Is Cardio a Legit Weight Loss Tool or a Waste of Time?
Doing lots of cardio for weight loss is a good idea, right?
The answer is….maybe.
In this article, you are going to learn the fallacies of using traditional cardiovascular training for weight loss and learn why it can actually be detrimental to your success.
First, let’s define what we mean by doing cardio. This is any type of training that includes maintaining a raised heart rate during elongated bouts of exercise. This includes things such as walking, running, cycling, and jogging.
It uses pieces of exercise equipment such as the treadmill, elliptical, arc trainer, rowing machine, upright bike, seated bike, and the Airdyne bike.
An example of a bout of cardio is someone getting on a treadmill and walking or running for an extended period of time, such as 30-60 minutes.
If you want to lose weight, then getting on a treadmill and going for 60 minutes several times a week will surely melt the pounds off, right?
Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Yes, cardio does burn calories.
Yes, you need to burn calories to lose weight.
Yes, eating a diet that has the right number of calories combined with cardio will result in weight loss.
But, rarely does this approach EVER work for the long term.
The Fallacies of Cardio Training
1. The Body is Extremely Adaptive
Remember this – the body is great at adapting according to the amount of stress you put on it. I am not talking about the stress of deadlines at work or getting your shopping done for the holidays.
I am talking about the stress demands of exercise. Cardio makes your heart beat faster. If your heart has to beat faster, it is working harder than it is at rest. With repeated exposures, the heart gets stronger and adapts to being able to beat faster for longer periods of time.
This is great for things such as lowering your resting heart rate, lowering your blood pressure, regulating insulin, and decreasing the risk of all kinds of chronic diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. Cardio is great for increased longevity and overall quality of life, but it is NOT great as your only choice of exercise for fat loss.
Also, think of it like this…
Let’s say that you go outside right now and I have your run 3 miles without stopping. If you have not run distances in awhile, you are going to feel very winded and exhausted trying to get through it all.
But, let’s say that I have you do the same 3 miles run four times a week for the next two months. Would the run feel easier after you have done it almost three dozen times? You bet it would. It would feel tremendously easier than it would have the first time you tried it.
Why? Because the 3 mile run started as a stress that was very physically taxing. But after repeated exposures, your body adapted in response to the stress of the 3 mile run and became better at it.
Here is how this all relates back to cardio for weight loss…
Doing lots of cardiovascular training makes your body more efficient. The more efficient your body becomes, the less energy it has to use to complete the task it has adapted to.
This is bad for weight loss because the goal of a fat loss workout session is to burn lots of calories during and after your exercise.
Lots of repeated bouts of cardio makes your body become more efficient and adaptive, meaning that the more adaptive it gets the fewer calories you burn.
2. Too Much Cardio Makes You Lose Muscle Mass
This is perhaps the biggest downfall of cardio for weight loss.
We just talked about how the body becomes more efficient with repeated exposures to exercise. Part of becoming more efficient includes having to drop some weight in order to get there. Your body has a very smart survival mechanism. It knows that long exposures to exercise (running, cycling, rowing, etc.) are going to be easier if it has less weight.
If you don’t believe me, try putting on a 30lb weighted vest and try going for a jog. The extra weight makes the exercise a lot harder.
Unfortunately weight cardiovascular exercise, the weight you lose does not come solely from body fat. If it did, then running a marathon would make everyone look lean and cut like a fitness model on the front of a magazine.
Instead, prolonged cardiovascular bouts make your body have to catabolize lean muscle mass in addition to body fat.
Here is where we find the true downfall of cardio training because fat burning happens in the muscles.
Read that again and remember it – fat burning happens in the muscles.
The more muscle mass you lose, the lower you fat burning oxidation will be.
If you have tried to lose body fat by doing excessive bouts of running, elliptical, arc trainer, etc., then you may have lost weight at first before hitting a major plateau where the scale does not budge.
If this has happened to you, then it is likely because you burned a ton of calories during your exercise, but you also burned through a good deal of lean muscle mass as well. The more lean muscle mass you lost, the lower your fat metabolism becomes.
This is precisely why doing lots of cardio for weight loss happens soon after you start but starts to wear off after awhile.
You simply cannot continue to only do cardiovascular exercise and expect that you are going to develop lean, firm, and toned muscles. If you want more proof, look at some pictures of people who run marathons. They are great endurance athletes, but they don’t exactly look like fitness models.
The one exception is if you are a true “mesomorph” body type (think of the build of a male or female fitness model). These people have a lot of natural muscle mass and can tolerate doing tons of running, cycling, rowing, etc. They never seem to lose muscle but they shed fat like crazy. They are the genetically lucky ones, but they certainly do not represent the vast majority of the population like you and I.
3. Extreme Boredom and Repetition
We don’t have to go into great detail here. One of the biggest detriments to so many people starting an exercise program is that they simply get bored to death of another 50 minute grind session on a treadmill, elliptical, bike, running outside, or any other machine.
Some try to distract themselves from the monotonous boredom by reading a book or watching television.
Like we said before, if you are just training for general fitness then you can still get some benefit from exercising like this.
But if your goal is weight loss, then you are in for a potentially long and time consuming battle. We are going to talk more about interval training, resistance training, and other types of exercise that are much more fun and more beneficial than the traditional cardiovascular workout.
We all have busy lives and can think of ways we would rather spend our time than by spending 5+ hours per week on a cardio machine.
4. You Don’t Need to Run a Marathon to Lose Weight
This goes back to the myth that you can train for an endurance event and expect that fat loss is going to be a side effect of your training.
We already know that lots of endurance work makes the body more adaptive and efficient.
If you want to lose 30lbs and decide you are going to train for a 5k, half marathon, or full marathon, then you should expect some fat loss to occur from your training.
However it is possible for someone to train for months for a running event, develop some incredible endurance, and not lose a single pound.
Why?
First, you will likely lose lean muscle tissue unless you supplement your training with some kind of strength training.
Second, burning more calories makes you hungry. If you burn an extra 400 calories a day from running but take in an extra 700 calories per day because you your appetite is higher, then you have not created the caloric deficit you need to lose weight.
You can develop some incredible endurance without ever losing any weight. This is another reason why traditional cardio exercise is great for the heart but not so great for losing body fat.
You can also think about it like this:
If you want to train for a marathon, do lots of running.
If you want to train for a power lifting competition, do lots of bench press, deadlifts, and barbell squats.
If you want to train for baseball, do lots of core training that emphasizes rotation.
If you want to train for the Tour De France, do lots of cycling.
If you want to train to lose body fat, develop a balance of resistance training, cardio training (intervals are great), and most importantly, a great diet.
Training for fat loss is just as specific as training for any of the sports listed above. Think of fat loss as your sport and your training is what prepares you for “game day”.
Now, read these other articles to delve deeper into exactly how to use strength training, nutrition, and cardio for weight loss.