Alli and I were out for a walk Friday morning. We walked the Prospect Park loop which is almost 3.5 miles. So we had some time to cover a bunch of topics. Towards the end of the walk we got on the subject of working out/fat loss. We have a 5 month old baby and, shout out to her, Alli has lost all the baby weight. She's ready to go back to her favorite workout, which is I Love Kickboxing classes. Long story short, I snottily got into how most group fitness classes are really cardio workouts faking as fat loss workouts. This has to do with the setup of the classes. Most of them are 45-60 minutes long and the goal is to keep you moving as much as possible throughout that time. With this setup you're never really reaching (relatively) high intensities.
Fat loss happens at high intensities. Intensities that canNOT be maintained for 45-60 minutes. For example, probably the most famous fat loss protocol are Tabatas. Your gym most likely has had a Tabata class at some point (and those classes probably were 45-60 minutes long). The real protocol was 8 rounds of 20s all out work with 10s rest. That's 4 minutes total.
The key to Tabatas is the all out work with short rest. When you do the Tabata protocol correctly, puking should be very possible at the end of that 4 minutes. I don't think the experiment has been done but I'm willing to say it would be impossible to carry out this protocol for 45 minutes.
So lets get back to group fitness classes. I'm not saying you're not working hard during whatever class you like to take. I'm just saying it's probably not the most efficient fat burning workout you could be doing, despite the name of the class.
Group fitness classes will keep advertising themselves as fat loss because people want to lose fat. (I should also say that you will lose some fat in these classes, it's just not the best way to go about it.) I don't think group fitness will ever start doing true Tabata protocols. I also don't think they'll do the other proven fat loss method: lifting heavy weights for about 4-6 reps with long rest periods between sets.
Why won't group fitness classes use these proven fat loss methods? As I explained to Alli during our walk, I think this is all about marketing. It's hard to get people to pay $20/class to do 4 minutes of work. Then with the misconceptions around lifting weights and getting bulky, most ladies (it's mostly women who are attending these classes) aren't lining up for the class boasting improvements in 5 rep maxes.
I explained all of this to Alli. The conversation ended, however, by saying that what really matters is that you find the class you'll enjoy and keep attending. So the conclusion of our conversation and me extolling the benefits of high intensity exercise on fat loss, is that Allis is going to return to I Love Kickboxing because that's what she likes doing.
