Got Time to Waste? Do Cardio!

Information rules the world. The more information you have the better off you are. But we run into problems when the information we get conflicts. This comes up time and time again in the health & fitness game. High carb, low carb, high reps, low reps, yes cardio, no cardio. And it goes on and on. Well that my friends is why I write these newsletters – to give you the best, most accurate and up to date information possible. You know who I am and where to find me, and hopefully you have come to trust what I tell you. Plus I back up what I say with results. So in this article I will be telling you why standard cardio is a lousy fat loss tool- and why I am right and everyone else is wrong (unless they agree with me :) ).

If you have ever talked to me, or read my articles on fat loss then you know I am not a fan of "steady state" cardio work. Steady state cardio can be defined as regular old walking on a treadmill (or whatever) at a relative steady pace for a period of time – say 30 to 45 minutes. I have always hated it, but now I have scientific proof to validate my hatred- which is always a bonus.

What we have discovered is that while steady state cardio promised us accelerated fat loss it never really delivered. In fact in some cases it made people fatter.

Why We Wish it Worked
What we were told is that standard cardio burns more fat while exercising. Plus it's easy. Slow steady cardio will melt the fat right off! Hey great! Well, not really. What actually happens in traditional cardio is that calories are expended during the activity itself. That is all well and good, and it in fact does burn a greater PERCENTAGE of calories from fat. Yippee. But if you were to work out more intensely for the same amount of time the percentage of total calories burned from fat would be less, but the total number of calories that were from fat would be greater. Confused? Here is a completely hypothetical (I made up the numbers) example to illustrate the point.

Low Intensity 30 Minutes Cardio	High Intensity 30 Minutes Cardio
Total Cals Used= 500 % Cals from fat 80%	Total Cals Used= 800 % Cals from fat 60%
Total Cals from fat= 400	Total Cals from fat = 480

First off, of course exercising harder for 30 minutes will simply require more calories- that is a no brainer. But even though the percentage of fat used in the low intensity exercise was higher, the higher intensity exercise had a greater total number of fat calories used. This tells us that low intensity cardio offers no real benefit over a higher intensity activity. Plus as it turns out it is not near as important how many calories you burn during the activity, or even where they come , but what happens after (more on that later). In the exercise world almost without fail harder is simply better, and will always yield better results.

Why it Steady State Cardio Actually Sucks (as a primary fat loss tool)

There are 2 major reasons in my book why standard cardio is a big loser for fat loss.

Reason 1
The first is EPOC. EPOC stands for Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption. Basically what EPOC does is tells us how long it takes the body to return to its pre-exercise metabolic rate. So after a bout of intense exercising your body will continue to burn extra calories for a certain period of time. From a fat loss perspective, the longer the EPOC the better. Some activities like weight training have an EPOC of 30 plus hours. The EPOC for steady state cardio is approximately zero. Yessir, give or take when you step off that treadmill or bike you are done burning calories – done.
You should think of exercising like investing your money. Let say you have a pile of money (you do right?) You are far better off investing it in a high yield account than you are burying it beneath the dog house out back. You want a return on your investment right? The same is true for exercise. If you are going to spend the time, get a high return on your investment and that means a high EPOC. You want to continue to burn extra calories for as long as you can post exercise. There are simply better choices than boring cardio.

Reason 2
The second reason cardio blows for fat loss is the adaptation factor. Your body is wonderful at adapting to various stresses. In general that is a great thing – it has allowed us to survive and thrive for hundreds of thousands of years as our world has changed. From a fat loss perspective it is a giant pain in the ass. Our bodies adapt to certain exercise quite rapidly, and that can bring fat loss to a halt.
As your body becomes accustomed to the activity, it becomes more efficient at doing it. With cardio that means that while walking on the treadmill for 30 minutes once burned 500 calories, 3 weeks later it only burns 300 calories. So for the same amount of work you are now burning 200 less calories per session. Sound good? I didn't think so.

Real World Example
This has been proven in multiple studies but my favorite example is a client that came to see me a few months back. This is an absolutely true story. She was a woman in her 50s who had 30-40 pounds of fat to lose. She began to walk around her neighborhood to lose weight. At first it worked great, but then the weight loss stalled. So she walked more. Then it stalled again, so she walked more again. After she told me this I asked her how much she was currently walking per day. She said 3 hours per day. I kid you not. 3 hours per day. My jaw hit the floor. Can you imagine working out 3 hours per day and seeing no results for your efforts? I have clients who barely do 3 hours per week and have fat falling off them.

Here's what happened: her body adapted AND there was zero EPOC. So first off the very second she was done walking she was also done burning calories. There was no carry over to the rest of the day, thus no metabolic increase. 

Then as she continued to walk day in and day out her body figured out what was going on and made the appropriate adaptations. Initially that meant weight loss. But that did not last long. So she had to walk more and more for the fat loss to continue. Eventually her body became very good at using fat for fuel – she was an efficient fat burning machine. While this might sound cool, it is most decidedly not cool. We want our cars to be efficient at using fuel, the less gas we use the better. But since the goal is fat loss we want our bodies to use as much fat for fuel as possible- we want our bodies to be fat INefficient. Her body was using less fat per unit of time while working out. Not only that, it taught her body to use less fat during the rest of the day too. The end result was stalled weight loss. The only method she knew to re-start the weight loss was walking more. But to what end?

There you have it, in a nutshell the reason why my training facilities do not use steady state cardio as a primary fat loss tool. Now I just spent over 100 words tell you how useless cardio is, but I will say it does have its place in certain fitness programs. But if your main goal is fat loss, steady state cardio should be very low on your to-do list. In the next installment I will share with you some of the metabolic trickery we use to elicit serious fat loss in a fraction of the time of standard boring cardio. I'll give you a hint: INTERVALS.

Until next time,

Joshua Carter
The Body Transformation Expert
Carter Fitness
http://CarterFitness.com
818-337-6175