Cardio addendum
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It seems that some of my posts last week including the steroid video and the cardio article got some of you guys all worked up:). I am going to run with it. You guys tell me what you want and you will get it. In the post from last week, I hit on a lot of topics surrounding cardio. It has been ‘globe gym’s personal trainer’ method since the 70′s. They would warm you up with 10 minutes of cardio, stretch, hit every machine once in the gym, then finish you off with 30 minutes of more cardio-ahhh, what a workout. Didn’t you feel like you got your money’s worth?
I need you to understand that there are different energy systems in the body and if you try to train them with equal intensity at the same time, you will get no where. Typical cardio that I am talking about is working your ‘aerobic’ energy system. Not every intense and not needed by most. It falls at the bottom of my hierarchy of fat loss, somewhere around #5, behind: metabolic lifting, sprinting, interval training, and then heavy weight training. What works the cardio system? Does the cardio system work the muscles? No, the muscles work the cardiovascular system, which means that the more intensely and the more muscle you work, the more you will stress the cardiovascular system. I would think more cardiologists would be talking about this, but they don’t seem to be. The more muscle worked, the more oxygen debt you are going to get=more fat loss. This only works though if we are in some kind of calorie deficit.
Slow, long distance exercise makes you more efficient at utilizing fat stores, you don’t want to be efficient! You want to create a metabolic disturbance! You want to be a tank! Got it? Now, when is cardio appropriate? Some people are shocked when they find out that I do condone ‘cardio’ some of the time. If you like it, all power to you, do it. If you are extremely overweight, then you will start with this mode of exercise simply because you won’t be able to handle anything else. If you are an endurance athlete (they are the most injured btw), then you must train this way at least some of the time, although I believe I could get superior results with a marathon runner without them on a typical distance program. And finally, for recovery or when you are simply too drained and lack the recovery means. This last method would apply to bodybuilders that don’t have the energy to do sprints or interval training and athletes that are simply tapped out. The Russians used to take their athletes and drop them off on the beach, barefoot and tell them to walk for 3 or 4 hours. This would help to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system. Anyway, hope this sheds some more light on the topic.
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