Cardio Exercise Training For Losing Weight

The Biggest Lie The Fitness Industry Fed You on Fat Burning!

Fitness tip #25 –Cardio Training done the right way

There has been a great deal of miss-understanding for sometime as to what type of cardiovascular training is best for losing body fat.

This is largely due to the fact that the obesity epidemic is a relatively new phenomenon. It has only been in recent times that we’ve really had to specialise in fat loss.

For years the fitness industry has been trying to copy other sports like long distance running and bodybuilding, with the idea that because these athletes are super lean this is how we must train.

This is a big mistake, it is not the same for the average person trying to lose fat to copy the training of an athlete. Although weight training and cardiovascular training are both essential for fat loss, neither bodybuilding nor steady state cardio training are the best form of exercise for fat loss!  

To give you a better understanding of the basic principles of fat loss, I am going to get a bit technical and have a crack at explaining some common terms so frequently used in the fitness industry.

Cardiovascular Training

Referring to the heart (cardio), blood, and blood vessels (vascular). Also known as cardio, many people confuse aerobic training with cardio training, although aerobic training is cardio, cardio training can be either aerobic or anaerobic.

Aerobic Training

Oxygen-requiring. When you hear people talking about aerobic training they are generally referring to low intensity endurance activities such as jogging, swimming and cycling.

Anaerobic Training

Not requiring oxygen. An anaerobic environment lacks oxygen. This usually refers to high intensity training such as sprinting and weight training.

Metabolism

The whole range of biochemical processes that occur within us. The term is commonly used to refer specifically to the breakdown of food and its transformation into energy. Metabolism is largely to do with the amount of muscle you carry, the more muscle you carry the higher your metabolism. Creating a high metabolism is the key to fat loss!

The Truth about Cardiovascular Training For Fat Loss

For the past few years there has been a lot of confusion as to how to effectively train for fat loss. The main reason for this is largely to do with past scientific research that had been conducted on the effects of exercise on fat burning.

Research shows that when performing low intensity exercise (aerobic) the body will take its energy from burning stored body fat, whereas when performing high intensity exercise (anaerobic) the body will take its energy from stored carbohydrates.

So based on this research people have focused all their training around steady state aerobic training, believing this is the #1 training method for fat loss. This was a miss-interpretation of the research.               

What the research didn’t take into account was the total number of calories burnt during the course of the entire workout. Although when exercising at low intensities the primary fuel source is stored body fat, the actual total number of calories burnt in the workout isn’t very much at all. Whereas when training at high intensities you’ll burn significantly more calories in total, meaning you’ll burn more stored body fat.

“The Fat Burning Zone”… Fact or Fiction?

“The fat burning zone” is where your heart rate stay’s between 50-70% of its estimated maximum rate.

The TRUTH is there is no “fat burning zone”, the body’s preferred source of energy is ALWAYS stored body fat unless you’re exercising, so in theory your ALWAYS in the “fat burning zone”.

So if you’re always in the “fat burning zone” why go to the gym and spend an hour walking on a treadmill with the misconception that you’re training in the "fat burning zone"? You could save yourself the bother and lay in bed and burn calories!

What has happened is that people have been exercising at an intensity which is far too low for them, believing that they’re training within the “fat burning zone” and not really burning many calories or elevating the metabolism.

In addition, when performing low intensity exercises you’re only burning calories whilst you’re performing the exercise, as soon as you finish your workout you stop burning calories.

Aerobic training causes the body to reduce its release of the fat burning hormones and enzymes, this is not good if you’re trying to lose fat!

Another problem with aerobic training is that it encourages the body to adapt by becoming more energy efficient, so the more you do, the better your body adapts to it. This means that it takes less energy to perform the same workout.

Although this sounds like a good thing, if you’re trying to lose body fat, it’s not. A body that is energy efficient will make it harder for you to lose fat, because for you to get the same training response you’ll need to keep increasing the distance, you can only increase the speed so much because you’ll get to a point where your aerobic system will no longer be able to keep up, so your body will switch to the anaerobic system, therefore you’ll be doing anaerobic training anyway!

Why not just start off training in the anaerobic system if you’re going to end up there anyway?

So what is high intensity training?...........

HIIT – (High Intensity Interval Training). Interval training is short bouts(10-60 seconds) of high intensity exercise broken up with periods of low intense exercise. The good thing with this is that you can burn more calories in a shorter amount of time, so there’s no need to spend 45-60 mins pounding away on a treadmill, you can be done in 20-25 mins and that's including your warm up and cool down.             

When performing high intensity exercise you’re not only burning considerably more calories whilst exercising, but you’ll also burn heaps of calories after. Interval training will keep your metabolism elevated for up to 24 hours after your workout has finished, through what is known as EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption).  So the total number of calories burnt from that workout will be much higher.

Also as you become better at this form of training you can just keep increasing the speed/time of the work interval or decrease the amount of time of the rest interval.

Here is the original interval training and weight loss study from the mid-90's. This study included a group of people doing 15 weeks of interval training and another group doing 20 weeks of aerobic training.

The study showed the energy expended from the aerobic group was 28661 calories. The total calories burned for the interval training was less than half at 13614. 

Although the interval training group burnt fewer calories they had three times greater fat loss. This demonstrates that interval training is the best way to increase the metabolism. That creating a high metabolism is the most important factor when training for fat loss.

Tremblay A, Simoneau JA, Bouchard C.
Impact of exercise intensity on body fatness and skeletal muscle metabolism.
Metabolism. 1994 Jul;43(7):814-8.

This type of training can be done anywhere, running/cycling in the park, swimming in the pool, on any type of cardio equipment, on a boxing bag or even roller blading if that’s your thing. Personally I prefer to run. If you want to make things interesting, try accelerating/decelerating and cutting and turning in different directions, this will really crank the intensity up and hit your legs hard. Interval training will only aid in fat loss though if it is accompanied by a suitable weight training program and a well balanced diet.
                  

Reading this report will mean nothing to you if you don’t take action and begin to implement some changes into your everyday life, without taking action you’ll be stuck in a vicious circle of fad diets and magic pills only to find yourself back where you started, frustrated and confused. It’s up to you to make things happen and to take control of your own health, don’t you think you’re worth it?  

Take action TODAY! What are you going to do today to become who you want to be?


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