{"id":2803,"date":"2018-03-07T21:26:28","date_gmt":"2018-03-07T20:26:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/taoofstefan.com\/blog\/?p=2803"},"modified":"2018-03-18T15:40:37","modified_gmt":"2018-03-18T14:40:37","slug":"dont-do-cardio-for-weight-loss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/taoofstefan.com\/blog\/main\/lifestyle\/dont-do-cardio-for-weight-loss\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t do cardio for weight loss and what to do instead"},"content":{"rendered":"

You read that right. Don’t do cardio for weight loss. It sounds\u00a0atrocious to many people and trainers out there. And there’s a good reason for that. Doing cardio for weight loss initially seems to work, it’s simple and easy, doesn’t take much of an investment and as a trainer, it is stupidly easy to program. I want to share more on what I learned about the human physiology and weight loss in the course of this article.<\/p>\n

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Human physiology<\/h1>\n

Here’s why cardio for weight loss has such a good reputation, despite the fact that it’s a terrible idea for the purpose of weight loss: minute for minute you actually – initially! – burn the most amount of calories. Sounds great, but the problem is that it only works initially.<\/p>\n

What do I mean by that? If you did a little deeper into human physiology<\/a> you’ll quickly notice that the human body is an outstanding apparatus when it comes to adaptation and efficiency. It finds ways to get by on less or more, too much or too little. So the moment you do something your body will start to become proficient in that one thing. If you lift weight to gain more muscle mass you are very familiar with this concept already.<\/p>\n

\"Don't<\/a><\/p>\n

You lift weight, your body initially breaks down, recovers and tries to adapt to the new load by getting stronger. Easy.<\/p>\n

More weight = more muscle (in the long run)<\/p>\n

In other words, you become efficient at it and if you wouldn’t increase the weights, you would simply plateau there.<\/p>\n

What’s cardio all about?<\/h2>\n

What has this to do with cardio? Everything. Now ask yourself what the body tries to accomplish when you go running for an hour, what exactly is happening? You are stressing your cardiovascular system and you need a lot of energy to do this. Energy equals calories in this case. So you spent calories, which is great for weight loss, right? Wrong.<\/p>\n

\"Don't<\/a><\/p>\n

Adapting to stimuli: Cardio vs Muscles<\/h2>\n

It’s wrong because your body will adapt to this stressor by getting more efficient doing it. One of the things the body can do in this case is to get your motorfunction on a better level (as in practice makes perfect). A perfect stride costs less energy than an imperfect one, which means your body can to more strides with the same amount of energy. That’s fine, the problem really lies in thefact that your body will also become energy-efficient too.<\/p>\n

\"Don't<\/a><\/p>\n

This means it will find ways to get the running session done with less energy. And that is the problem with cardio for weight loss. If you never did this, then it initially works fine because your body is inefficient. The moment the scales tips over to being efficient this advantage will quickly turn. If you want to burn the same amount of what you did at the beginning you need to increase the stimulus. There are really only two ways of doing this:<\/p>\n