The Unbelievable Cardio Myth: Why Cardio Is Possibly The Most Overrated Way To Lose Fat
Before you get hate mail or rants and compliments from people calling me an idiot, let me clarify. Cardio works to lose fat. That’s obvious. Cardio is great for general health, heart health, and just getting you off your butt. However, when it comes to losing fat fast, especially for busy moms and dads, cardio is way, way overrated. Is it sacrilege for a personal trainer to say cardio is overrated or doesn’t work?
I do not think. In my personal opinion, it’s the lazy and uninformed personal trainers, nutritionists, medical professionals and every other health related professional who should be ashamed and stupid for not doing the job and actually helping the people who come to them looking for of help. . Before we burn any more bridges, let me go over some of the reasons cardio for fat loss is the most overrated type of exercise known to man (followed closely by crunches).
1. Traditional cardio workouts for weight loss are a huge waste of time.
When you think of cardiovascular exercises to lose weight, how long do you think you need to do it? Most people I come across tend to think you need to do it for a minimum of 30 minutes and some even go so far as to say that you need to do it for 60-90 minutes EVERY DAY to get any kind of weight loss benefit. Do you really have 60 minutes of free time to devote to ineffective cardio training?
2. Adaptability.
Your body is very intelligent and adapts to any form of exercise you give it. That’s one of the reasons why you should switch up your workout every few weeks, but this is especially true when it comes to cardio for weight loss. Let me give you some numbers to consider. Let’s say you traditionally do a cardio workout for about 45 minutes 3-6 days a week and that burns about 400 calories. Sounds good right? But what you don’t realize is that every time you do that workout, your body is adapting to that workout, which means you burn fewer and fewer calories each time you do it.
So after a few weeks, instead of burning 400 calories, you’re burning 380. You can take that further and say that in a few months you’re only burning about 300 calories. But how do you solve that problem? The goal is to burn more calories, not fewer, right? To fix it, you would have to do your cardio for a longer period of time or work harder in those 45 minutes. Sounds good. You can do it… but remember, you’re working harder and taking longer to convert the same number of calories you burned a few months ago, when you weren’t working as hard. Call me crazy, but I don’t think that’s the goal you’re looking for.
3. The ‘fat burning zone’ doesn’t exist.
This is one of my favorite cardio workouts for weight loss myths because it’s a pretty skewed way of looking at the science. Yes, your body burns a higher PERCENTAGE of fat at a given heart rate or work zone, but who cares. When I’m sitting on my butt in front of the TV, my body is burning a higher percentage of body fat than when I’m working hard doing a fat-burning exercise, but that doesn’t mean I’m burning more fat. The key word is ‘percentage’.
Do you want to burn a higher percentage of fat, or just more fat? If you’re like most people, all you want is to burn more fat, and you couldn’t care less about the percentage of fat calories versus non-fat calories. To burn more fat, you need to stop doing as much low to moderate intensity cardio and start doing more resistance training and interval training. Resistance training shouldn’t take a lot of time and should involve lots of full-body workouts and full-body exercises. It should take less than 20 minutes (hopefully around 10) so you have no excuse not to do it.
You should not focus on useless exercises like triceps kickdowns, chest flyes, leg extensions, biceps curls, etc. and you should focus on exercises that give you the most fat-burning bang for your buck. So stop putting all your faith in the treadmill, elliptical, stationary bike and stair climber and stop heading straight for the cardio area at the gym as soon as you walk in the door because that’s not the best way to lose. fat. There are much better ways than traditional cardio workouts to lose weight that will burn fat much faster and make you feel better and healthier in much less time than most cardio addicts spending their time warming up.
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