A glistening six-pack. A tantalising vee. Sculpted shoulderblades. We could go on, but in this physique obsessed world, we hardly need to. We all know the score: fitness is a goal to either maintain or covet.
But is counting calories the way to go about it?
Even if you have a top of the range fitness tracker, if you’re only using it to watch your kilojoules combust; you won’t be maximising your workouts.
That’s according to Sydney-based personal trainer Liam Chenery.
Looking through the Instagram photos of the Bondi Fitness First trainer, we’re inclined to believe him. So, what’s his secret? According to Liam, the key to supersizing your shred is tracking your steps instead of counting your calories.
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While everyone from The Economist to The New York Times has reported that calorie counting is a nutritionally-flawed concept, Liam goes a step further and tells us that it can hurt your fitness too.
“Forget calories burnt, I use fitness trackers to track steps,” Liam says, explaining calorie counting doesn’t take into account “things such as adaptation…or the body adapting to stimulus.”
How does this work? Liam explains it like this: “You could go for a run and your activity tracker [sic] says you burnt 100 calories during that run. Yet; do that exact same run twice a week for 12 weeks and you will become a lot more efficient at running and be burning fewer calories – however, your activity tracker may still read the 100 calories burnt (when it could now only be 75 calories).”
“So it can give a false reading and not be consistent with the correct information.”
“This is why I focus on steps,” Liam adds, “as it is consistent, and you can manipulate it during a fat loss phase. For instance, “If you do 10,000 steps per day, after 12 weeks, if your activity tracker reads 10,000 – you know you should have done that amount of steps or similar movement to the first week,” he tells us.
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The takeaway? If you are improving at whatever activity you are tracking (and you really should be); make sure to focus the tracker in the direction of steps, not calories, and the results will run for themselves.