Should I do muscle training that doesn't go well with my smartwatch?

Research on health is progressing day by day, but not all mechanisms have been elucidated. After all, the data that is used as a reference for health becomes a guideline for health based on statistical data.

For this reason, it is necessary to constantly update the data that should be referred to, but at the time of writing, it is often thought that the BMI should be 25 kg / ㎡ or less. Where to set the lower limit of BMI depends on age, gender, and target guidelines (whether to look at mortality or the results of screening, etc.).

It is consistent that the BMI value should not be too low, but the lower limit depends on the conditions. For the businessman generation, even if it is too low, the lower limit is often around 18.5, and between the upper and lower limits, about 22 or 23 is often recommended.

The focus of this series is on how to promote lean body mass (reduce excess body fat) and lower your BMI.

Should I do muscle training if I want to lean body mass?

Monitor your muscle training activity with your smartwatch. For example, the next activity is about 50 minutes of muscle training (pull-down, rope-pull, Decline Abcrunch).

Strong muscle training is thought to be mainly anaerobic exercise. The energy mainly used is sugar (carbohydrate). However, as you can see from the screenshot above, fat is the main source of energy during muscle training. Carbohydrates do not appear to be used much.

Next, let's take a look at the monitoring results of the 40-minute aerobic exercise (incline walking) that was performed later on the muscle training. This has a lower rate of fat burning. However, calorie consumption is more than three times that of muscle training. After all, aerobic exercise uses more energy and leads to more lean body mass.

Looking at these monitoring results, it seems more efficient to do only aerobic exercise instead of muscle training if you want to promote lean body mass. The calories burned in the muscle training even seem to be the same as when sitting in a chair.

Muscle training is incompatible with smart watches

In fact, muscle training and smartwatches don't go very well together. A smartwatch is basically a device that measures your heart rate and "guesses" various physical changes. In muscle training, there are few exercises that increase the heart rate at once, and the duration is short. Muscle training is a "hard-to-see exercise" from a smartwatch.

The mainstream muscle training is a strange story, but the trend of muscle training that aims at muscle hypertrophy, for example, has changed with the times. In the past, it was often said that it was effective to set the interval to about 1 minute and to make all out 8 to 12 times with about 3 sets.

Nowadays, it seems that more and more people think that it is easier to get all out and muscle hypertrophy can be achieved well by setting the interval time to 3 minutes or 4 minutes, which is relatively long. Recovery cannot catch up with the one-minute interval, so the idea is to drive in properly even if you take a long break.

When that happens, even if you measure the effect of muscle training with a smartwatch, most of it will be a break. Earlier, I was monitoring muscle training for about 50 minutes, but I'm actually focusing on about 10 minutes, and the rest is interval (recovery) time. When it comes to that, the fact that the measurement results are not much different from those at rest is unavoidable due to the specifications of the smartwatch (note that there are devices that can monitor muscle training in more detail).

Muscle training has an afterburn effect

The calories burned by the muscle training itself are low. For this reason, you may think that muscle training is not suitable for lean body mass or takes too much time, but it is not always the case. The calorie consumption effect called "afterburn effect" has been confirmed for muscle training, and there is a possibility that the calorie consumption is increased more than the measurement of the smart watch.

Not all the mechanisms of the afterburn effect have been elucidated. However, as a phenomenon, it has been confirmed that calorie consumption increases for about 1 to 3 days when muscle training is performed, and some of the mechanisms have been confirmed at the experimental level. It is expected that new findings will continue to be discovered regarding the afterburn effect, and it is highly possible that more detailed mechanisms will be revealed.

For now, it is thought that the afterburn effect will be activated by muscle training and HIIT. Since HIIT is too tight, it seems difficult for businessmen who do not usually exercise much to continue, so I will consider muscle training.

It has been confirmed that these effects exist, and the method of invoking them is known. However, the more detailed triggering conditions and the specific calculation method for knowing how much calories burned will increase are not yet known. There are still many uncertainties in incorporating the afterburn effect into lean body mass design. However, the current situation is that there is no doubt that muscle training is also effective in lean body mass.

Let's do muscle training for lean body mass!

It seems that more research is needed on how much muscle training contributes to lean body mass, but it has been shown that it consumes more calories and has various health benefits.

The "World Health Organization 2020 guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behavior --PubMed" published by the World Health Organization (WHO) at the end of 2020 is also an exercise with a high probability of becoming healthy during 150 to 300 minutes a week. He said that intense exercise is good, and that he can aim for even better health by doing moderate exercise for 300 minutes or more a week and medium-strength muscle training at least twice a week. The fact that muscle training promotes health is a highly reliable situation from a statistical point of view.

Therefore, it is a waste not to do muscle training just because the calorie consumption measured by the smartwatch is low. Incorporating muscle training as much as possible is effective for working healthy.

Even if you say muscle training in a bite, the effective muscle training method changes depending on what you aim for. If you want to do muscle training, it is better to have basic knowledge. For the time being, I'll focus on the relationship between muscle training and smartwatches, and focus on how to promote lean body mass.