WHY EXCESS CARDIO IS ACTUALLY SABOTAGING YOUR FAT LOSS RESULTS!

Ask most average women what exercise they’re doing to help lose fat, get fit, stay healthy, prevent disease or basically look good naked and they almost always invariably say something like, running, jogging, swimming or cycling. Or in the most dire of cases they say something like Zumba, Body Pump or some other shameful excuse for physical activity which more closely resembles the mating habits of wild flamingoes than actual exercise.

This false belief is largely perpetuated by the most common school of thought that fat loss comes when focusing on just burning calories rather than improving body composition and that solid state or long distance endurance style exercise (ie. Cardio) is the best way to achieve your fat loss or fitness goals. And who could blame you? This has been the common myth covered far and wide in pop culture and the general media, but unfortunately is based on old, outdated and in some cases just wrong information.

When in reality the only thing cardio does is make you really good at running or swimming for a long time or distance. And while the body adapts or your cardiovascular fitness increases you have to continually run farther and longer just to have the same result that you once got from running only a couple of k’s a week. And at the end of the day just looking at cardiovascular fitness is not an accurate biomarker in determining what makes a person physically fit. We need to look at every marker as they are all equally as important.

Biomarkers are things like muscle mass, strength, metabolic rate, body fat percentage and cardiovascular output. Which all, but the last one, are damaged or are in some part diminished by doing hours on the treadmill while catching up on episodes of The Bachelor.

This is where all the other inherent problems with doing excessive cardio come into play. So let’s start with with first one. Muscle mass. Now we know why this is important. When you lose all this body fat, which I’m assuming is your goal, what are you going to replace it with? You quite literally will be bag of bones. And who want’s to look like a gaunt and gangly marathon runner with a meth addiction. Now while your aim may not necessarily be to gain muscle, excess cardio can drastically increase your body’s stress hormone, cortisol, because of the shear duration of the workout, and is quite catabolic (muscle destroying) to whatever muscle you do have. In other words you’ll start to look like you just did 20 years in a Korean prisoner of war camp.

This brings us to the second one, strength, which should be quite obvious at this point. Reduced muscle mass invariably means reduced strength and a reduced ability to lift weight, challenge your body and generally making it harder to reach those fitness goals of yours which are now slowly disappearing over the horizon.

What does all this have to do with fat loss you ask? Well put your hand down for goodness sake and I’ll explain it to you. I bet you were the nerdy kid that sat in the front of the class in school and threw yours hands up for every damn question the teacher asked didn’t you? Well we now arrive at the third biomarker, metabolic rate. Reduced muscle mass doesn’t just reduce your muscles ability to contract or product force, ie. loss of strength, it will also begin to downregulate your body’s metabolic rate. And we all know that means don’t we? A reduced metabolic rate means your body will burn less calories while going about your day to day life and if your training or diet isn’t in check then you might as well open those doors to that long lost cousin we hate but always hangs around, his name is fat! You see muscle is very metabolically expensive, meaning your body has to burn a lot of energy to maintain muscle. And what is the body’s measure of energy? You guessed it, calories. Less muscle means less calories being burned which means more calories being stored. Oh and incase you were wondering. Yes the body does store excess calories in the form of fat.

This now brings to body fat percentage. Cardio has been proven to be less effective or at the very least just as effective as burning fat as resistance training, but with excessive long distance, steady state cardio you’re not only chewing through those love handles of yours, you’re also just as quickly chomping through all your lean muscle tissue. We’ve already established why this is bad. If you haven’t been following, then scroll back up and read the first few paragraphs again. Reduced muscle mass also leads to a poor body composition or body fat percentage. Which, in simplified terms just means that your body will be carrying a greater proportion of fat to muscle. Again, as detailed above, this is bad.

And there you have it. It’s not hard to see why doing all that long distance jogging or stomping for miles and hours on a treadmill, which is just the human version of a hamster wheel, may not be the best option for you if your goal is to lose fat, tone up, or just look sexy in a bikini. If you enjoy running or any of those activities mentioned above, then more power to you, but my suggestion to you would be, if you do want to hit the beach this summer rocking that new Sea Folly number then some light cardio in conjunction with a regular resistance training program is the ticket.