Articles

The Truth About Cardio
by Rick Mayo

The human body is an amazing machine. It has the uncanny ability to adapt to a wide variety of stresses. Whether that stress comes from internal or external sources, your body is always in a battle to adapt and create a balance between the stress and the adaptation to that stress.

A great example of this process is how your body reacts to different types of exercise. It has long been believed that cardiovascular training is a great tool for weight reduction and control but the stress/adaptation model reveals that this is not true.

We'll use running as an example. Let's say that you run 5 miles three times a week. When you first began this program you were most likely very inefficient and burned loads of calories laboring through these running sessions. Over time y ou noticed things got a little easier and that you covered the miles in less time with less energy. Great, if your goal is to run 5 miles as fast as possible. No so great, if you want to burn off those hot wings from the night before.

You see, as your body adapts to the stress of running, it becomes more efficient at that particular activity resulting in less calories burned with the same level of activity. That means each year you would need to run more miles to just maintain your weight/body fat levels. This is cardio's "Dark Secret": your body's own stress adaptation is working against your weight loss efforts.

On the other hand, we have strength training. The body's adaptation to the stress of strength training is to add more lean mass (muscle). Lean mass increases your resting metabolic rate which accounts for over 80% of your daily calories burned. This never changes. Twenty years from now your strength training workouts will create stress for your body and your body will respond by adding (or at least maintaining) muscle which will result in a leaner, calorie burning machine with the same time investment as before. Based on our running scenario, in twenty years, you'd need to more than double your miles per week just to maintain your current weight/body fat! Call me crazy but I think I'll lift.