San Antonio Personal Trainer – Question of the Day: What Kind of Cardio?
Good morning, San Antonio! I much prefer this schedule as opposed to daylight savings time. I was fast asleep before 9pm last night and completely awake and ready to take on the day at 5am this morning.
I received a question via email that I felt I should share here on the San Antonio Personal Trainer Blog. Enjoy!
Boyd,
There are so many conflicting ways on how to get lean – some recommend long duration cardio. Others say high intensity interval training. Should I do it in a fasted state? Should I treat it like any other training session with a pre and post workout meal? How much cardio should I be doing, when should I do it, and what other tips can you offer?
To many, the word “cardio” ranks right up there with the word “diet” on the list of bad words. I prefer to not let my 6 year old son use either word, as they are both dirty (ok, a bad attempt at humor early on Monday). Here’s the truth…
First and foremost, I have mentioned numerous times that the “Calorie In Versus Calorie Out” method is prehistoric and has nothing to do with burning body fat, instead, it is only for burning weight. Weight is not an indicator of progress – I have listed 5000 examples here on this blog where simply losing weight is not desirable – where the weight loss actually comes from is key. Of course, you have the “heart rate” method, but this ignores the afterburn effect of many types of training: burning glucose during a high intensity workout will actually force the body to switch to burning body fat post-session. So while the “slow go” method may burn more calories from fat during the session, you’re still taking about a relatively small quantity, and the post-effect isn’t doing anything to continue the fat burning process.
However, most personal trainers are looking to give their clients instant gratification, even if it is a false sense of progress, so they put their clients on the elliptical or other cardio machine for hours each week in the beginning, and while pounds do fall off, the actual shape does not change. I much prefer education: I like to see inches melt off and to see the person actually become lean, not just a smaller version of what they look like in the beginning.
Don’t get me wrong, cardio is necessary – the heart is a muscle and must be trained accordingly. But as a fat burning tool, it is highly overrated and very inefficient. The most efficient method that we, as humans can use to become lean is through nutrition and resistance training.
Look in most aerobics classes, even the advanced ones: as a whole, the individuals in the class aren’t very lean. A step further? Most distance athletes, while they may be relatively thin, the consistency of their bodies usually isn’t desirable. I work with many distance athletes to help them increase lean body mass, and even though they aren’t what most would consider obese, many of them have body fats in the mid-20% range due to muscle atrophy from the high volume of aerobic training.
Humans are primarily anaerobic creatures, and are designed to throw a rock at our food, not to chase it.
The amount of cardio I prescribe to an individual client is not directly dependent on their body fat percentage: the first thing I look at is their ability to perform without gasping for air, their ability to recover during an exercise, and their ability to recover from workout to workout, as an efficient cardio-vascular system does help the body recover, remove waste from training and improve sleep and other training functions.
If you’re depending on cardio as your primary weapon against fat loss, you’re making a mistake. Following A DIET isn’t the answer either – your nutritional strategy must be optimally designed with your daily schedule and training goals in mind. Cardio must be used only as a supplement. Most people that are looking to burn body fat and transform their bodies simply do too much, and try to do cardio to make up for poor nutrition habits. This does not work, and doing too much cardio is one of the most counter-productive things you can do for fat loss (again, think of body transformation as a fat loss endeavor, not a weight loss issue.
An example I like to give clients is from one of the fitness competitors I train. After a previous show, she had taken time away from weight training to compete in ultra-marathons. If you think running a normal race is tough, try ultras. Anyway, during this time, this competitor had gone from a very lean competition shape to upwards of 20% body fat, although she had practiced relatively good eating habits. For her, shifting the paradigm from much less cardio to more strength training was counter-intuitive to what most people would think is necessary to burn body fat, but she became much leaner performing less cardio work. I know, I know – most average people think “I’m not an ultra marathon runner and I don’t want to compete”. I totally get that, but those cases are extreme and are infinitely more difficult to adjust to than the average individual looking to see their abs or become defined for the first time in years. Even worse? Few personal trainers have ever helped a person drastically change. While most of them will probably blame the clients, I put much of the blame square on the trainer for not keeping that individual motivated and making the proper adjustments.
When someone comes to me that has been struggling with fat loss and performing hours of cardio, one of the first things I do is reduce their amount of cardio. Then, I overhaul what they thought was “eating right” (it rarely is) and turn their focus to the magical fat loss effects of resistance training.
If your trainer has you doing hours of marathon cardio and you are not training for a distance event such as a marathon, plus have you starving (I never let me clients get hungry, they simply eat the right foods at the right times), they are simply too lazy to educate you on body transformation and aren’t training you with your actual goals in mind.
Or even worse, they simply aren’t educated enough to understand how the body functions. Either way, it is your money and time they are wasting.
Boyd Myers
Personal Trainer in San Antonio
Owner, San Antonio’s Top Personal Training Studio
16613 Huebner Rd (corner of Huebner and Bitters)
210.391.1454
