Cardio….hmmmm…Anyone who knows me or has trained with me, knows my feelings about cardio. Now don’t take this the wrong way, cardiovascular training can have its advantages. Personally, I hate it with a passion! I would rather eat 500 less calories a day then sweat my butt off on a treadmill for an hour. Have you ever gone into your local gym and looked at the people on the cardio machines? More often than not, they are the people with the worst physiques in the gym. Why is this? Let me tell you.

Like I stated in earlier articles, your body adapts to various changes, internal or external, and it can adapt in many ways. I have informed you that to build muscle you must challenge your muscles by lifting weights. Your body is put under the external stress of having to move more weight and must adapt by adding muscle to make the task easier.

Conversely, when your body is put under the external stress of running, cycling, or any other form of cardiovascular training it adapts by shedding weight and enabling your heart to beat faster and longer. Sounds good to those of you trying to lose weight right? Wrong! The thing is that your body doesn’t care where that weight comes from, muscle or fat. More often than not, the majority of weight lost from a strictly cardio based workout is from muscle and water.

In order to shed weight to make the task of running, or the like, easier you must become lighter. Since each gram of protein or carbohydrates is 4 calories and each gram of fat is 9, your body can lose weight faster by burning protein and carbohydrates (in the form of muscle) than fat.

You see, cardio burns calories and those calories have to come from somewhere. We would like to take them from our stored body fat but it takes sometime before the fat burning process kicks in when doing cardio, generally 15-30 minutes depending on the individual and sex. The preferred fuel source is carbohydrates in the form of blood sugar and carbohydrates stored in the muscles (glycogen), those are used first.

An additional benefit to burning off those carbohydrates in our system is that each gram of carbohydrates we store will enable us to carry four times that amount of water. So just getting rid of the carbohydrates will enable you to lose more weight.

After an elite distance runner finishes a race, there is major atrophy that occurs in the legs. Studies on the calves of runners has shown the how catabolic the mere act of running such distances is on the muscle. Now I realize that you may not be running 30 miles at a time when doing your cardio workout but by looking at these extremes we can assume that this is happening on a lesser but still relevant level to you.

It doesn’t require much muscle to run far or for a long period of time. It merely requires muscular endurance and enough muscle to move your body weight. As you know, your metabolism is determined by the amount of muscle mass you carry. The less you have, the less food you can afford to eat and the harder it is to burn excess calories.

That being said, there is a benefit to performing cardiovascular exercise. Basically, it is one of the best ways to exercise and strengthen the endurance your heart. Although, if you follow a strenuous resistance training program, your heart should be pumping throughout your workout. Studies were done comparing the heart of an elite distance runner to that of an elite power lifter. These studies confirmed that the power lifters heart was in just as good (in some cases better) overall condition than that of the distance runner.

They both had larger hearts from the stress placed on them through the training they do. However the power lifter has a heart with a thicker more muscled wall. The distance runner had a thinner wall since they don’t put their heart under the same pressure that a power lifter or a sprinter would. The distance runners heart has to be able to pump a lot but not a hard as that of a power athlete.

If you are looking to just improve your overall appearance and lose body fat, I don’t believe that cardio is a must. If you are looking to improve your cardiovascular endurance, it is beneficial. So is there a balance, and if so what is it? Well, that is different for everyone.

If your main goal is to put on muscle, forget about doing any cardio. It isn’t worth the effort. It is just going to hamper your lean mass gains. Worry about any fat gained in the process after the fact. Mind you, that doesn’t mean you should let your body fat levels soar. With a proper diet, your muscle to fat gain ratio should be 3 to 1 (by mainstream standards, I generally have clients gain lean mass without fat gain).

If you are trying to gain muscle and lose fat, you can get away with a minimal amount of cardio. Ideally, you would focus on one at a time. Too often people try to accomplish too much at once. Technically, gaining muscle and losing fat contradict one another. In order to gain muscle, we must consume more calories than our body needs to maintain its present shape. To lose fat, we need to consume less calories than we require to maintain our shape.

However (there always seems to be a however), I have found that with my diet approach, I have been able to keep clients in an anabolic environment to gain muscle and a fat burning environment to lose fat at the same time. The newer you are to working out the better the odds are of accomplishing both goals.

If your main goal is to lose fat and you are quite overweight, you can afford to do more cardio. The more overweight you are, the more cardio you can do. Again, your body knows what it has to do. If you have a lot of fat, it will tap into those stores more readily than it will on someone who is quite lean. Having a large amount of body fat, will require you to have more muscle to lug it around. Therefore, your body will spare your muscle to an extent until your body fat levels are lower.

So how much cardio should we do, when is the best time and how often? Again, it depends on your goals. If you are trying to preserve as much muscle as possible (which you better be) and lose fat you will require less, if you want to improve your cardiovascular endurance you will have to do more. Lets look at some examples.

Fat loss

One of the best ways to use cardio to aid in fat loss is a technique called interval training. This basically refers to training at both a high and low intensity levels for short periods. This will tend to not only burn more calories than the traditional slow and steady low intensity cardio but is believed to jack up your metabolism for hours later. Don’t worry about the calorie counter on the machine you use, keep in mind it is only telling you half the story.

The best time to do your interval training is as soon as you crawl out of bed in the morning. You body will tend to be in a slightly carb depleted state and tend to tap into fat stores as fuel at a faster rate. So with an empty stomach and a bottle of water, you head off to the gym or jump on your piece of cardio equipment at home.

You will perform your interval training for 20-30 minutes tops, that’s right no more than 30 minutes three times a week. Using a treadmill and myself for example, after warming up, you will start with 2 minutes at light jog (approx. 4-5mph). From there you will go all out for 1 minute (approx. 7-8mph), after that minute you go back to the light jog. This will go back and forth for the 20-30 minutes and you are done. To continue burning fat, try not to eat for the next hour, take advantage of the jacked up metabolism.

Keep in mind this is a very simple approach and I hate doing cardio. So if you want to know more ways to interval train, there are many resources out there where you can learn more.

Cardiovascular endurance

If you want to help lower your blood pressure, lower your resting heart rate or just improve how long or far you can run, you need to kick the cardio up a few notches. You are going to have to work up to a high intensity level with your cardio training. We aren’t concerned about calories burned here because this isn’t your main goal or you would be doing what we spoke about earlier. If maintaining lean body mass is a big issue, you should take this level of activity into account when planning you daily caloric intake.

You are going to have to perform 45-60 minutes of high intensity (all out effort) cardio three times a week. Doesn’t matter what piece of equipment you use, mind you if you want to be a better runner it would help more to run than to bike. It doesn’t really matter what time of the day it is unless you want to do it first thing to help burn a little fat at the same time. If your health or overall endurance is the main goal, you can perform this exercise any time of the day.

You want to always keep in mind your max heart rate (the highest beats per minute your heart rate should reach) and your target heart rate (training zone to improve cardiovascular endurance). To determine your maximum heart rate, you take 220 and minus your age in years from this number. Your target heart rate will be somewhere between 60-90% of your maximum heart rate depending on your cardiovascular fitness level and age.

It doesn’t take a long time to start to see and feel the improvements in your endurance, thing is every week you don’t maintain this cardio routine you cardiovascular endurance will drop by 10%.

I am sure there is plenty more I could tell you about cardio training but as you can see it is far from my favorite topic. Most people who come to me come for one reason, to look better. For some cardio will help but in many cases it isn’t required and can in some cases do more harm than good, aesthetically speaking.

Now for my closer on cardio, if we look at our lives and daily activities that we perform it generally doesn’t make sense to do cardio. Why? Well, first off pretty well everybody walking the face of the earth today lives and functions in the glycotic pathway. This means their bodies are running of glucose for fuel. Every time we get up from a desk and walk across the room to get a file, or reach for a pen, carry groceries or whatever explosive task we perform we run on glucose. The only time we run off oxygen (the oxidative pathway) is when we do cardio.

So basically we do cardio to get better at doing cardio, not to improve our daily fitness level for our day to day tasks. Unless you compete in a sport that requires you to run for extended periods cardio will not help make your daily task easier. To me it only makes sense to spend more time in the gym training for your life and not training for the sake of training.

If we go back to primitive times man would sit and conserve his energy most of the day, he would run in short spurts (glycotic) when hunting or escaping being hunted, I seriously doubt there was ever a time when he thought “hmmm, I am going to run for an hour just for the heck of it.” From a daily function stand point it just doesn’t make sense.

One final note about increasing your heart rate to improve the health of your heart. I had a client that would perform many spin classes each week as well as many aerobic classes. He would always wear his heart monitor, he had a resting heart rate in the high 40’s and would typically get up to 150bpm in a spin class. He would also wear his heart monitor when training with me, almost regardless of the exercise we where doing (squats, bench press, lat pull down…) his heart rate would spike as high as 165bpm. It would range from about the low 90’s to the mid 160’s, this is called interval training for the heart and is the way our hearts actually perform in the real world. So don’t tell me you aren’t getting a cardiovascular workout when weight training. This type of cardio training actually helps you build muscle and increase your metabolism not burn muscle and slow your metabolism in the long run (no pun intended).