Cardio
Some people say cardio is not neccassary cause you can just eat less food and skip the cardio, well there is more to cardio than burning calories during it, actually burning calories during it has little to nothing to do with the change in your phsiuqe, the fat burning benefits you get from cardio are hormones that are secreted during and after cardio that elevates your metabolism to burn fat while your resting, and prevent food from accumulating into fat.
It's important to remember that cardio is an important tool that you do which prevents food from accumulating on your body as both fat and muscle, but you can still gain muscle depending on other hormones such as testosterone, and how much of the thyroid hormone T3 is being produced in your body (see thyroid section at
? for more info on thyroid hormones), cause T3 eats away at fat and more muscle than other thyroid hormones. Later ill explain how to get more T2 rather than T3 from cardio, since T2 preserves muscle more than T3. The point of being able to eat more without it having to turn into bodyfat, will result in a faster metabolism. Your body will simply use the food as energy, turn some into glycogen, then most of it will actually get "wasted", yep, not excreted, your metabolism will simply waste the calories, cause it has no use for them, and in turn in will increase your metabolism, cause your metabolim HAS to increase to waste the calories.
The Hormonal response to cardio
The main hormone secreted when doing cardio is GH, secondly TSH (thyroid Stimulating Hormone). The more intense you do it the more of those hormones will get secreted. The point of these hormones is to help your body adapt to the physical stress your doing (cardio), your body does everything in its power to keep your body from getting heavier, which involves preventing food from accumulating on your body as fat and muscle. If you regulary do intense cardio (at least twice a week) for only even like 15 minutes, that is generally enough to keep anything you eat from acummulating on your body. Yes, you can eat all the pizza, cake, pie, tons of calories whatever you want, and you most likely wont gain weight or extremely slowly at the least, your body looks at this as a threat to your survival of the surroudings of your environment. But keep in mind in order for this non-accumulating of food to occur, you must push your self as hard as you can with your cardio workouts.
Long, moderate intensity cardio raises the following hormones: GH, TSH, T3, cortisol, Some T2. note: T3 and cortisol eat away at both fat and muscle
Short, high intensity cardio raises the following hormones: GH, TSH, T2, and some T3. note:T2 preserves more muscle than T3.
Long, low intensity cardio raises the following hormones: generally little to none at all.
The best way to increase your metabolism is a combination of doing intense cardio, and eating tons of calories all through out the day. Eating plenty of food helps your body adapt to its environment better, and in the case of cardio, it will help you lose fat. This is the key to getting that lean small look.
What kind of cardio should i do?
Now here's something interesting to note, do you think walking as a form of a cardio workout is a threat to your survival and that your body will prevent all incoming food from accumulating on your body? I don't think so, unless walking for you is difficult and intense to do. It's important to keep in mind that most of your calories you burn in a day is not directly from the activities that you do but rather your metabolism which is created from the activities that you do. In other words, changes to your physique are due to your metabolism and not burning calories during physical activities. The only time your changing your physique from burning calories from physical activites is when your starving yourself (this is actually done by the last week or so of a bodybuilder preparing for a contest, trying to get totally shredded, but they are losing muscle at the same time with this process). Remember, burning fat during cardio is not the real fat loss benefits you get from cardio, its all about adaptations to your environment, and this is all done by hormones.
Now putting this info together its easy to say that short intense cardio workouts is so much superior to longer less intense cardio. It enables you to lose fat and keep you from getting fatter, while allowing you to preserve more muscle than longer durations.
Another interesting comparison is looking at distance runners verses sprinters. Notice how distance runners are generally a lot skinnier with less muscle than sprinters who have a lot more muscle with still the same low amount of body fat? It's because of too much T3 and cortisol eating away at everything their body has so they get very light, so that the stress of running long distances is reduced greatly.
As far as what kind of cardio is better than the other (such as swimming, running, jump ropping, hiking, dancing, etc.., there is none! It's usually good to do different ones every now and then for a change of stress, which equates to more GH output.
how much cardio should i do?
Keeping in mind the more short and intense the better, it's good to mix up your cardio workouts, if running is the type of cardio you like doing then, say, do interval training one day, and do a 10 minute fast run another day etc..
Generally you don't have to do cardio every day to keep the hormones flowing, your body still releases hormones from a workout days after a workout and sometimes weeks, months, years, and/or decades after depending on how long of your life you've been doing cardio or whatever workout (this is discussed more in chapter XXX). I'd say do at least one cardio workout a week no matter what your goal is (gaining muscle or losing fat), but if your goal is to lose fat i'd probably do about 2 to 3 cardio workouts a week, that's it. I'd say if your a begginer do 3 a week, someone who has been doing cardio for a long time, it would not hurt to switch to only 1 or 2 a week, this is because of the long term hormonal effect of exercise (this is explained in more detail in chapter XXX). People who do cardio almost everyday (especially for longer durations), are wasting thier time! If Someone's goal is to gain muscle, they would probably only want to do 0 to 2 cardio sessions a week, doing only a few short sprints, usually only like two 15 - 30 second sprints. that's it. If you allready have an extremely fast metabolism i'd do no cardio at all if your trying to gain muscle.
Why NOT do the same "fat burning phase" cardio sessions with your gaining muscle phases? Cause like i said, this will stop you from gaining muscle along with fat. Your goal during the gaining muscle phase is to slow your metabolism down a bit so you can gain muscle. Doing cardio will prevent this. But, like i said, short sprints will not hinder muscle mass gains, while keeping your fat in check as best as possible.
At what time of the day should i do cardio?
Anytime you feel you have the highest amount of intensity to do it, after at least your first meal of the day, and that insulin is settled down a bit (this is done by not eating a high carb meal before the workout and that you've waited at least an hour after eating to do it.) The reason why you don't want so much insulin in your bloodstream while your working out is because insulin prevents GH from being secreted.
Most People will say first thing in the morning on an empty stomach, reason being is because your body is short on glycogen supply and will take only fat for fuel for the workout. This is nonsense. The point of doing cardio is alterating your internal hormonal environment that increases your metabolism, not burning fat during the workout. There are several important reasons why you should not do cardio first thing in the morning. One, you are more prone to injury, you just woke up from a 6+ hours of sleeping, your body needs warming up before doing intense exercise. Two, your intensity will be decreased, which is extremely important for a good hormonal excreting cardio workout. Three, when you wake up in the morning the hormone cortisol is raised which is the "main" catobolic hormone, which goes away after eating breakfast. Breakfast jumpstarts your metabolism for the day, skipping breakfast and doing cardio instead raises catobolic hormones even more and slows your metabolism, which is a good formula for losing muscle and gaining fat!
How do I combine my cardio workouts with my weight workouts?
Although it's better to do cardio and weights on seperate days. When doing both on the same day do resistance exercise first (but a 5 minute aerobic warm-up is beneficial before weight training to get the blood pumping). It's more important to preserve your strength, energy, and intensity for the weight training part of your workout, because intensity is more critical to weight training than to cardio training.
Although you can do two seperate workouts during the day, doing cardio earlier in the day, then do resistance later on in the day, making sure you have several meals inbetween that time. But if your doing them all in one workout, do resistance first, then cardio.
