Why Does Cardio Suck For Fat Loss?
Is your main goal to lose body fat? Are you a cardio bunny? Have you not seen a change in body composition for months?
Let me put this in context, ‘YES’ cardio does without a doubt burn more calories in 60 minutes than any other form of training or exercise and if your goal is to improve cardiovascular endurance, stamina for sport etc. then cardio is most definitely for you. If your main goal is fat loss, get off the cardio machine.
The key here is “speeding” up your metabolism. “Speed” it up to burn more calories doing as little as possible.
Our bodies are highly adaptive, anything we throw at it, it will adapt. This does happen rather quickly and start at between 2-4 weeks.
There are 3 major problems with steady state cardio -
You only burn calories whilst doing cardio. Albeit you burnt a high number of calories but the second you step off the stair master or the treadmill you are no longer burning calories.
We adapt so quickly. Our bodies are smart, smarter than we are and highly efficient. Physiologically speaking what happens when doing long bouts of cardio many days a week is, we are sending a signal to our body to be more efficient with our energy and fat stores. The body is primitive, this signal is screaming to every cell in your body, we’re running down a gazelle again, let’s slow our metabolism down, let's reduce our muscle mass to be lighter and hold onto some fat in case we don’t catch it.
Every time you go back to do cardio your body becomes more and more efficient and you burn less and less fat and calories. Eventually, you’ll be able to run all day long and burn hardly any calories.
The best examples as to what this looks like are, look at long distance runners, skinny, unhealthy looking, slow metabolisms, no muscle mass, consistently busting out the millage to stay that way. Another is, have a look at the studies done on the modern hunter-gather tribe ‘HADZA’ from Tanzania. They don’t grow food or have livestock. They do, however, do what they have been doing for 10,000 years, chase down their food and gather food. The studies blew the researchers away showing that tribe members metabolisms had evolved to be the equivalent of a sedentary western lifestyle. What’s mind-blowing about that is they are extremely active.
This is great if we were still living on the land but, we don’t live in a world like that anymore, we can get highly palpable food, in every flavour and colour, delivered to our door with a couple of clicks on a phone. We aren’t chasing food around, we aren’t active and the last thing we need to do is slow our metabolisms down any further.
The best way to lose body fat is on the gym floor, building strength and lean muscle mass. Building an extra half, a kilo of lean muscle will burn roughly between 30-60 extra calories per day. Fast forward 6 months with an average muscle gain of 0.7kg per month you will have gained around 4.5-5kg of muscle. The extra muscle mass forces your metabolism to burn about 300 extra calories every day doing nothing extra. No hour-long cardio sessions 5 days a week, you can actually skip a day of the gym, sit on the couch all day and still burn that extra 300cal.
Training for muscle mass is a long-term strategy for fat loss, it a smarter way to lose the extra unwanted kilos. Placing cardio into your training plan with a strategy much highly effective way to go.
P.s Like what you read, share it with your friends everybody knows a cardio bunny ;)
