gains. first and foremost, you need to alter your diet.

you have to eat like a fucking asthetic. i mean, eat like you're training for a marathon. in fact, you should probably google "training for a marathon".

martial arts is not a path to fat loss. continue going to them, but don't count that in as part of your exercise routine.

the only running you do are your fartleks. how far do you go?

here's a pretty rad link for you outlining some stuff they give to potential officer candidates.

you really need to go for the extended cardio...and forget bicycling unless you're gonna truck >20 miles. you basically want to run for at least 3-5 miles straight.
posted by taumeson at 7:22 AM on February 16, 2006

ah, not asthetic, but rather, eat like an ascetic
posted by taumeson at 7:30 AM on February 16, 2006

Figuring I should get in shape, I started riding my bike on a trainer in early autumn. Over that time I've gone from about 85kg to 65–68kg and I think I've got some pretty heavy duty metabolism going on.

Basically the system I used was to do distance training four times a week and interval training twice per week. I've used the same heart rate intervals throughout and as my capacity has grown I've increased the training time somewhat. My distance training is at about 60 minutes now and the interval training takes a little less. It gets boring on the trainer after a while and I can't wait until the snow is gone so I can do much longer rides.

I make sure I eat well enough with small amounts of fast carbs (except right after training) and as little stuff as possible that contain ingredients with scary sounding names. I also eat enough to never be hungry. Finally, I've never counted calories or anything like that, seems like a waste of time unless perhaps if you are training as a pro athlete.

So, to summarize, I definitely think you should go for the longer, lower heart rate exercise with intermittent interval training. Also, eat well and enjoy life :-)

Oh, and I'm not sure what a good rest pulse is for the kind of training you do but 60bpm seems a bit high. With the exercise I do I went to a rest pulse in the low 40s within a month. I guess this differs a lot between persons though, my rest pulse was already pretty low when I started.
posted by rycee at 8:16 AM on February 16, 2006

I agree with the longer-lower intensity workout suggestions. Unless you're after conditioning, dump the fartleks and just run 5-10 miles at a very mild pace. Same deal with the biking, go for 40 or 50 miles (if you have a road bike, fewer if you have a mountain bike), wear a heart rate monitor, and keep your heart-rate below 60% of your max.

When you do those high-intensity workouts you're getting good conditioning, but you're also burning carbs and not stored fat. Low intensity exercise burns stored fat. I don't think you can just do something and magically change your metabolic rate -- changing your exercise plan to target fat is a more doable thing.

Part of the correlation between upping your amount of exercise and over-training/injury may be that you're doing too much intensity. Cut the intensity, up the time, and you'll be better off.

By the way, what's your reasoning on the accurary of your body-fat scales? My experience is that those electronic scales are notoriously unreliable, especially for people who are actively involved in any sort of training. You should have a professional do a skin-fold body composition test if you really want to know the numbers.
posted by dseaton at 8:51 AM on February 16, 2006

It's all weight training.

Cardio burns calories while you're doing it, and for about half an hour later, but lifting weights can up your metabolism for up to 24 hours afterwards. Additionally, building more muscle will directly increase your BMR.
posted by brool at 11:02 AM on February 16, 2006

High Intensity Interval Training, check it out.

Cardio burns calories while you're doing it, and for about half an hour later

I completely disagree with this. After a basketball game or a good run, I know my metabolism is up for the next 6 to 12 hours.
posted by knave at 12:01 PM on February 16, 2006

Thanks for all the comments. I guess I should emphasise the part about personal stories of success or failure. The standard advice about lifting weights and eating less food more often is all good; has anyone here got a personal story of these tactics working for them? Was it sustainable? Did you put the weight back on? How quickly did it come off? Were there any quirks to your training that helped or hindered?

A few comments:

taumeson, thanks for the link. Also, some martial arts certainly can be a way to weight loss. Try an hour of boxing (and I mean boxing not boxercise) followed by an hour of wrestling and you may agree :-)

rycee, thanks, that's just the sort of thing I was after. Personally I think my heart rate is probably fine. If anything, yours sounds quite low. I had my blood pressure checked a few months ago and it was fine. Have you had yours checked? It may be low. Maybe not, you just may be significantly fitter than I am!

knave, great link, thanks. Fartlek is HIIT by another name. There are loads of equivalent or similar training techniques, such as wind-sprints, shuttle-runs, etc. The problem I have is that I'm doing HIIT some days and distance other days, and not an ounce if fat is dropping off. Very disconcerting. A question for you: how do you know your metabolism is up after a game or run?

dseaton, as for interval training burning carbs and not fat, I'm unclear about this. While it seems to be true that as you increase the intensity the proportion of calories used come from fat, the overall amount of fat burned should be roughly the same. From Brian Mackenzie, a well-known sports coach:

If you cycled along at 50% VO2max, fat would provide about 50%, on average, of the energy you needed to keep going. If you cycle along at 75% VO2max, fat would provide 33% of the required calories.

A moderately fit athlete exercising at 50% VO2max generally consumes about 220 calories during a 30 minute workout. If the same athlete works out at 75% VO2max, 330 calories are burned during the same period. Of course, 50% of 220 calories and 33% of 330 calories yield an identical number of calories coming from fat - 110 calories.

Answers to questions:

I don't only do fartlek running, I do some 30 minute runs once or twice a week. For the fartlek I run up and walk down London's Primrose Hill 4 times (there's a nice view from the top) plus a 5 minute jog there and another back home :-) Sorry I can't say how steep it is, but my heart's pounding when I get to the top.

As for the scales, I appreciate that a caliper test may be more accurate. In fact accurate is probably the wrong word. "Self-consistent" might be better. The fact that I vary at most by 1% either way is the annoying thing. I've weighed other people on them and their body-fat measurements have been very different from mine, so although the 15% might not be quite right, I reckon the thing should be sensitive to change.

Thanks again for all the input, and I look forward to reading people's personal accounts of their efforts.
posted by ajp at 12:25 PM on February 16, 2006

Oops: ...as you increase the intensity the proportion of calories from fat becomes smaller...
posted by ajp at 12:28 PM on February 16, 2006

A question for you: how do you know your metabolism is up after a game or run?

Ok, I might get blasted for this because it's not very scientific. But after basketball (I play for an hour, once a week), I am warm for the rest of the night. That is, I keep my house at 60°F, and I'm comfortable in a t-shirt. I also find that I can eat a ton of food, and I'm hungry again pretty soon. I take that to mean my body is consuming food at a high rate.

Also, sorry for being redundant, I didn't know the other name for HIIT. I would be disconcerted if I was you, too. Have you seen a doctor or a nutritionist?
posted by knave at 2:00 PM on February 16, 2006

You might be encouraged by the results of a skin-fold test, so I definitely recommend it. In a skin-fold test I come out at <5 % body fat; my electronic scales i come out, no matter what, at 15±1%. i can lose weight, gain weight, whatever, but the reading never changes. i race bikes, i'm very fit, and i believe the skin-fold test. the scales -- set up to for some generic average person -- can't compensate for the fact that an abnormal proportion of my body mass is in my legs. could be something similar at work for you.br>
As far as the lower intensity training is concerned, the trick is that you can do much more of it than you can high intensity, so you burn more total calories and more fat calories. You'll have no problem sustaining 50% of VO2max on the bike for several hours. But, without training for it, you couldn't just jump in at 75% for hours every day. When you do high-intensity you might end up with fantastic cardiovascular fitness, but you probably won't lose weight.

Try riding your bike for an hour or two, keep the pace under control. It'll be no problem, and you'll be able to burn way more than you do during these short hard efforts. Don't stop the harder efforts, but spend several days doing long slow distance.
posted by dseaton at 5:40 PM on February 16, 2006

This might be something that you need to experiment a bit with, which may not be what you want to hear, but there it is. I've found personally, that the biggest changes come when I make big changes to my workouts, not necessarily from the changes themselves. For instance, I recently lost about 5 pounds (since regained on vacation) when I changed from a high-rep, low-weight strength workout to a low-rep, high weight workout. The amount of calories burned during the newer workout is almost certainly less, and I definitely put on some muscles, so the wieght loss doesn't exaclty make sense.

In addition, sometimes when I'm running a lot, by which I mean training for a marathon or longer run, my body holds onto weight in a way that seems counter-intuitive. This is true for many runners I know, they report dropping weight either during their taper or during their time off after a big race.
posted by OmieWise at 12:10 PM on February 21, 2006