The Real Facts of Cardio for Fat Loss
I probably get more questions about steady state cardio (i.e.: get on the treadmill or elliptical for somewhere between 30 min to three hours and maintain a nice steady pace) for fat loss then everything else combined. Unfortunately the “cardio is great for weight loss” myth has been perpetuated in the industry for way to long. Although cardio has many other benefits it is not nearly as beneficial for fat loss as once thought. So let’s talk about fat loss and cardio.
The number one most important thing to induce fat loss is to increase a person’s metabolism or their resting metabolic rate otherwise known as RMR. The best way to accomplish this is to perform demanding workouts that cause metabolic disturbances while placing the body into an anabolic state thus causing muscular growth. Weight bearing activity is the only way to get this done.
The truth is cardio does nothing to increase your metabolism. In fact if you do enough cardio it can actually decrease your metabolism, decrease your muscle mass and make your body burn fat at a slower pace. For those of you who like hard data and scientific studies check this out. The University of California Berkeley put on a study and discovered that men and women who ran the same weekly mileage year after year (regardless of the amount of distance) actually gained weight. Even those who ran 40+ miles a week still managed to put on body fat. They concluded that to avoid weight gain female runners needed to boost their mileage by 2.4 miles per week or 125 miles per year, every year. To put this into perspective lets use an example of a 20 year old woman who ran an average of 15 miles a week every week throughout the year and was actually able to maintain her body weight doing so. By the time she is 30 she will have to run nearly 40 miles per week to maintain the same body weight. In the same study men would have to boost their weekly mileage by 1.7 miles a week or about 89 miles per year just to maintain their weight.
The main reason this occurs is that cardio does nothing to increase muscular growth. Muscle is the only type of body tissue that burns fat. Therefore the more muscle you have on your body then the more fat you can burn. The other trouble with traditional cardio training is that it only causes EPOC (Exercise Post Oxygen Consumption) to increase briefly at best. What this means to you is that by spending 45 minutes on a treadmill you might burn 300 or so calories while actually being on the machine. However once you step off the treadmill your EPOC is only elevated for a short while and then it returns to normal. Studies have shown us that a properly designed weight bearing program causes huge increases in EPOC for 24-48 hours. So basically weight training sessions cause your metabolism to be elevated for up to two full days keeping your body burning fat even while you’re sleeping! On the flip side the steady state cardio session only burns calories while you are doing it and does nothing to increase your metabolism after stepping off the machine. Which would you rather have?
In this article I have only briefly touched on the cardio myth but hopefully you now see that steady state cardio is overrated for fat loss. If you are in search of a better leaner body then weight training is the best way to go. “You can bang a nail with a screwdriver, but a hammer just works better.”