What were the results for obese employees (compared to those who are not obese) as published in the Journal of Internal Medicine?

• Obese employees filed twice the number of workers’ compensation claims
• Obese employees’ medical costs from those claims were seven times higher
• Obese employees stayed out of work 13 times longer after a work-related injury or illness
• Obese employees medical claims cost per 100 employees per year was 51,019 USD compared to $7,503 USD for non-obese workers
• Obese employees lost 183 days of work per 100 employees as compared to 14 days for non-obese workers (thats 13 times more!)

Yeah but those guys were OBESE. Well it doesn’t look good for the overweight/mildly obese either…

• Overweight employees took four times the number of days off after being injured or getting sick at work.
• Mildly obese employees took five times as many days off after being injured or getting sick at work.

And what are employers doing? The study reveals that…

• “As many as 40 percent of employers are giving workers products, cash or health insurance discounts to lose weight,” said Laura Linnan, the study’s principal investigator and a professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Public Health.
• Employers are getting scared off as well. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, assistant professor of medicine and health economist at Stanford University co-authored a 2005 study that showed employers compensate for anticipated higher medical costs of obese workers by paying them less than slimmer employees and passing them over for promotions.

What are we gathering from this?

Being fat is bad for employees (that’s most of us) because it costs us in terms of career advancement and money, and its bad for employers because its affecting their profit margins when they pay for all these health costs.

Simple problem yes, simple to fix, not quite. We need to approach this troubling issue with a corporate fitness solution from both ends. The employer as well as the employee.

3 things that employers must do:

Adopt a fitness culture starting from the CEO knowing that it is best for the company

“We all know obesity is bad for the individual, but it isn’t solely a personal medical problem — it spills over into the workplace and has concrete economic costs,”

Dr. Truls Ostbye -author and professor of community and family medicine

Well, if its not a personal or private medical problem then it becomes a community problem. That means the problem is larger, but the solution is also more permanent. Community solutions just work better. They work for gang violence and for addiction to vices. From my experiences as a fitness professional, community solutions work for health goals as well. Kickboxing, pilates, yoga, aerobics and other fitness classes or group activities have a higher penetration rate (about 12-15% in most health clubs) than personal training (2-3%). I believe that people stay on longer in group classes as well.

A community solution to corporate fitness has to be built into the company culture. Usually this is dictated by a CEO or a board of directors. If they are reading this article they are probably aware of the health challenges facing companies in this day and age. They are also probably aware that companies which have an adaptive culture that is able to handle changing circumstances tend to do really really well. 2-3 times as well profit-wise according to some studies. In addition, setting a fitness culture shows concern for employees (and allows them to be more productive) and in the long run costs less than paying for medical bills. As a minor side note, your employees will look healthy too and that in itself has its own host of benefits.

Once the CEO has decided that a fitness culture is needed and is in fact the course that the company needs to take, he can implement it in the same way he makes most culture changes

Align your company culture with your strategic goals (being fit saves money, makes your employees more productive and more attractive to customers, and increases profit)

Develop a specific action plan that can leverage the good things in your current culture and correct the unaligned areas. (free employee breakfasts on Fridays may be good, but making it doughnuts and pancakes is BAD.

Brainstorm improvements in your formal policies and daily practices. (allocate some work time to fitness and health education and activities, ensure managers lead by example, bringing healthy food into the cafeteria, allow 15 min breaks during work for healthy snacks)

Develop models of the desired actions and behaviors. (how many hours a week minimum that an employee must exercise, social support and encouragement to make healthy eating not just acceptable but preferable, all management staff must enthusiastically take part)

Communicate the new corporate fitness culture to all employees (tell everybody about it)

Over-communicate the new corporate fitness culture and its actions to everyone. (tell everybody about it again and again, with checks to ensure that the new culture is followed)

Remember, often people don’t do what you EXPECT. They do what you INSPECT.

Hire a Fitness Professional

This one may seem a like a bit of a sales pitch, me being a fitness professional and all… but bear with me. A respected fitness professional is a real asset to a corporation. Think about it. Companies get accounting firms to do their accounts and taxes, they get law firms to do their legal documents, and they get business consultants to check their business processes. So is it a big stretch to think that they should get a fitness professional to take care of company health and fitness.

Not at all. The best fitness pros will know how to approach corporate fitness. They will be able to advise on the set up of health facilities, run fitness classes, be good public speakers on more general topics like nutrition, and be able to give individual training programs for more difficult cases of extreme obesity or employees with past injuries and medical conditions.

Only accept success

No CEO would accept sub-standard work by an employee, neither would they accept failure on important projects, they wouldn’t accept a lack of integrity with regard to finance either. Shouldn’t this be the case with the company fitness program?

Like I mentioned in point 1, this new program has to be enforced. It’s a kind of “tough love” that needs to happen. Hey Mr. CEO…take attendance at fitness classes, walk around the cafeteria at lunch to see what people are eating, do your managers speak as positively and motivationally about the fitness program as they do about meeting project deadlines?

3 Things that an employee must do:

Accept culture change without taking it personally

This is not about discrimination. This is about a true win-win situation. Companies show concern for an employee and treat him or her as a person. A person who is an integrated being, emotionally, socially and physically as opposed to a brain connected to a computer, churning out stuff that profits the company but stuck on a useless body.

This new corporate fitness culture is great news. Yes, no more cheesecakes and ice cream for lunch (oh… gasp… my boss is infringing on my freedom of choice…) but you shouldn’t be eating those anyway! Your choices stink, that’s why you are 40 pounds overweight. That has to stop.

So where’s the great news? You are being put in a position to succeed. To gain back your health, to improve your quality of life, and to improve the quality of your future. All on the company’s budget. Your “no cheesecake” boss is building a culture where people are supportive of each other’s health and fitness goals. No judgmental or condescending remarks, no embarrassing behind the back talk about each other’s waistlines. The perfect environment for YOU.

They are even hiring a top class fitness professional to get you in shape…for free! Those guys aren’t cheap you know! As the Duke study also indicated, the most common injuries experienced by obese workers affected the lower extremities, wrists or hands, and backs. Most injuries were caused by falls and lifting. Have you ever had a back injury? Those make you walk and feel like you are an unhealthy 90 year old. Take the opportunity positively not personally. It’s a blessing.

Be willing to change lifestyle habits that used to be “private”

You could always break the rules. Sneak in a chocolate bar or a packet of potato chips and eat them in the toilet. There is a rebel in all of us right?…I’ll admit, It can be a tough pill to swallow to change something as personal as food choices, or spending time on exercise instead of some other form of recreation. But remember you still have choices. Lots of them. All that has been taken away are the choices that were bad in the first place. When you realize how absolutely great healthy food can taste, you will realize that you aren’t missing anything. And check out that wonderful new figure you have.

“There is nothing that tastes as good as a fit attractive body looks”

If that fitness professional is doing his or her job and you are following his or her advice, it will only take about 8-12 weeks to realize that the saying is true.

Enjoy the fitness community

When I run group classes, the participants go through some pretty tough training. But they form awesome bonds and all of them become great friends. I have seen this happen with every body from kids to adults, from overweight clients to national level athletes. Suffering together tends to form strong friendships. Even in my personal experience from my time in the military, I know there are guys who I can trust with my life because we had some pretty tough missions and spent some pretty cold nights out in the field together.

Same thing in the corporate fitness situation. If your fitness professional knows about fat loss, those fat loss workouts are going to be challenging (he/she should structure training so that each person is challenged) no matter if you are the fittest person in the company or one who hasn’t done any exercise for the past 5 years. Some of those workouts can be downright brutal. Soak it in. Relish it. Make friends over it. Maybe you will find work even more pleasant with all those comrades you know from yesterday’s 10 sets of burpees and chin ups.

There are only good things that can come out of a corporation that has a fitness focus. Corporate fitness has come a long way. I do know of companies that have gyms and health facilities for their staff. But as usual we need to look for the person before we provide the place and the program. In this case there are 2 people. The fearless CEO with a vision and the fitness professional who can deliver the results.

Contact Us to see how we can meet your organization’s health and fitness needs.

Every athlete, bootcamp fitness client, or personal training client, for just about any goal, can do with more strength. This applies for both men and women.

When you are strong, you can work with more “density” i.e. more weight lifted per unit of time. That means more muscle and better ability to lose fat.

When you are strong, you can produce more total force, which when applied with the correct speed and skill, produce great athletic performance.

There is no point in doing plyometrics and “speed” training if all you are doing is learning to use a puny amount of strength quickly. This is a common mistake among many athletes that I see. They can’t even squat light weights without good form, and yet they ask me what advanced polymeric drills they should be doing.

My answer: Squatting and other kinds of heavy lifting.

Recently I experienced this myself. I have always liked basketball and have always wanted to dunk a ball. But alas, genetics decided that I would only grow to 5’8″ (173cm). Not quite Jordanesque stature… but what the heck, that’s not going to stop me from trying.

I have been able to dunk small balls like tennis balls and softballs for a few years now.

But by recently building up my maximal strength in the squat and dead-lift exercises, my jumping has improved. Vertical leap has gone up over the last 2 years from 31 inches to 35.

I managed to cleanly dunk a soccer ball. No problem at all. And the ease of the dunk surprised even myself as well. The only reason I can’t dunk a basketball now is my smallish hands that can’t grip it cleanly ugh another limitation.

Weight loss and fat loss is a MULTI-BILLION dollar industry. In the United States alone, this industry is estimated to be worth over 100 Billion US dollars in the year 2007. That is one country, in one year!

The truth is, the weight loss and fat loss market is so incredibly huge, that it is possible to be profitable by simply selling a scam and leaving a customer or client disappointed, upset, frustrated and worst of all… too scared to try again. Thus damning them to a life of poor health and low quality.

So what is it about fat loss vs weight loss? If you search for either of these terms in an online search engine, you will get millions of hits. Many from the same websites. It may seem slightly obvious to some, but fat loss and weight loss are not the same.

I say that I can help a person “lose weight” simply because weight loss is what most people commonly ask for and it is a term they easily understand. But as soon as I get the chance, I educate them that FAT LOSS is the key issue not weight loss. Once you start reading the articles on this site, it will become very clear that I don’t actually care about weight loss. Why is this so?

Fat Loss vs Weight Loss: Round 1

Weight loss simply means “being lighter on the weighing scale” (scale weight). While it’s true that overweight people do tend to carry a lot of fat, we cannot just consider “scale weight” when we set goals for ourselves. I don’t care that much about my client’s scale weight. I couldn’t care less if they lost 30 pounds. 20 or 40 or even NONE would have been fine as well. Why is that? The simplest way I explain it to people is as follows:

You see, most of us want to look good and perform well, whether in daily tasks, or as an athlete who needs to control their own body to play a sport well. In general, this means having more muscles and less fat.

• Fat doesn’t help us at all in most sports, (except sumo!) muscles do. In fact fat within our muscles slows down their contraction, reducing your speed and strength.
• Fat doesn’t look good on our hips, thighs or tummies, muscles do. Even our female clients don’t complain that their tummies, arms or butt are “too firm”.

Fat Loss vs Weight Loss: Round 2

In general almost all of us need to gain some muscle and lose some fat to get to our fitness goals. Here is where scale weight comes in. Muscles have a large amount of water in them. Fats well… they are fats. Have you ever seen oil (fats) and water (muscles) in the same glass? Which one floats? Yup it’s the oil. Oil is less dense that water. It takes up more space. Fat is about 20% less dense than muscle (0.9g/ml vs 1.1g/ml) if you want to be calculative about it.

Fat Loss vs Weight Loss: Round 3

In practice all this means that if you are following a good exercise and diet plan, you can gain muscles and lose fat at the same time. The increased muscles will offset the “weight loss” from the reduced fat resulting in a “disappointing” change in scale weight. This can be discouraging but in reality it’s great news!

So if scale weight doesn’t matter, what then should we look for to check our progress? I look for 2 things.

• Appearance: This can be easily seen: “hey my arms don’t jiggle when I wave at my friends”. Easily touched: “wow my stomach feels a lot firmer now”. And changes easily measured via fat measuring calipers. Seeing and touching is enough for most people to notice progress. Calipers just give a more consistent way to quantify it.

• Performance: Simply put, you can do more with respect to your bodyweight if you are not carrying a lot of fat around. A good example is the chin-up. The chin-up exercise is all about strength to weight ratio. Fat doesn’t help at all. If a person increases his/her ability to lift their bodyweight, we can be pretty sure that they have gained some muscle and probably lost some fat.

Fat Loss vs Weight Loss: Round 4

Society as a whole has to get off the “weight loss” bandwagon and onto the “fat loss” one. Eating disorders, fad diets and slimming centers focus on weight loss. But usually the quality of their nutrition is doubtful, and they don’t do ANY proper training so the majority of the weight loss is muscle. It’s even shown that when we go on a lousy weight loss plan, to body PREFERS to lose muscle weight rather than fat weight because its biologically efficient to do so.

It’s a never ending cycle:

• Client comes in–>
• Client uses scam product–>
• Client achieves weight loss (but this is actually muscle loss)–>
• Client’s reduced amount of muscle means lower calories burnt per day thus making fat gain easier–>
• Client goes back to his/her regular lifestyle but now that they use even less calories due to the muscle loss from the poor product–>
• Client gets fatter than ever–>
• Client goes back to the slimming center or fad diet–>
• Unscrupulous makers of bad products/services have a never ending supply of “satisfied” clients

Fat Loss VS Weight Loss: CLEAR WINNER! Fat loss is king.

So remember, if you are looking better and performing better, you are on the right track. I know weight loss can be highly emotional… if you are overly fat of coruse you wull lose some weight but it isn’t the top priority. Let the scale weight fall where it may, it really doesn’t matter because we are going for performance and appearance. So please tell all your friends that you are on one of my Singapore “fat loss” programs even though you searched for “weight loss” on Google!

I wanted to show that this can be done.

I tried several training methods. Doing chins with less and less fingers holding on the bar, doing them with one hand holding a towel/rope hanging from the bar to decrease its usage, doing slow lowering exercises.

All these helped but I had always been stuck at somewhere around 90 degree arm angle or a bit higher.

I believe that I had not put enough emphasis on just being plain STRONG. So I modified the training program and took out the fancy exercises.

I just did weighted chin-ups. Some days with weights i could do for 12 reps, others with weights I could do for 6 and others with weights I could do for 3.

By the end of the 8 week program I could do 12kg added weight for 12 reps, 32kg for 6 reps, 50kg for 3 reps and 70kg for a single (all this is of course in addition to my bodyweight of 80kg). Now I finally had the strength to do the task at hand.

Once again, just like I mention in my article on vertical leaping and dunking, don’t neglect maximal strength. Fancy exercises are nice, but when it comes to making the best use of your time, I would venture that 90% or more of athletes (healthy and ready ones!) need to focus on some kind of maximal strength training.

Come join my athletes training program to improve your strength today! Even the ladies practice weighted chin-ups (see the pic above).

P.S. Not everybody is genetically able to do a 1 hand chinup. Not being able to do so does not affect you as an athlete. And I do admit, 1 arm chinups are more for fun and a bit of showing off. The reason for this is the difference in the insertion points for the Biceps, Brachialis and Lats. If they insert at very disadvantaged positions it will be hard to perform one hand chinups even though you may be lean and strong. Don’t worry, you are not a bad person!

In fact I know of top level athletes who could do 60kg wide grip chinups for 3 reps at 75kg bodyweight. Who could not do a one arm chinup, not because of lack of strength or training, but because of lack of genetic luck.

This pathway is used during long distance activity. It uses fat for fuel (true) but latest research also indicates that it burns alot of amino acids as well – that means that your muscle get alot weaker!

Many personal trainers and fitness instructors use cardio as their main method of fat loss unfortunately cardio has so many negative side effects, that I almost never use it in my client’s programs – unless the person has a pre-existing heart condition and needs to build up his ability to do exercise.

Cardio exercise that wastes your precious time and makes you WORSE at losing unwanted weight, and burning unwanted fat can include jogging, swimming, eliptical trainers, cycling and stationary bikes.

Here are some reasons why cardio is a terrible form of exercise for most people.

• It uses amino acids from your muscles so it makes your muscles weaker and smaller physically
• It makes you slower - cardio exercise is long and slow, and when you train slow, your body becomes slow. This is the worst possible thing for athletic training especially.
• It makes you stressed – oxidative stress is like “rusting” in your body, and cardio is shown to raise the level of oxidative stress via cell and DNA damaging free radicals.
• It makes you stressed (part 2) – Adrenal stress and increased stress hormones. Because long slow activity is telling your body that it is under a stressful state like being lost in the jungle. This engourages your body to store fat “just in case” there isn’t enough food. That means more fat on you! Especially on your tummy – the stress hormone site.
• It makes your “too feminine” – Cardio not only increases stress hormones, but because the base hormone – pregnanalone is the same for male sex hormones and stress hormones, it reduces the raw material availible for male hormone formation. This means less ability for fat burning and muscle strengthening/repair/growth. This is bad for ladies too, because most women are already “overly” feminine due to our environment and pollution. Increasing their stress and decreasing their male hormones makes this even worse.
• It works backwards – The more cardio you do, the better you get at it, and the more efficient you get at it, and the LESS calories you burn while doing it. So the FATTER you become. I have a client who used to cycle 12km from home to work every morning and he got fatter and fatter! ….He wore a heart rate monitor and found that his heart rate while cycling kept dropping and dropping over time. He was getting more efficient – and thus using less and less energy, and thus getting fatter and fatter day by day. I’m glad that he stopped doing this after joining our fat burning personal training program! And then he finally started to get leaner.

The best way to burn body fat (assuming you are cleared by your heart doctor to exercise), is correct nutrition coaching, and correct strength training that you can find in my personal training for fat loss and fat burning fitness bootcamp programs.

End note: I am for cardio if a client is totally out of shape and I progressively help them get back to the ability to perform exercise. But once they are able to do so, cardio has almost no further benefit. I will admit however, that 20 mins of brisk walking with friends and family can be fun and relaxing and that is fine and its certainly better than watching TV. But if you are looking for an improvement in your fitness and a change in your appearance, then cardio is not the way to go in the long run.

• Great for building muscle, as well as restoring and maintaining muscles
• Has a satiating effect (makes you feel full for longer)
• Has a great thermic effect (takes a lot of energy to digest – 25% of its own calories)
• Helps to give healthy blood cells and enzymes
• Good for immune system
• Good for boosting detoxification (many forms of toxins require amino acids to be removed from your body)

Bad news:

• If you eat PROCESSED protein such as chicken nuggets, sausages and fish balls, these are NOT considered protein to me. They are junk, just like soft drinks and fried noodles. They are full of cancer causing preservatives and low quality animal parts.
• Unfortunately many “protein bashers” in the nutritionist and even medical community do not make the distinction between healthy and unhealthy sources of protein.They are NOT the same!
• I tell my nutrition coaching, weight loss and mass building clients doing personal training in Singapore that, there aren’t many bad things to say about this nutrient.

Good places to get it?:

• Fish – any kind is great, just make sure it’s cooked in a non deep fried manner
• Poultry – try to get it free range, all cuts are fine
• Meat – All animals are fine especially if wild and free range/grass fed
• Shellfish – all good, make sure its prepared hygienically but the only thing to be conscious of is where its from. Many shellfish have some heavy metal toxicity in them
• Diary – Cheese, eggs, are all fine. Try to get the cheese that hasn’t aged too much. Aged cheese gives more time for the air to oxidize the fat in the cheese which is not good for you.
• Legumes – beans

How much to eat?

I like to recommend up to 2g per lb of weight for best results. That ends up at about 1.5kg of uncooked meat for a larger sized man and about 600g of uncooked meat for a woman. Per day. It may seem like alot, but if this is high quality protein combined with good digestive and hormonal health (which we work on in all our fitness services), I have seem magnificent fat loss and muscle building results in my clients.

As a personal trainer in Singapore, I know that the typical asian diet is too low in protein. Here a good protein supplement, or to add protein like cooked chicken pieces to traditional dishes is a good idea.

Anything Else?

Protein is special because of its thermic effect. It is tough to digest so 25% of its own calories are used for its own digestion. This really adds up. Let’s say that our 80kg man eats 180g of protein a day. Since protein is 4 calories per gram that’s a total of 720 calories from protein. 25% of this is used up in digestion of protein that’s 180 calories burnt each day just as a result of how much work the body has to do in digestion of this nutrient alone!

Since his intake is about double the average person’s that means that he has an extra 90 calories burnt each day just because of his increased intake. That is equal to an extra 10 minutes of brisk swimming each day and will result in about 1kg extra of fat loss (all other things being equal) every 10-12 weeks. All this for “free” just because we have increased protein intake.

I tell my clients doing personal training in Singapore with me, that the guidelines for protein containing foods are that we should eat those that are as close to their natural form as possible.

They have the highest quality of nutrition so its more usable by our bodies, also they contain less preservatives and artificial ingredients. Chicken is better than chicken nuggets, and fresh fish is better than fish sticks.

Protein Myths

For clients doing personal training in Singapore or elsewhere, there is the general misconception that excess protein causes you to have serious health problems.

Well excess anything makes us fat. Protein “seems” even worse than that according to many old wives tales. If those tales were correct, excess protein would make our kidneys explode! But they don’t. In fact there are no studies that show that high protein diets affect kidney function. NONE. ZERO!

There are however studies that show that people who have EXISTING kidney problems should not take excess protein. This is like saying “you shouldn’t do sprints if you have a broken leg…” well of course! But that doesn’t mean that people who do sprints end up with broken legs.

In addition, remember that studies do NOT distingush between lousy meat like fish balls, and good meat like fresh, wild fish! There will be problems if you eat processed food no matter if its protein, carbs or fat. But there will not be problems if the food quality is natural and high.