Cardio Training: Three Things It Is… And Isn’t
Submitted by Got Strength? Blog
Cardio Training: Three Things It Is… And Isn’t
Posted in All Posts, Fitness Articles by Isaac.Wilkins on the January 31st, 2008
One of the old lines of getting fit and losing fat or weight is “You gotta do your cardio”. Take a walk around the gym, talk to most trainers, or spend some time at the water cooler and you’ll hear that over and over again. Let’s look at what this “cardio” thing is, real quick.
When most people talk about cardio they mean “steady-state cardiovascular exercise”. This means they’ll walk, run, bike, use the elliptical, or whatever for a certain amount of time at about the same intensity. If someone says that they’re going to get on the bike for half an hour after they lift weights, usually they are talking about this.
Lately this type of energy system training has been beaten up pretty badly in the “educated” training world and in the online forums. Steady state cardio has become the whipping boy for most of the poor results seen in the gym. To some degree these arguments hold water, but like anything else, there’s a middle ground. The problem isn’t necessarily the cardiovascular exercise; it’s the selection and application of it.
Here are three things that steady state cardiovascular exercise is:
1. Cardiovascular exercise can be helpful for recovery purposes. Long, slow cardio exercise isn’t particularly stressful or demanding on the body. What it does do is help move blood through the muscles as they’re being worked. This flowing blood helps carry fresh nutrients into the muscles and carry waste products and damaged cells out.
2. Cardiovascular exercise is a good calorie “sink”. Ok, so let’s say you sit on the bike and burn 300 calories. In the grand scheme of things, 300 calories isn’t a huge deal and you could have burnt it much faster doing heavy squats. Those squats would have made a big dent in your recovery, though. The half an hour on the bike didn’t do much to offset it (and might have helped your recovery as we went over above) and you did nail down 300 calories. Five sessions like that a week and you’re at almost half a pound down without much stress.
3. Cardiovascular exercise is an effective method for improving insulin sensitivity. One of the big problems when it comes to losing weight (fat) and staying healthy is insulin resistance. Basically the sugar in your blood can’t get into your muscles easily to be used so more insulin has to be released (causing a variety of health problems) and the sugar is more likely to be stored as fat. Cardiovascular exercise is an effective way to stimulate the glucose transporters in the muscle cells to move to the cell membrane and start moving that sugar in the muscles.
Ok, so that’s three facts about steady state cardio that it does well. Here is a list of three things that it is not:
1. Steady state cardiovascular exercise is NOT the most efficient way to improve VO2 max or “fitness”. Studies have shown that the body responds better to a brief, intense stimulus over a longer, weaker stimulus. To get in top shape the body must be exposed to stressful situations, and steady state cardio isn’t stressful enough. If the activity were stressful enough to cause these changes, then you couldn’t keep it up long enough to be considered steady state cardio.
2. Cardiovascular exercise is NOT the best way to elevate your metabolism. The body’s metabolism is affected by a bunch of factors, but one of the primary factors that you can control is an “afterburn” effect. This is a combination of processes including tissue repair/remodeling, waste removal, and substrate replenishment. All of these processes require energy from the body, measured by calories. Steady state cardio doesn’t cause much damage or stimulate a whole lot of change, so other than the energy required to actually perform the task (running, biking, whatever) it doesn’t need much. Heavy weight training, on the other hand, can keep the metabolism going for days after the session is over because the body is still trying to repair all of that damage.
3. Cardiovascular exercise is NOT the best way to improve or maintain your bone density. I know all of you young pups out there are rolling your eyes at this one, but it does matter. Osteoporosis is a mother and people build most of their bone mass between the ages of 15 and 25 or so. This is the time when nutrition needs to be on point as well as the stresses placed on the skeletal system that will induce more bone growth. Steady state cardio is better than sitting in a chair all day but it’s not stressful enough to really build much bone. Sprinting and heavy weight training put a whole lot more stress on your tendons, ligaments, and skeleton, which will push the body to fortify its structural system.
It’s not as simple as saying that “cardio is good” or “cardio is bad”. It’s important to focus on picking the right methods of fitness training to produce the effect that you’re looking for. Look at the human body for the adaptive organism that it is. It will react to the stimulus that you give it, so pick the right stimulus for the result that you’re targeting.
Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.
