Step your way to fitness

A member of our Freestyle Step Enthusiasts group prompted me to this article (Thanks Yolanda!)

Gym-goers looking for the best workout should consider dusting off their leg-warmers, according to new research from Charles Sturt University (CSU).

Just 262 kilometers from Sydney, you can find the city of Orange, and just on its outskirts is the Charles Sturt University (CSU). In the School of Bio-metrical Sciences at CSU, we find Dr James Wickham an Anatomy and physiology lecturer. Dr James Wickham has finished the first study of energy expenditure and how muscles activate in group fitness classes. The findings are interesting, to freestyle steppers, to say the least.

In 2012, the Fitness Australia Industry Report stated that more than four million Australians partake in regular exercise such as aerobics, fitness or gym workouts. This means that after walking, group workout is the next most popular physical exercise activity.

Really, all this fame was expected to brings about $1.2 billion in revenue in 2013. An even with all these money, these gym-attendees have little or no assistance in finding out which class would be more effective for their spent dollar..

This is where Dr Wickham comes in. His study looked at how much muscle activity, heart-rate, and how many calories were used compared between 10 volunteers. Each volunteer took a Step, Ride or Power (aerobic weights) class.

Dr James Wickham said, “We used an ‘Actiheart’ monitor and 16 wireless surface EMG electrodes which are attached to the skin with double-sided tape and each relaying 2 000 measurements per second, for a total of about six million measurements per class,”.

“Our goal was to determine which group fitness class burned the most calories, which generated the highest heart rates, and also to determine the muscle activation levels for core, upper limb, and lower limb muscles.” he said

In brief, Dr Wickham study identified that taking a Step Class burnt noticibly more calories overall than the the other two compared class types, Ride and Power class.

If you are looking for results, Dr Wickham advises “If your goal was to burn calories and to lose weight you may want to consider a Step class as it burned the most absolute calories of the three classes. But on a calories per minute basis, there was no difference between the Ride and Step classes,” he said.

“Average heart rates for the Step and Ride class were also very close, while the calories burned and heart rates for the Power class were significantly lower.”

People can now make more informed choices, Dr Wickham said. The research, which for the first time quantifies the muscle activity and the intensity of these classes, will allow people to make more educated choices about which class is right for their personal fitness goals.

“Higher levels of intensity were recorded during Step and Ride classes which would lead to higher levels of aerobic fitness than if you just relied on the Power class as a workout,” he said.

“The Power class was the most effective in eliciting upper limb muscle activation, particularly for the biceps, deltoid, forearm muscles, and trapezius and, of the three classes, either Step or Power should be selected for core muscle activation.”

O'Brien, Mark (December 2, 2013) "Step your way to fitness", Charles Sturt University (CSU), retrieved from http://news.csu.edu.au/director/latestnews.cfm?itemID=9D40E41EEA017E73C0FB87DB50E7D648