Cardio
Cardio is the best fat loss exercise.
If you’re trying to get lean, you need to do cardio.
Lots of cardio.
Hop on the treadmill. Jack up the incline. Start jogging. Don't think about the similarities between you and a domesticated rodent trapped inside a rectangular glass cube, pitter-pattering on a plastic wheel to nowhere (or the oddity of performing a locomotor movement without translating through spacetime).
Repeat this on a daily basis for thirty minutes, and you'll be shredded before the sun sets… or so the story goes.
Unfortunately, doing cardio to lose fat is like having a kid to save a marriage.
Doesn't work nearly as well as you think it would.
You don't need to do cardio to burn fat. Cardio can actually be counterproductive. If you wanna know why and you're inclined to take advice from someone who thinks (knows) cats are better than dogs, then keep reading…
First, let's take a closer look at the word “cardio” as it's thrown around with less care than a Pollock painting. Clarity is needed.
Not everything on social media tagged “cardio” is actually “cardio” (like most forms of HIIT).
Real “cardio” is aerobic exercise, and aerobic exercise is easiest to define by heart rate. You can find your maximum heart rate by subtracting your age from 220. The aerobic heart-rate range is 50-85% of your maximum heart rate. So if you're twenty years old, your range is probably around 140-160 beats per minute. If you're sixty years old (or built like Droopy McCool), your range is probably only 110-130 beats per minute.
If you don't have a heart-rate monitor, you can also use muscle burn as an aerobic indicator. Because when your muscles are burning, you’ve extended beyond your aerobic ceiling. Muscle burn is a byproduct of the anaerobic-glycolytic energy system, which is one step above the aerobic energy system (from an intensity standpoint). For max aerobic involvement, you should be huffing and puffing without acidic interference.
Setting limits on aerobic involvement is important because different energy systems use different substrates to recycle energy. The anaerobic-glycolytic energy system uses muscle glycogen (stored carbs) to recycle energy, whereas the aerobic system uses triglycerides (body fat) to recycle energy. This is why cardio is considered “fat-burning” exercise.
Even though cardio will break down your body fat stores, there are a few problems with becoming a cardio queen.
First, you don't need to do cardio to activate your aerobic system.
The aforementioned heart-rate range(s) for aerobic exercise represents the aerobic ceiling. The aerobic floor is, uhhh, your resting heart rate. Believe it or not, your aerobic system is illuminating your existence as you read this, which means your body is currently using triglycerides to recycle energy in some capacity.
You need to exist near your ceiling to improve your aerobic capacity. You don't need to exist near your ceiling to use body fat as an energy-recycling substrate.
Existential fat burn hasn't made you shredded (assuming you aren't shredded) because macro energy balance beats micro energy balance. Energy balance is the relationship between energetic expenses, energetic income, and energetic assets.
- Expenses > income = decrease assets
- Income > expenses = increase assets
Expenses consist of everything from deliberate exercise (jogging for the sake of jogging) to non-deliberate physiological processes (heart beating, brain thinking, kidneys filtering, pancreas squirting bile into your stomach to help you digest the slice of chocolate-covered bacon you pretended to enjoy because it was $7). Income consists of energetic material your body derives from food. Assets consist of a combination of surplus energetic material your body was given but had no immediate use for as well as other tissues your body is reluctantly capable of sacrificing for energy. (Pssst, body fat is an energetic asset.)
You can estimate your existential expenses (the amount of energy required to exist as a somewhat sedentary human) by multiplying your weight (in pounds) by thirteen: If you weigh 180 pounds, your average existential expenses are around 2300 calories. (This is not 100% accurate. Just an estimate.)
You use body fat (energetic asset) to cover some of your existential expenses, but this doesn't result in real-world fat loss because your income contains enough energetic material to replenish what was spent. In other words, you spend $100, but you make $100, so there's no net change.
Stop eating tomorrow.
You will lose fat (eventually).
Simply by existing.
You will also cease to exist (eventually).
Of course, you don't have to starve yourself to lose fat (you shouldn't). You can eat a great deal of food and lose fat without becoming a cardio queen as long as your expenses are greater than your income. Adding cardio will increase your expenses (energy required to exist), which will increase the amount of fat you burn on any given day… but not by as much as you'd expect.
Second, cardio isn't knock-out effective.
Google says jogging will burn around 100 calories per mile of distance covered. You'll also burn 100 calories if you walk a mile. There’s not much difference between jogging and walking, from a calorie-burn standpoint, as long as the distance is consistent. The benefit of jogging (for fat loss) is finishing faster, which is a bonus for everyone (except your significant other).
You put on your Sunday best and hit the road. You jog for 30 minutes, averaging 10-minute miles. (This estimation might be generous you've been suctioned to the right angle of your sectional couch for the past seven years.) Based on the calorie-per-mile standard, you assume you burned 300 calories and your exercise-adjusted expenses have risen to 2600 calories (from 2300 calories).
Not so fast.
A three-mile jog may burn 300 calories, but this doesn't mean your expenses for the day will jump 300 calories. Your body can offset exercise-related expenses by spending less on non-exercise activities.
A chunk of your daily energy requirements is a byproduct of non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). Rolling your mustache while you browse the internet is NEAT. Standing in front of your stove to cook dinner is NEAT. Closing the bathroom cupboard door (the one your wife always leaves open) with the force of Thor (to communicate your continual frustration) is NEAT.
When you exercise more, your body can decrease NEAT (make you lazy) in an attempt to keep its expenses within a narrow window. As for why the body would do such a cruel thing, now isn't the time for a long-winded explanation. Some research suggests you may only burn 50-75% of the calories you think you should after accounting for exercise-related metabolic adaptations. This is all you need to know.
And so, your thirty-minute bout with breathing difficulties may only have boosted your expenses by 150 or 200 calories. The treadmill said you burned more. You didn't. The smartwatch said you burned more. You didn't. Your brain says you burned more because after your run you felt your heartbeat in your head and that had to mean something, right? Right!?
Nope.
150-200 calories.
It's not much.
But it's also not nothing.
Let's take a look at how impactful this can be.
The average Shemp gains around 1-2 pounds per year.
The caloric “math” for gaining 1-2 pounds per year is laughable. You eat 10-20 calories above your expenses for the day. That's all. Your margin of error is, like, three almonds.
We're surrounded by hyper-palatable foods. We can't stop snacking. You'd think Shemps would be suffocating themselves with excess energy. Sometimes they are, I guess (I've seen My 600-lb Life.) But, for the most part, the human body does a decent job of regulating hunger and appetite around a baseline, which is remarkable considering we don't think twice about what touches our tongues and modern-day foods have ruined the intelligence of our intestines. (Don't tell me you haven't heard about the gut-brain axis. I'm convinced we're controlled by bacteria, the way a stormtrooper controls an AT-AT. Don't fear death. The bacteria controlling you will live on.)
You take a Shemp on a crash course to gain 1-2 pounds every year and you make him jog three miles a few times every week. You'd assume this would result in some fat loss. Crunch the numbers:
- 20 extra calories per day =
140 extra calories per week - 3-mile jog, 3 days per week =
600 fewer calories per week
At worst, he'd create a 450-calorie deficit, which would result in losing almost one pound per week… unless, of course, he was offsetting exercise-related metabolic boosts with his income.
It's easy to sabotage your fat-loss efforts with food.
Adding cardio to your life has ripple effects. Some are sinister. For instance, once you start exercising regularly, your body might adjust your appetite and sense of satiety in an attempt to get you to eat more.
Might.
Don't get discouraged.
Your body isn't your number one enemy.
You are.
“I ran today. I can have that cupcake.”
No.
You can't.
Self-sabotage isn't always ill-intentioned, either. You come back from a jog and eat a heaping spoonful of peanut butter because some pastel-colored “wellness” website said peanut butter was a “protein powerhouse” (it's not) and you thought it'd help you recover from your workout.
Guess what?
You potentially negated most of the “fat burning” that took place.
Cardio can do more harm than good because of moral justification and similar compensatory actions.
The degree to which cardio actually contributes to fat loss is contingent upon your income.
Even though cardio tips the scale in favor of fat loss by increasing your expenses, this doesn't guarantee fat loss because the increase isn't enough to make income a non-factor. I wish this weren't the case. I wish cardio burned an unfathomable amount of calories, an amount impossible to ingest.
Nope.
Casual cardio barely negates the calories inside one of those insect-sized boxes of raisins. It's not powerful enough to ensure fat loss without nutritional awareness, which is ironic because nutritional awareness is powerful enough to ensure fat loss without casual cardio.
Remember, your body is using energy 24/7. If you fix your income below your existential expenses, you can be rather certain you'll lose weight because your existential expenses are rather steady. (Metabolic adaptations occur over time as you lose weight, not immediately.) Day after day, you'll burn around BWx13 calories.
Beyond ensuring results, using diet to drive fat loss is generally easier than relying on cardio.
The effort requires to increase expenses by 500 calories is greater than the effort to decrease income by 500 calories, especially for a beginner. Instead of eating a cream-cheese-covered bagel and drinking a glass of orange juice for breakfast, you eat some eggs and drink some black coffee. You put 300 fewer calories into your body and you didn't have to rise before the rooster and run six miles in sub-zero temperatures (in recently purchased above-the-knee-shorts).
Exercise requires time and a healthy body. What happens when you're awake all night consoling your two-year-old daughter who can't sleep because she has an ear infection? Are you still going to wake up at five o'clock for cardio? What happens when you get that itchy pre-tendonitis feeling underneath your kneecap? You gonna fight through the pain? What about when the itch becomes an ache?
Driving fat loss with diet is more antifragile.
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t do cardio.
Cardio is good for your heart. If you want to improve your health, you should do joint-friendly cardio. If you're an overweight middle-aged man that's been sedentary for the past nine years, pause and think about the preparedness of your feet, knees, and hips before you repeatedly bash your bones against concrete. I wince when I see fat people jogging — an all-too-artistic rendering of the second reason cardio can do more harm than good.
Cardio can also help with fat loss, as long as you don't eat like a cloaca and sabotage yourself.
That's the thing, though…
Results will always depend on your diet, which is why diet drives fat loss. Not cardio.
May the Gains be with you,
Ant
PS
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