20240129 Day 659 Part-3 - FAQ: “How Much Cardio Should I Be Doing?” The Full Length Version

20240129 Day 659 Part-3
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FAQ: “How Much Cardio Should I Be Doing?”
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I saw this Short where MPMD Derek was on some Podcast and the guy on the Podcast said something like, “I can’t lose weight. I train 5x (I think he said) time a week. I do 20 minutes of cardio…”
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Ok. I’m stopping there because that’s what I want to focus on. Here’s the thing folks, “20 minutes of cardio…” What exactly does that mean? I interpret that as at best, a jog on the treadmill at an 10-15 minute mile pace, or at worst just walking, maybe on a slight incline.
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What you have to consider is the concept of raw stimulus magnitude. That “cardio” isn’t either hard enough OR long enough to have a robust enough training effect. It’s “burning calories” sure, you’re expending energy but not that much for the time investment. For the 2-300 calories you expended at most, you could just not eat 2 slices of bread for instance, have 20 more minutes in your day and have the same net result 🤷🏿‍♂️
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If you’re going to invest time training, train for a specific adaptation. If you’re going to only invest 15-20 minutes for conditioning, sprint! Pull/push a sled! Do a loaded EMOM or any number of intensification methods to increase training density.
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Conversely, if you have time but want to sham and just walk/ruck/move at zone-2 or below, it’s got to be for longer time domains to get a training effect. If the intensity is low, duration has to be high and vice versa.
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So now that we’ve defined what’s actually going to be worth our time, how much of it should we be doing?
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The simple answer is however much you can recover from. The shorter, more intense sessions like sprinting will also generate a ton of fatigue. They will also have a more robust training effect so 1-3x a week is probably plenty for anyone who isn’t a speed oriented athlete of some kind.
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Conversely, zone-2 type training is easy to recover from after acclimating to it so 3-5 days or more is a good idea depending on how you feel like managing your training time. I’ve personally found very robust adaptations from daily Zone-2 but I don’t recommend that for everyone.
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I DO recommend walking everyday for everyone, to the tune of 9000 steps or roughly 4 miles cumulatively throughout the day.
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Stay in the fight 🇺🇸🇰🇪
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