8 Things Nobody Tells You About Cardio

Find out how cardio actually affects fat loss, muscle growth, and your health in this Science-Based Presentation About Cardio Mistakes and Myths. Many people try to use cardio to burn belly fat and do as many cardio fat-burning workouts as possible. However, is this actually a good strategy? How does cardio vs strength training stack up? Learn what you never knew about cardio.Show more

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Performing cardio can be very beneficial for your heart, your lungs, and your overall health. But overdoing cardio has been proven to lead to a shorter lifespan. This is just one of many counterintuitive things that many people simply don't know about cardio. So today I want to go over the 8 things that nobody tells you about cardiovascular exercise.

Starting first with the simple fact that you don't burn as many calories from cardio as you think. Most people believe that you burn a lot more calories from cardio than resistance training. But according to the research, there actually isn’t that much of a difference. For example, we can look at a study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. (9) In this study, researchers compared the energy expenditure of 30 minutes of weight training, to 30 minutes of a HIIT/circuit style training workout, to 30 minutes of a steady-state cardio workout performed at 70% of the participant's maximum heart rate. As you can see in the graph in front of you, there was no significant difference in energy expenditure between weight training and steady-state cardio. (10) In other words, if you want to lose fat.... from a purely caloric perspective, you would be just as well off performing a resistance training workout with a decent amount of training volume.

In fact, resistance training is even better from a pure calorie-cutting perspective because another thing that no one tells you is that cardio Can Cause “Constrained Energy Expenditure. This is one reason why cardio isn’t that effective for weight loss and fat loss in general. Constrained energy expenditure basically points to the phenomenon that doing cardio tends to lower calorie expenditure in the hours after you're done with cardio. When most people do (aerobic) exercise, their non-exercise physical activity, also known as NEAT, tends to go down. This refers to the calories you burn through everyday activities, mostly movement that's not related to exercise. A couple examples include fidgeting, bouncing your foot up and down, and even the way you sit in your chair.

The point is after burning calories through cardio, people tend to become less active throughout the rest of the day. For example, they may keep their hands and feet still instead of bouncing their feet around and fidgeting. Or, they may slouch in their chair instead of sitting in an active and straightened position. They may also be more likely to drive instead of walking. If you've ever done a heavy cardio session, you've probably noticed this yourself. A simple task like going to the kitchen to grab a glass of water requires more mental and physical effort than normal. In general, your body will make many unconscious adaptations where it'll cut back on every form of non-essential energy expenditure if you try to burn more and more calories from cardio reducing the number of calories you burn for the rest of the day which brings us right to the next point...

Cardio is Not That Beneficial for Fat Loss. Now don't get me wrong. Cardio can be beneficial for many reasons, including improving heart health, endurance, and your health and well-being in general. However, if your sole goal is to lose weight, cardio is not the most effective option. This was well shown by a meta-analysis in which 14 studies were reviewed that involved over 1,800 overweight and obese people. (11) The researchers looked at whether cardio would benefit weight loss, and when the data was in they concluded that "Isolated aerobic exercise is not an effective weight loss therapy." (12) So you're probably thinking well duh...isolated cardio won't work because doing cardio alone without dieting obviously won't help you lose weight. But what if I told you that you could just diet without the cardio and still lose the same amount of weight without all that extra effort. If you don't believe me I'll link up another meta-analysis, which by the way a meta-analysis is considered the gold standard of evidence. But this other meta-analysis also found that adding cardio to a diet plan did not increase weight loss compared to just dieting without cardio. The difference was 11 kilos of weight loss versus 10.7 kilos of weight loss. (13) So if you're doing cardio to improve your cardiovascular health or your endurance capacity you're on the right track, but if you're doing cardio to lose an extra 0.3 kilos which is the same as a little more than half a pound I think you're wasting your time...