To Cardio, or Not To Cardio… That is the question!

As with much of the rest of the health and fitness world, many fallacies exist around cardio.  I will do my best in this brief article to dispel some of those fallacies, and discuss some of the considerations for how much and what type of cardio you should be doing. 

So what are some of the fallacies that exist???  When I think of cardio fallacies I think of things like:

• More cardio will make me skinnier
• We need to do cardio to “burn” calories
• We need to do cardio to be in great shape
• Cardio makes us healthy
• The more cardio the better

Do you have any of these ideas about cardio?  If so, keep reading and see if I can convince you otherwise.

Will cardio make you skinny??? (A better question may be do you even want to be skinny, but we’ll save that for another day.)  Well, my answer would be a resounding no!  Follow me here for a second… Do you have friends who are runners?  If so, how many of them are skinny?  How many of them are skinny fat (fairly small but soft and flabby), or maybe chubby?  Have you ever sat by a jogging path and looked at the people running by?  How many of them are skinny?  How many are skinny fat, or chubby?  Skinny people tend to gravitate towards running, the same way tall people gravitate towards basketball, but running will not make you skinny anymore than basketball will make you tall.  I know runners, and often watch people run on the waterfront in PDX, and what I see is much more skinny fat people and chubby people, then skinny people.  I know this is anecdotal, but there’s more to come on why cardio doesn’t make you skinny.

The idea that you need to “burn” calories to lose weight, is overly simplistic and mostly just useful for marketing gym memberships, fitness classes, and fitness DVD’s.  Guru’s argue back and forth about whether or not the key to weight loss is as simple as take in less than you burn, but even if it is that simple, doing high intensity cardio to burn calories doesn’t make sense.  Here’s why it doesn’t make sense…  When you jump on the elliptical and go hard for 30 minutes, racking up 350 calories burned (as the machine tells you), you did some work!  You leave tired, but you’re satisfied that you burned 350 calories.  The problem is that even if the machine calculated your “burn” correctly (they often over estimate), you still likely did less for your calorie burn than if you would have spent 30 minutes lifting weights.  You see, 30 minutes of weight lifting may only burn 150 or 200 calories, but the increase in your metabolism following that weightlifting session (EPOC-  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_post-exercise_oxygen_consumption) can last as long as 38 hours after the session!  Additionally, building more muscle means that your resting metabolic rate is increased every day you have that muscle.  So, any way you slice it, you will likely “burn” more calories with weightlifting than you would with cardio.

Do you need to do cardio to be in great “shape”???  Well, I guess that depends on how you define cardio…  The approach I recommend for most people includes lots of low-level cardio (read: walking), and lots of strength training.  I would argue that most people can get in just as good of shape with this approach as someone who’s running regularly (or doing other mainstream forms of intense cardio).  They will not perform as well on extended efforts (30-minutes or more), and they won’t be as proficient at running (or Zumba or Spin) as someone who’s doing those things regularly.  They will however perform nearly as well on a VO2Max test (the gold standard for cardiovascular performance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VO2_max), and they will avoid the overuse injuries and metabolic damage that can come from large amounts of intense cardio (more on that in a future blog).  They will also likely be much stronger than the runner, and strength trumps all! 

The idea that you need tons of cardio to be healthy is just ludicrous to me!  So much so, that I don’t even want to address it, but I will.  Here’s my first piece of evidence that large amounts of cardio does not make you healthier than other exercise:

  

Which one of these two people look healthier to you???  To me, one looks like a POW, and the other looks like the peak of health!  The adaptations that occur in your body when you are doing large amounts of cardio are very similar to those that happen as you die.  Does muscle wasting and storing fat inside muscle sound like health to you?  Clearly cardio doesn’t MAKE us healthy!

I’ve already touched around the fallacy of “the more cardio the better” above, but I’ll briefly touch on it again.  I don’t like that society has this “everything in moderation” mentality because I think that’s total BS, but that said, I think it’s clear that moderation is better in a lot of things.  More cardio is not better, unless you’re training for an endurance event.  More cardio will not necessarily help you lose fat faster, it won’t necessarily make you healthier, and it won’t necessarily improve your fitness.  We’ve covered this enough right???

So, who should do cardio, what kind of cardio should they do, and why?  As I said before I think everyone should be strength training and doing lots of walking.  These things will help everyone be healthier, and leaner, and more fit.  Beyond that, the question gets more complicated… 

Are you metabolically broken (read: obese), or suffering from adrenal fatigue, hormone issues, or thyroid dysfunction?  If any of those apply to you, then you are best to not do any more exercise than what’s listed above.  If you fit into any of those categories, you need to clean up your diet, sleep, lift some weights, and walk, AND THAT’S ALL!  Once your metabolic/hormonal/adrenal/thyroid issues are improved, you can begin adding in some higher intensity work.

If you’re metabolically healthy, then adding in some higher intensity work can be a great thing for you.  If want to train for an endurance event, go for it, but still do the strength training and walking.  If you just want to be healthy, or you want to lose some fat, adding in some high intensity interval work once or twice a week might be great for you.  Studies show that high intensity work can be great for metabolism, VO2Max, and other indicators of health and fitness, so if you’re not metabolically broken this could be a good thing to add into your routine.

I hope I’ve proved my point to you that more cardio isn’t better, and not everyone needs any more cardio than just daily walking.  Did this article clear things up for you, or just make you more confused?  What questions do you have about application of cardio?