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In this episode, I break down the different strategies about when, if, and how to incorporate running into your fat loss and/or performance phases.
To try a free week of my signature Fit for Hiking program to get you fit from the trails (gym AND at-home options) start HERE.
To try a free week of my signature Fit for Hiking program to get you fit from the trails (gym AND at-home options) start HERE.
For next level fat loss strategies, hormone/gut health help, serious performance goals and unparalleled support, apply for Mountain Metabolic coaching. Learn more HERE.
For more free wellness resources, hiking/travel guides, and other blog posts, check out my website HERE.
What is Fit for Hiking?
Where fitness and outdoors meet. In this space we chat all things hiking, exercise, wellness, adventure, motherhood, and metabolic health from a female perspective! Get ready to learn + be inspired to live your fullest, most adventurous life!
Hi, my name is Brady and I'm a longtime fitness professional and Midwest girl turned mountain living hiking addict. In combining my knowledge of fitness and passion for hiking, I've helped hundreds of women get lean and strong for the trails. Think of this as your onestop shop for both education and inspiration on all things female. Wellness, trail talk and adventure hiking, female metabolism, motherhood, nutrition, travel, and fitness are all topics you'll hear discussed here. If you are outdoorsy and active, looking to level up your health, unlock your potential, and become inspired to live your most vibrant life, you're in the right place. You're listening to the Fit for Hiking podcast. 2s Hello and welcome back to the Fit for Hiking podcast. This is your host Brady, and we are going to be talking about a fitness topic today that is a big misconception. Kind of one of those fitness myths that I have fallen into in the past and many people do, and that is thinking that running and fat loss are paired together, that you need to run to experience fat loss, or that you're just going to get the best possible results from running. And so first I just want to put out a little disclaimer that if any sort of talk around weight loss or fat loss is triggering for you in any way, then this is probably not the best episode for you to listen to as we are addressing people who specifically have a goal of fat loss in this stage of life. Okay? So you might want to tune this one out if it is a little bit of a trigger for you. Okay, so let's dive into it. This will be a bit of a quick bite sized episode, but it is definitely a topic worth covering because this is such a huge misconception. And like I said, I even used to think this way. I remember being fresh out of college and I decided to sign up for a half marathon as a means to lose some of my college weight and look my best. And I was a little bit confused because as I started training and doing more mileage, I wasn't losing weight and I actually remember gaining a little bit of weight and thinking, what the heck? This is so backwards. What am I doing wrong? 1s I thought that running was it for fat loss. That's the thing, right? That's the most effective thing we can do is sweat as much as possible, get the heart rate up, do lots of cardio. And so I think that a lot of people fall into this camp of just kind of assuming that fat loss is correlated with running as far as exercise. So we're going to talk about what is necessary to achieve fast fat loss, why running isn't the best strategy, and what you can do instead. So we're just going to cover it all. So first let's get into what is necessary to achieve fat loss. How do we make this happen? The most important thing and the most necessary thing is a calorie deficit. You need to be in an energy deficient state, so taking in less calories than your body needs to just maintain its normal bodily function. Okay, so we have to have a calorie deficit. So you could hypothetically lose weight without doing any exercise whatsoever simply by altering your diet. I think oftentimes we put too much power in burning calories and exercise when really so many people successfully lose tons of weight without ever, ever doing any exercise or any running whatsoever. So it's important to state that exercise is not necessarily like the best mechanism to achieve fat loss in general. And especially running is not going to do it for most people, and we'll get into why. So keep in mind that, again, a calorie deficit is essential for fat loss. So when we are performing a lot of intense exercise, it can become harder to stay in a calorie deficit due to our hunger hormone ghrelin increasing naturally. As you're putting your body through more intense exercise, you're burning calories, you're sweating a lot. Not only is there that mental component of, oh, I went for a run, so I can probably go eat a lot, you probably see people post race, like going and having a bunch of beers, having pizza, having burgers. We have that mentality of like, well, I earned this, that's just kind of innate in us. We just think, oh, well, I definitely can earn this back now. So not only the mental side that kind of tells us that we can eat whatever we want because we run a lot. But then also the physiological component of your hunger, hormone increasing, it makes it really hard to fight your physiology. Over time, as you start to increase your amount of running volume and you're increasing your intensity, you're going to need to increase your calories and carbs in order to perform well. So not only is it not helpful to try to cut calories if you're trying to run a lot, but it's going to be impossible to perform well. So these two goals are a bit at. ODS like, performance is on one side where we want to be just crushing it on our runs, PR doing our best in our pursuits. And then there's fat loss on the other side. One requires an energy surplus, right? Performance requires you to fuel your body properly so that you can perform. You need ample carbs, you need ample glycogen stores from the carbs and enough calories in general to sustain your efforts and to feel good doing it. And the other goal, fat loss requires an energy deficit. So really depleting yourself in a sense. So it's really not beneficial to try to pursue both of these at the same time. It makes it really difficult to do both well, okay, so. 1s There's a couple different, like, layers to this, right? So you might be someone who is just like, well, I just want to do, like, running every now and then. It's not really like, my main thing then you don't need to worry about this so much. This really isn't going to apply to you if you just go for the occasional run. Like, I'm a big fan of running. I'm training for a half marathon right now. I'm not in any way anti running. I just want to the record straight that it's not necessarily the most strategic way to lose fat. So if you're someone who's like, well, I just want to go for the occasional run, I incorporate it into my workout routine, but it's not everything to me. Then this is not something that you need to worry about. Like, going for the occasional run is an awesome thing. You're really working on building your aerobic base. It's amazing for you. Okay, so don't think that I'm saying, oh my gosh, you should never go for a run. But what I'm saying is, if you are someone who is training for a race or you're running several times a week as your main source of exercise, this is going to apply to you the random occasional for fun runner or doing it once or twice a week in addition to some other things. I'm not speaking to you. Really? Okay. So this is really just if you're using running as a tool for fat loss as your main source of exercise, or if you are trying to use running to perform well in some sort of competition or race and really building up your mileage, so what do you do then? Right? If you are someone who loves to run or you are trying to compete in a race, but you also have this goal of fat loss, what do we do here? So one thing that I recommend to my clients who kind of fall into this camp, maybe they're trying to train for some sort of endurance event, or they just love running, but they're also like, oh, but I want to lose 15 to 20 pounds. I really highly recommend not trying to do both at the same time. So what does this mean? 2s Am a really big fan of phasic training in this case because, like I said, those two goals are really at ODS with each other, so it's hard to focus on both well, at the same time. You're going to just end up kind of like chasing your tail, not really doing either optimally. So phasic training is a really great way to do this. So it's taking a cyclical approach that allows you to focus on fat loss for a few months and then move to more of a performance and emphasis after that. So in this case, I would do a mini cut for a client or for myself if fat loss was a goal. And I would focus on this well before needing to focus on the race. So if your race is in two months, then you're probably a little bit too late to focus on fat loss first, right? Because we need some time here. So if you have a race that's say, in eight months, great, that gives us some time. So we could do a cut for a couple of months, get your body fat down to where you are more comfortable, where you want it to be. And then after we're happy with our results from the cut, then we can go into more of a performance based mode because that way we're able to give you the fuel that you need that we really just can't do in order to achieve a fat loss goal because you really can't out exercise surplus. People have tried this for years, right? We see. Like, oh, well, if I have a piece of pizza, then I need to get on the treadmill for. 1s 30 minutes or whatever, it's just a terrible tactic that will leave you spinning your wheels. So we really want to focus on the calorie deficit that's necessary for fat loss during that cut phase and then transition to more of that performance based goal and up calories up carbs in a way that you can really crush it with your running goals. Okay? So if you're running on the other end of the spectrum and you hate it, but you just think that you need to do it because in your mind weight loss and running are connected, you can stop. There is nothing magical about running for weight loss like I said, and using other modalities of movement or fat loss strategy will likely be more enjoyable for you if you're not a big fan of running and probably work a lot better. So let's talk about what that could look like. So one thing that I always recommend for fat loss is increasing your steps in a non intense way. So increasing your meat. So that stands for your non exercise activity. Thermogenesis I am such a nerd about meat. I love it. I want to preach it from the mountaintops because it's such an underutilized tactic that doesn't add stress, it doesn't add inflammation, it doesn't increase your hunger, and it doesn't even feel like exercise. So it's like a massive win in every possible way. So if we can get in the habit of increasing our need just through non exercise movement, playing outdoor sports, going for walks, going for hikes, skiing, doing these things that are just fun but you're moving your body and increasing your total daily energy expenditure, that is one of the best things that you can do for fat loss. So having something where you can kind of keep track of your movement, your steps, is really helpful here because it's hard to really know where you're at unless you have some way to measure it. So increasing your steps, increasing your total daily energy expenditure without making yourself crazy hungry and working up an appetite with feeling like you have to do all this extra intense exercise and running and then using strength training as your main modality of exercise to really focus on shaping your body in that way. Again, I feel like there's such an emphasis on exercise for body composition results. And it's going to be really hard to lose fat purely from exercise. We really need to focus on manipulating our nutrition for that. So you should think about using exercise to shape your body through the weightlifting, putting on lean mass, which is your metabolic tissue. It's going to do you so any favors lifelong. So really focusing on strength training and then adding in some non exercise activity and then maybe a little bit of aerobic work, especially if you are a hiker or you just enjoy it, right? Like I like to go for a few runs or a few hikes a week, but that's not my main modality of exercise. And I'm not trying to elicit a fat loss response from it because I know that's just not how it works necessarily. So all of that being said, you don't need to run to lose fat. There are other strategies that will really work better. A lot of people have reported training for half marathons or training for races are starting to run and actually either maintaining weight or gaining weight because you are going to increase your hunger. You're going to really need to up your calories and up your carbs. And you just can't fight your body on this. You can't fight your physiology. It will win. So, trying to look at other more effective strategies for fat loss, such as. Focusing on manipulating calories, not over exercising, and creating a higher hunger signal to your brain, increasing your total daily energy expenditure in a non intense manner, and strength training. Those are some of the best things that you can do for successful long term fat loss. So I hope that this has been a little bit insightful that there's nothing wrong with running. I'm not a running hater. I really enjoy it. But I also know that if I am trying to do a sort of cut or lose fat in a certain season, that I'm not going to just immediately start trying to run like five days a week and expect that that is the secret sauce. So it's important to know that running and fat loss are not necessarily linked. It can be a tool that you can use for building your aerobic base, for enjoyment, for fun performance goals, increasing your movement, but you can necessarily start running and just expect that you're going to have a fat loss response. Okay? So I hope that this has been helpful. If you are looking to lose fat right now, our team for Fit for Hiking has an offer that is really high touch. It's a one on one coaching. It's called the Mountain Metabolic Method, and we work with about 45 to 50 women at a time. We have multiple coaches with different expertise, and we address everything from performance, fat loss, body recomposition, corrective exercise, hormonal imbalances, gut health, all of these different things at a high level with a team of experts. So if you are like, okay, I know I need to lose fat, but I'm just feeling stuck, I'm feeling overwhelmed. I don't know how to do this strategically or do it the best way to really move the needle and make progress and actually keep the progress. Then definitely shoot me a message. You can find me on Instagram at ponytail underscore on a trail. That's ponytail underscore on a trail. Send me a message and let me know where you're at and I will point you in the right direction to just get on a discovery call, chat with our team, and see if it sounds like a good fit for you. Okay? We have got you covered in that category, so I hope that this has been a helpful episode and I will see you in the next one. Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Fit for Hiking podcast. As always, I hope it leaves you feeling inspired and informed on how to take your health and adventure into your own hands. For more content like this, be sure to follow along with my daily posts at ponytail underscore on Trail. That's ponytail underscore on a trail. You can also stay up to date on my new episodes being released at fit Underscore for Hiking and find more free resources@ponytailonatrail.com. Happy and healthy trails.