Hey everyone, sorry about the lack of posts over the past few weeks. Spring break, and the preceding week have been pretty nuts (in a good way =D).
Anyways some of you may remember the previous post I made about "cardio". You can find it here.
Today I'm going to cover "cardio" again, but hopefully add some addtionall understanding to the mix.
So what IS "cardio"?
Technically, a slang term referring to
a. aerobics (steady state-low intensity exercise).
-Examples include group fitness classes such as kickboxing, "washboard" abs, body sculpting and things like jogging, slow swimming, etc.
or it can refer to
b. The state of your cardio-respiratory system, 99 times out of a 100 under the pretense that the training you have done, or "should" be doing, has had a direct central effect on your body, and that your heart + lungs are now stronger despite the lack of any substantial skeletal muscle growth.
What are some of the effects "cardio" has on the body?
Most people jogg or perform low intensity exercise beleiving that it will somehow strengthen their heart and lungs to higher level, some even train thinking they will get "super" or "ultra" fit, like a fellow instructor at the UCF gym whos training for a tri-athalon.
Fact- Low intensity exercise will only produce "benefits" to your heart in lungs, when compared to living a completely sedentary lifestyle. Benefits in "" because even that's a stretch.
The reality is low intensity exercise can and does have all kinds of negative effects on your body, even your heart.
Former running guru Jim Fixx, who died of a massive heart attack while jogging, is a good example.
I'm not going to get too scientific but the basic principle is that low intensity exercise creates a lot of free radicals in your blood stream, which your body responds to by creating more cholesterol to protect your heart and arteries. Hence Jim Fixx's arteries were 95%, 85%, and 50% clogged up.
Fact- Low intensity exercise generates a lot of wear and tear on your joints. Running is a horrible way to protect your body from arthritis and other bone/ligament problems, in fact if I wanted to rush myself into old age at this point, I would take up running again.
Can you think of a better way to destroy your knees than to continually use them through thousands of contractions a week under stress from your entire body? Better yet if you're like 99% of runners you are heel striking and sending shock straight to your knees and lower back, rather than landing on your forefoot so your muscles can better absorb the shock the way you were designed to.
Fact- "Cardio" burns fat, but not enough of it. Think about how hard our lives were for most of our evolutionary timeline, chasing down and fighting animals, foraging for berries and other plant foods, fighting off animals that tried to eat us...
Do you really think we would have survived this long, and became the dominant species on the planet, if we had burned massive amounts of energy off just gathering FOOD?
Fun fact- a pound of fat holds about 3500 calories. A 150 pound person, on average (walk run or jog) will burn about 100 calories per mile he/she travels.
That means that 150 pound person would have to run 35 MILES to burn off 1 pound of fat.
Fact- cardio stimulates hunger. Your body expects food after running around for 40 minutes, what the hell else would you be running around for anyways?
*Funny, the other day we had a meeting for all gym employees. A kickboxing instructor was talking within ear shot and I heard her say how she had eaten a peice of cheese cake the day before, after her kickboxing class. Assuming she worked hard, which most group ex instructors don't from my experience, she might have burned off 300 calories from the exercise itself during the 55 minute class.
That piece of cheese cake, even if it was small, was at least 300 calories. Probably a few hundred more.
So, she put her body through a lot of wear and tear, not to mention risk jumping around on a sweaty wood floor, only to eat back more calories than she burned, most of which being preservatives and sugar.
A few hundred calories of high fructose corn syrup (whacked out sugar) and salt, = to or greater than the calories she had just burned in class.
Doesn't "cardio" help you lose weight?
Yeah it sure does, but what I'm about to tell you is either going to shock you, or piss you off.
Cardio makes you fat.
There I said it!
Why you may ask?
Well cardio will help you lose "weight", I can attest to that, the problem is most of it will be muscle.
The more muscle you lose, the higher your body fat percentage will go, and eventually without muscle there on auto-pilot to eat away 50-100 extra calories a day (pound for pound), you WILL gain fat no matter how restrictive your diet is.
Ladies, pay close attention (guys dont skip this either). There's a mini-epidemic going around colleges around the US. I don't have a name for it, but I can describe it.
Girls leave high school in decent to good shape from sports or what have you. They get to college, drink, and gain a few pounds.
They gather into groups (or sometimes go solo) and hit the gym. Strength training has a masculine stigma to it, not to mention few girls were ever introduced to it in high school, so they start jogging, and using "cardio" machines like the stair master, the eliptical, the bike, treadmill etc.
Or better yet, they start taking group fitness classes that almost always endorse working as hard as you can and never resting (and therefore never allowing you to dig deeper into your muscle fibers).
The result?
Few girls lose weight. Those that do lose it due to their genetics that fell into their lap at birth. It has nothing to do with what they are doing so to speak.
80% of girls will not lose much weight, if any, and will quickly become discouraged and frustrated, leaving 3 options.
A.Do MORE, which doesnt work.
B. Quit, which just sucks.
C. Starve themselves (or begin sticking fingers down the back of their throats).
Those who choose option A will likely lose weight, but it will be muscle loss, and eventually (1 year or 10) it will bite them in the ass. As I said earlier, muscle burns 50-100 calories a day, all on it's own, pound for pound.
If you were to lose 5 pounds of muscle, which is pretty realistic if you are really "dedicated" to cardio, that would leave you burning anywhere from 250-500 calories less per DAY, not to mention the hunger generated by the exercise.
In a given month that could be up to 4 pounds of fat gain (3500 calories in a pound of fat, 500x7).
If this were to begin happening to someone who worked out a lot, their quick reaction would be to work out even more, therefore destroying even MORE muscle.
See where this is going?
Moving on to option B, if you stop working out all together, you aren't doing your body a favor. Sitting on your ass eating cheetos is not the route to a better body and lasting health.
I think the most common option is C, eat less and less. And here we have the root of the mini epidemic.
Girls do lots of "cardio", and don't eat a lot. They become thin, which for the most part (and to the uncaring drunk guy at a bar), is attractive by modern standards. However, they are still technically fat.
I've noticed this not long ago with a girl I was hooking up with. Thin, attractive, but something was off physically. I realized one day while we were fooling around that she didn't really have a lot of muscle, she was just thin. Her body fat was probably in the low 20's, if not even higher.
I can spot this when I'm out meeting women now to. Simple, but once you see it you can't ignore it.
As these women become older...well I'll leave you to draw your own conclusion. What do you think will happen?
...
Back to some facts before we summarize and wrap up this post.
Fact- Your cardio-respiratory system is strengthed by 1, and only 1 thing, muscle exertion. Using your muscles is the only way to make them stronger. Getting even more specific there are 2 ways to make your heart, lungs, and everything intertwined stronger.
1. Build muscle. Your heart and lungs will literally grow with your muscles (other organs do as well). They have to support them, so they grow. It's their job.
2. Train intensely- to some extent, your heart will strengthen when it is put through strenuous exercsise. Similar to your skeletal muscle, it responds to intensity, not long durations of steady state exercise (which can clog your arteries).
As stated previously, running around like a hamster on a wheel will only show "results" when compared to doing absolutely nothing.
But what about the Vo2 max test!?
Point blank period, it's muscle specific and it is not related to a central adaptation by your body. Doug McGuff MD talks about it here, and cites countless studies in his new book, Body by Science.
Well, it's among the ~30 pages of studies he has listed at the end of the book anyways.
So, in summary...
-"Cardio" is a slang, and somewhat vague term that's thrown around the fitness world
-"Cardio" is not neccessary for a great body, or good health. In fact it can have quite the opposite effect.
-"Cardio" does not burn nearly as many calories as most people think (FYI-cardio machines ask for your weight so they can calculate your resting metabolism, and therefore show you a higher number by displaying how many calories you would have burned just sitting in a chair + the exercise itself).
-Low intensity, steady state, long duration exercise destorys muscle, the most metoboically productive tissue in your body, burning pound for pound 50-100 calories a day, all on it's own (actually it's 35 for the muscle plus connective tissues and organ growth from increases in muscle size).
-Cardio makes you hungry.
-Cardio generates a lot of wear and tear on your entire body.
-Cardio sucks.
Hopefully by this point I've sparked a great deal of curositiy about any 'cardio' exercises you do under the premise they are improving your health and physique. That said, you can still run around play football, have a swimming race at the beach with friends, play sports, and live an active life...
Just don't go jogging or swimming thinking it's an effective way to improve your health and musculature.
-Dream
