Take a Walk, With a Weight Vest

Aerobic Exercise or Cardio. Most people don’t like it. They don’t like to do it and they don’t WANT to do it, so don’t even mention it. For some, bringing up Aerobic Exercise is enough to get them to give up on their lofty goals of getting into shape and starting a fitness program.

Why is this though? Actually, it’s very simple. Cardio can wipe you out. Very, very, quickly. Aerobic exercise is not the kind of thing that you can go and do and immediately feel success. It needs to be developed. A GOOD Aerobic base needs to be BUILT. From the ground up.

When most people decide to add Aerobic Exercise to their workout it generally feels as if they just took part in a modified Wingate Test. What is the Wingate Test, you might ask? Well, the Wingate Test is an all-out, 30-second ride on a stationary bike. Remember, as a kid, riding your bike so hard that your lungs hurt? That’s the Wingate Test. It’s horrible. What’s ironic is that the Wingate Test DOES NOT test your Aerobic Capacity, which is the level of your ability to take part in long-term activities running and swimming. Instead, it tests your Anaerobic Capacity, which is your ability to use enegy for quick and powerful actions, like the ones you use for lifting weights. Why is me bringing this up so important? Let me tell you.

Simply put, if you are struggling to run, breaking a sweat, and breathing heavily, then you are most likely using your Anaerobic Systems when you try to engage in what would normally be called an Aerobic Activity. The more that you have to push yourself, the more you begin to push into Anaerobic territory. Is this a bad thing? Not really. We all have to start somewhere, but the purpose of long-term Aerobic Exercise is to build endurance and for those of us trying to lose weight, to use our fat cells for energy instead of our body’s glucose stores (the sugar our cells use for energy that is stored in the blood, liver, and muscles).

What then, is the solution for this dilemma? “Light Aerobic Exercise”. Light Aerobic Exercise can be any number of things really, swimming at a slow pace, a light bike ride, even a leisurely stroll on a trail through the woods. All of these will work. But, what they most likely won’t do is increase your overall muscular endurance and build it up to a level where you can reap the benefits of good ol’ steady-state Cardio. You see we want to push, but we don’t want to push it too much. We want there to be effort, but not so much that our bodies see it as an all out race. We want to pace ourselves.

This is where the trusty old Weight Vest comes in. With it, we can elevate our leisurely stroll into a steady-state, fat burning machine. A recent study, titled Does Weighted Vest Use During Weight Loss Influence Long-Term Weight Loss Maintenance? A Pilot Study in Older Adults Living With Obesity and Osteoarthritis by Carson DeLong, Barbara J. Nicklas, Daniel P. Beavers, Jason Fanning & Kristen M. Beavers, found that, “among older adults who wore a weighted vest during caloric restriction, initial Weight Loss was better preserved at 24-months, which may be due to preserved Resting Metabolic Rate”. What this study suggests is that the extra effort that you put into moving through space with extra weight (weight that you wouldn’t normally routinely carry) increases your metabolism. But, not only does it do it when your wearing the vest, but this metabolic effect continues even after you’ve taken the vest off.

It’s sort of similar to the elevated metabolic effect of doing a HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training) workout. Research suggests that fat burning after doing a HIIT workout continues for some time afterword, and since we are adding above normal weight to a walk with a weight vest, the intensity of this walk has increased and will lead to greater fat burning and overall endurance. What’s great about walking with a Weight Vest is that the body quickly adapts to this new load or weight and your brain normalizes the increase in intensity and the Weight Vest starts to not feel as heavy over time.

What this means is that you can go for a REALLY long time with a Weight Vest on and not be too put out by the effort that’s required to put into it. If you ever talk to anyone who has ever trained with a Weight Vest, they’ll tell you that, “yeah, it sucks in the beginning, but you get used to it”, and this is absolutely true. In the beginning, you DO feel the weight, but after a while, it’s really just a matter of keeping on going because you notice it less and less over time. What’s really weird is that you finally DO notice it the most when you take it off after you’ve finished. You wind up having a bounce and a strength that you didn’t realize that you had before the walk.

So, I encourage everyone to get out there and try walking a mile in a weight vest at least twice a week. If your looking to burn fat or looking to build endurance, then you can’t really pick a better activity. So, what are you waiting for? Get out there!

Michael Sahno, MS APK, TSAC-F