Fitness ‘Tracking’ and NEATUP247

What gets measured gets improved.

This is not about food or drink. This is about movement. So if we revisit the bank-account analogy, ‘earning less’ would be focused on changing the number of calories we consume. When we talk about ‘spending more’ we should not just be looking at training – this is a fundamental error that many people, including myself, have made over the years. I used to believe that the majority of my calories were burned while I was training in the gym, and that if I missed a session, the day was ruined and there wasn’t even much point in trying to eat well.

What if I told you that maybe not even 10 per cent of the calories you burn today will be burned while training?

Would you believe me? Imagine a tower block with ten floors, where the entire building is going to represent the number of calories you expend in a day. Everyone burns a different amount of calories, depending on several factors, including weight, age and height and then how active they are.

Acronyms used to turn me off any subject. As someone who struggled in school, my brain switches off when I see them. BMR, TDEE, NEAT, TEF … usually, my brain would make up the acronym NOPE (yes, I know it’s not an acronym).

But I need you to learn this. Not for my benefit, but yours. If you understand this, then, quite simply, your quality of life when dieting and training will improve. You will learn to move more and feel less guilty, and that’s a recipe for a better life if ever I have heard one. Not just that, but again, getting your friends, family and loved ones to increase their NEAT (NEATUP247), as I’ll explain in a second, can have profound impact on not just fat loss itself, but sustaining it too.

BMR

Seven of the ten floors are going to represent the number of calories you burn doing … nothing. Yeah, that’s right. Known in the fitness world as BMR, which stands for basal metabolic rate, this is the number of calories you burn at rest. Seventy per cent of your calories burned today are burned without even moving.

Now, the last thing I want you to do is to suddenly think you don’t need to get out of bed to get in shape or lose fat. I just want to make clear to you that missing a day at the gym is okay from time to time. I need to be real with you, and sometimes your kids, family or even friends will need you more than you need the gym.

Knowing that the majority of your calories burned each day occur outside the gym can liberate you to no longer feel guilt or a sense of failure when you opt to pass on it one day. Knowing what I’m about to teach you means that you could shave 10 per cent off your calories for that day and go to bed knowing you’re still on track for success, rather than skipping the gym and heading down a spiral of a ‘fuck it’ mentality, eating everything in sight.

EAT

So just short of one floor of the ten-storey building (or 10 per cent of your daily calories) would represent calories burned through exercise, or exercise activity thermogenesis – EAT. This can, of course, differ between different types of training, effort and time spent, but typically, from what I’ve seen over the years on the gym floor, I’d say expending 10 per cent of your daily calories is the average. There are always the extremes of someone who has a photoshoot or a holiday spending 120 minutes on a cross trainer, burning 20 per cent of their daily calories and, on the flip side, Dave has just come in off the building site to do eight sets of bicep curls before hitting the pub, and may be lucky to expend 5 per cent of his daily calories – and that’s before whatever he has at the pub. For every person over this amount, there will be someone coming in under it. Whether it be CrossFit, resistance training or a spin class, we consider all of these methods as ‘EAT’ – planned training; if it’s in your agenda, it’s in the EAT component (not the NEAT).

I’ve seen many clients over the years assume they’re burning 500kcals in a session; truth be told it’s more like 200kcals in the normal person who trains hard for an hour and burns 2,000kcals a day.

It’s important to note the relative insignificance of EAT in the context of a day and, by extension, across a period of a week. The average ‘fit’ person trains only around four times a week, so it is crucial to focus on your NEAT every day (see below). I am not against training whatsoever, simply a pragmatist at heart.

TEF

Next up, we have (give or take) an entire floor allocated to the thermic effect of food – TEF. The TEF is the amount of energy expenditure above the basal metabolic rate due to the cost of processing food for use and storage. The thermic effect varies substantially for different food components. For example, dietary fat is very easy to process and has very little thermic effect, while protein is harder to process and has a much larger thermic effect.

This is another reason why ‘high-protein’ diets are advocated in periods of calorie restriction – its high thermic requirement during digestion. Around 30 per cent of the calories consumed in protein are lost/broken down purely in digesting it.

I’ve seen a meme that says, ‘Studies show replacing carbs with protein but keeping calories the same results in fat loss – where is your calorie God now?’ This shows a direct lack of knowledge surrounding the thermic effect of protein in the body and the positive effects it can have on fat loss.

NEAT

I’m about to change your life by explaining to you the NEAT component. Non-exercise activity thermogenesis – NEAT – accounts for calories burned outside of ‘formal’ exercise, such as standing, walking, climbing the stairs or even fidgeting.

Highly active people can expend up to three times more energy in a day than sedentary people. Although many people if asked would blame the obesity epidemic on sugar or carbs, I think it’s important to note that the average person’s NEAT has decreased substantially due to increases in motorized transport, sedentary jobs and labour-saving devices. Even an electric screwdriver saves your arm from burning calories when putting together your IKEA flatpack.

Ben Carpenter, a peer and good friend of mine, brought to light several studies on social media about NEAT and concluded:

When someone wants to lose weight, their initial instinct may be to go to the gym, which is great. However, maintaining an active lifestyle can burn a significantly higher number of calories than your average gym workout.

This has also helped demonstrate why some people gain less weight than others when overeating; they find themselves moving more when calories are increased whereas other people don’t.

So, increasing your NEAT is free, simple to implement, has a low injury risk (compared to someone sedentary taking up running, perhaps) and can contribute a lot more to total calories burned than a gym workout performed a few times per week.

To be clear, I am not attempting to make a case against going to the gym, or implying that training is unnecessary. But I want to make you aware that movement outside of the gym needs just as much, if not more, consideration.

NEAT habits to have

Forming successful habits is crucial to hitting goals, and I’ll expand on this throughout the book. Setting a step target or taking the stairs a certain number of times a day can have huge, influential impacts, not only on the amount of calories expended, but also as they positively begin to alter your attitudes and improve other areas of your life.

When I was personal training in Sydney we were two floors below the ground and the changing room was three floors below. I remember one day thinking to myself, How can I take myself seriously as a personal trainer if I take the elevator in the gym? From that day onwards, I never took the elevator and always took the stairs. It was a simple habit that I knew would have a profound impact on who I was each day.

To me, not committing to this habit could also have had a knock-on effect on other areas of my life: if I can’t be arsed to take the stairs, can I be arsed to check my emails? From the second I implemented this I felt like more of an active person. Even if I was in the middle of a conversation with someone, I’d just say, ‘Meet you at the top,’ and, in most cases, I’d beat them up there, taking two stairs at a time.

From a fat-loss perspective, let’s say I burned 5 calories on every stair run. I did that five to ten times a day, that’s an average of 7.5 journeys. That’s 37.5 calories a day, 262 a week and 1,000 a month. That’s 3.4lb (1.5kg) of fat (hypothetically, each year) – and all because I decided to use my legs instead of standing still and checking Instagram amidst the awkward silence in a gym elevator.

Small habits like this make a profound difference to our identities. I make my bed every morning. And I make it well. I’m not even in the shower yet and I have a 100 per cent score streak on things I want to accomplish for the day. Should I leave the house with it unmade after I shower, I am only one out of two and have already ruined the chances of hitting a 100 per cent streak. The bonus is that if I hit a 100 per cent streak on all my daily habits, I get into a perfectly made bed every night.

Habits you can implement to increase your NEAT include:

NEAT habits have substantial positive effects not only on fat loss, but on sustaining it too. Not only that, but it’s so much easier to park in the empty part of the car park!

Over the years, I have honed a set of habits for myself. I can always trial new habits and ditch old ones, and the actual habit is not as important as the outcome and impact of it. Setting a reminder on my phone to supplement creatine has had a positive impact on my training performance, so the reminder remains. Setting myself a bedtime alarm to know to go to sleep has increased the quality of duration of my sleep. My current daily habits include:

With all of these done, I can go into the next day able to do the same. It’s not so much about each singular occurrence of the habit, but the compound interest accruing on their being repeated. Micro habits may not do anything for you today, but doing them every day, for years, can have huge and profound effects on your life.

Upskilling

I wanted to include upskilling within this section because it is a powerful habit.

A habit I have started recently is that whenever I’ve ordered food while I’m working on my laptop – whether it be breakfast or lunch – I think about the last tricky situation I got in while training in Brazilian jiu jitsu. I sit and think about where I struggled in a certain position sparring. I find a tutorial from a black belt where they explain that situation and the solution. I can’t use my laptop as I eat, so I give myself ten minutes to watch, listen and learn. By the time I put my knife and fork together and push my plate to the side, I have learned something in what could otherwise be considered ‘dead time’.

Sounds like a little bit of a loser thing to be watching YouTube instructionals when I should be enjoying my food, but it’s a habit that’s compounded over time to make me a better athlete. One day, it could be the exact concept I learned over my poached eggs, avo and sourdough that makes the difference between winning and losing a competition. Not only that, but think of the interest that would accrue over the years.

I have a saying, #alwaysbeawhitebelt. If you think you know everything, you know nothing. It’s important to upskill, and although you may not be interested in how to get yourself out of a tricky jiu jitsu position, deciding to upskill your own expertise – for example, in a JSA module on how to barbell hip thrust or even an online tutorial about the anatomy of the hamstrings – might deliver a small amount of information at first, but the cumulative effect of upskilling over time could have a huge impact on your overall knowledge.

Tracking NEAT with fitness trackers

So where do ‘fitness trackers’ come into play? Nowadays, our smartphones, smartwatches or fitness trackers can tell us how many calories we’re burning and how many steps we are doing each hour of each day. Personally, I don’t advocate calorie tracking on these devices, as I feel there are too many influential factors for an accurate calorie burn to be recorded.

However, having something to make you aware of how much you’re simply moving has a huge effect on fat loss in the long term. On days that we’re incredibly active, we know about it; on days we’re not, sometimes we don’t even realize – and that is where activity trackers have their place.

Hypothetically: Sandra comes into the gym with her friend Sally and they both want to lose fat, so they begin a sensible resistance-training regime. They’re the same height, weight, age and have the same job. Their calories, protein targets and training regimes are identical. They train together three times a week.

Sandra has a fitness tracker. Sally does not. Sandra notices a slight decline in her step count since adhering to the calories I’ve set her.*

Sandra, upon noticing the slight decline, opts to take the stairs at work, even when her co-workers are taking the elevator. She decides to take her dog for another walk each day, as she wants to keep her activity up to the level it was before meeting me.

Sally sticks to her calories, does her training and hits her protein target. Sally isn’t really aware of NEAT and its impact on fat loss, so only really does what I’ve instructed her to.

Sandra will, for certain, see superior fat loss results to Sally because of this. NEAT is a crucial yet not widely spoken about element of daily expenditure and needs to be taken into account, not only by coaches, but by those being coached themselves.

During periods of calorie restriction, you may find yourself parking that little bit closer to the shops or less inclined to move so much. I certainly notice myself sitting at any given opportunity when I’m cutting calories. Being mindful of these habits and changes can help us prevent them from getting in the way of progress.

#NEATUP247

A special mention to Diren Kartal, one of my best friends and former JSA head coach, who has made famous the hashtag #NEATUP247 – his idea being for everyone to ‘get their NEAT up 24/7’. This is a focus on people striving at every opportunity to increase their non-exercise expenditure, whether this is walking their kids to school, walking up escalators, taking the stairs or even the long route when going somewhere on foot. It’s all about keeping your NEAT UP 24/7 – #NEATUP247.

I’ve already seen this change people’s perceptions of their surroundings. Even at airports, where you have the moving walkways, I know people who now opt to walk to the side of them and shout ‘#neatup247’ to their friends, like: ‘C’mon, mate, don’t miss out on an opportunity to get your neat up.’

I’ve been tagged on Instagram stories of people who say to their kids: ‘What do we do here?’ The kids run up the stairs shouting ‘#neatup247’ to their parents. Non-exercise activity thermogenesis in a bid to promote subconscious energy expenditure is not the sexiest of subjects, but Diren† has not only got a substantial number of people moving, he has inspired them to encourage their family and friends too.

It’s a positive movement and I hope one day we will have abolished the notion of being allowed to stand still on an escalator, if we are able to walk. There are thousands of people who would do anything possible for a set of working legs, so please don’t take yours for granted: take the stairs, get your neat up and do it 24/7. After reading this chapter you’ll have no excuse to neglect your NEAT.

The tool belt – your ‘secret’ weapon

I often imagine a tool belt that we all have and wear each day, containing the tools we need to improve our overall lifestyle and aid us in reaching our goals. That might be, for example, increasing our NEAT one day to make up for a big hit of calories the day before, or some ‘cardio’ (which is EAT) because we’re planning a big meal at the weekend and want to be able to eat that pizza.

I feel it’s important to see these methods of burning calories, or reducing them in this way, at our disposal as our prerogative to use. Once we have the education to inform our decisions, we can choose and implement any tool whenever we like, or even opt not to use them at all. For example, having a step goal via a fitness tracker, albeit a non-essential addition to any person’s routine, is a smart addition to someone’s tool belt.

We can’t wake up tomorrow and have much of an influence on the calories burned in our BMR, nor can we do much to affect the calorie content of our favourite foods, but what we can do is consciously increase both NEAT and EAT through attempting to move as much as we can when not doing planned exercise. Then, on the other hand, it’s important we continue to make the most of our training and strive for a concept known as ‘progressive overload’.

Progressive overload is where you seek and strive to make quantifiable improvements session on session, whether it’s increases in weight or other metrics. I’ll explain this in more detail later in the book.

Other tools that we can use include food trackers such as MyFitnessPal, sleep-monitoring apps to quantify the duration of our sleep and even provide an estimate of its quality too. We can also work on conscious habits like parking further away from the shops or choosing to get off the bus or the train one or two stops early. None of these things has to be used; they’re just there for when we need them. And it’s always our prerogative to discontinue using them when we don’t need them.

So always keep in mind your tool belt. A bit like a handyman who has at his disposal a tape measure, a hammer and a pen for when he needs one, you’ll have your own tools, such as increasing your NEAT and tracking it on your Fitbit or iPhone, tracking your food on MyFitnessPal, doing an extra session in the gym, restricting calories for a short period of time to make up for a big social occasion …

You may find some tools more effective than others, but no two people losing fat are exactly the same. What you respond to best is for you to find out on what will be a journey of self-discovery. It sounds a bit hippyish, but there are a lot of things you don’t know about yourself yet, and I want to help you find what you need, so I can come on that journey with you – not physically, but I’ll be there in spirit, I am sure.

* One of the many adaptations to caloric restriction is subconsciously moving less; the further you diet someone, the less movement occurs. I’ve seen people who get very lean reduce the amount of gestures and fidgeting, and some even have noticed on camera that they blink less and slower. This isn’t to do with our mindset or determination; it is usually out of our control, similar to an adaptation where we burn fewer calories, so therefore we produce less heat in a bid to conserve that energy, and many of my female clientele have noted ‘feeling the cold more’ during periods of caloric restriction – this makes total sense, as they have fewer resources to produce energy and keep themselves warm.

† By the way, it’s pronounced Deer-en, like Kieran with a D.