The Worst Cardio Mistakes Everyone Makes For Fat Loss (Avoid These)

Here is a brief summary of the key points from the transcript: - Cardio has benefits like improving cardiorespiratory fitness and recovery between weight training sets, but diet is more important for fat loss. Simply doing cardio without diet changes results in less fat loss than expected due to compensatory eating and metabolic adaptations. - Cardio should be done after weights or separately to avoid acute interference effects on muscle strength and hypertrophy, especially for more advanced trainees. - High intensity interval training (HIIT) can burn calories quickly but may hinder strength gains more than steady state cardio. It should be used sparingly (1-2x per week). - Excessive cardio frequency (more than 3-4x per week) and duration (more than 30 mins per session) can hamper strength and muscle gains. The optimal amount depends on the type and intensity. - Fasted cardio doesn't lead to more fat loss overall. Focus on cardio at times you can stick to it consistently instead. - Practical recommendations include starting with 1-2 HIIT sessions per week and adding steady state cardio as needed based on goals, lifestyle, and monitoring strength/recovery. Lower impact cardio may be preferable.

Speaker A: So in this video, I'm going to lay out the five most common cardio mistakes that people make when trying to lose fat. Now, let me start by saying that while this video will focus on the biggest pitfalls of cardio, I am still a big fan of cardio in the right context and when done the right way. So contrary to what some gymbros might tell you, cardio does have some serious benefits. Cardiorespiratory fitness, which is basically your body's ability to give your muscles oxygen when they need it, is a major predictor of all cause mortality. So basically, just death from all causes and cardiovascular disease. Just look at the results of this 2009 meta analysis. Just about every study favored high cardio fitness over low cardio fitness when it came to both all cause mortality and coronary heart disease and cardiovascular disease. But it isn't just about health. Having better cardio can also help with your training goals by improving overall work capacity and recovery in between sets. Just think about how much harder three sets of eight on the squat feels when your cardio is lacking. You might need to rest all day long between those sets if you've been skipping cardio, and you might even struggle to get all the volume in. But when your cardio is on point, you can get all that work done much more efficiently. It's also worth mentioning that physical activity is an important factor for long term weight maintenance. Research shows that individuals who are more active tend to be more successful in keeping the weight off after a period of dieting. However, there is still a lot of misinformation around cardio and fat loss. So with these upsides in mind, let's dig into some of the biggest mistakes that I see people make and then lay out some practical recommendations at the end. Okay, so the first mistake is simply thinking that cardio is as effective for fat loss as diet is, which definitely isn't true. Even though being physically active is uncontroversially important for health, cardio isn't required for fat loss. This is because at the most fundamental level, fat loss ultimately comes down to the difference between the number of calories you consume and the number of calories you expend and the number of calories you expend in a typical cardio session is pretty depressing. For example, if you weigh 170 pounds, or 77 kilos, it would take you roughly 3 hours of brisk walking to burn 1000 calories. But you could eat 1000 calories in less than a minute if you really tried. Actually, fitness model Steve Cook showed this disparity well, when as a response to the 10,000 calorie food challenge, he tried to burn 10,000 calories the next day. And despite being one of the most physically fit guys in our industry, and despite his greatest effort, he still couldn't do it.

Speaker B: So freaking frustrating. I'm exhausted, my body's aching. I got, I'm like over a third of the way there, a third of the way there. I feel like all I've done all day today is work out. It is not not smart to try to out train a bad diet. See if we can get at least gonna try to hit like 8000.

Speaker A: And in the end, he ended up getting to just over 7000 calories burned. I so it definitely is much easier to eat calories than it is to burn calories. But it's actually worse than that because new research shows that when you do the math, weight loss from cardio still only amounts to 20% to 50% of the weight loss you'd expect to see from the number of calories burned alone. In other words, if you burned 2500 calories over the course of a week through cardio, so something like five hour long walks on the treadmill and did nothing with your diet, you'd expect to lose about 0.7 pounds based on the mathematic, but would only actually lose 0.14 to 0.36 pounds. So about a quarter to a half of what you'd expect. Now, there are two possible reasons for this. The most likely is compensatory overeating. Basically, when people are told to just do cardio but don't do anything with their diet, they'll often subconsciously start eating more. The second reason is that your body is smart, and when it notices that you're burning more calories through cardio, it tries to preserve more energy by burning less calories through the other metabolic components. It isnt perfectly clear exactly which component of metabolism is most responsible for this, but some evidence points toward it being due to reductions in neat or non exercise activity. Thermogenesis, basically your regular daily activities that arent formal cardio stuff like fidgeting, moving around at your desk, bringing in the groceries and so on. And so it could be that as you increase the number of calories that you burn through exercise, your body subconsciously starts moving around less, resulting in fewer calories burned through neat and less weight loss than you'd expect. Now to be clear, even though you could theoretically completely offset your cardio through compensatory overeating, that's not very likely to happen if you're actually making an honest effort to regulate your diet as well, and you'll certainly never see so much compensatory meat reduction that you start gaining weight as a result of cardio. But my simple point is that the more and more you rely on cardio for fat loss, the more and more diminishing its returns become as your body compensates and adapts. And I'm putting this mistake at the number one spot, not because I think cardio isn't any good, but rather so I can help prevent people from setting unrealistic expectations about what cardio can do on its own. And from a fat loss standpoint, I think cardio should be used like a supplemental tool that assists your diet rather than the engine of fat loss itself. Okay, so the second mistake is poorly timing cardio around weight training one of the most important things to consider with cardio is whether or not it's likely to impair your weight training performance, something referred to as the dreaded interference effect in the literature. This interference effect is the reason why there are so many memes that cardio is killing your gains. And while I do think the idea has been overblown by bodybuilders who just dont like doing cardio, there still is some truth to it. There is a well established conflict between the aerobic endurance pathway and the muscle building pathway, and there clearly are smart things you can do to help squash that interference. Perhaps the simplest way is just by doing your weight training first. Now I will do a five to ten minute warmup on the stairmaster or whatever machine you like, as this has been shown to improve subsequent weight training performance. But doing a formal cardio session that takes longer than ten minutes or so should be done either after weights or at a separate time altogether. This 2017 systematic review and meta analysis on concurrent training, which pooled the results of 13 studies, found that placing cardio immediately before weights resulted in significantly worse improvements in one rep max strengthen, and that strength training is compromised for at least six to 8 hours following endurance training. Now, obviously the extent of that compromise depends on how long and how intense the endurance training is. But still, these authors suggest that separating endurance and resistance exercise by 24 hours, when realistic, could be a useful strategy to optimize concurrent training adaptations and avoid acute interference. I should also say that the interference effect is more of a concern for advanced trainees than it is for beginners. This brand new 2021 meta analysis found that concurrent cardio and weight training had no impact on strength for untrained and moderately trained individuals. But did significantly impair strength in more well trained individuals. So the bottom line is that if you really want to knock out your cardio and weights in the same session for convenience, you should do your cardio last, and the more advanced you get, it wouldn't be a bad idea to create more separation between your cardio and weight training, whether that means by doing them on separate days or by doing one in the morning and and the other in the evening. All right, mistake number three is falling into what I'm gonna call the high intensity trap. Now, just so we're all on the same page, coaches tend to break up cardio into one of two categories. There's low intensity steady state cardio, often abbreviated as lis or miss if it's moderate intensity. And that's when you do cardio at a steady pace, like walking on an inclined treadmill or stairmaster. High intensity interval training, or HIIT, is when you go all out at a high exertion for 20 to 30 seconds or so, then go at a light pace for two to three minutes and then repeat that for usually five or six intervals. Now, a lot of people seem to think that hi T is more effective at burning fat because of the so called caloric afterburn effect. And while the afterburn effect certainly is real, you will burn more calories after high intensity exercise. And after low intensity exercise, I still think its practical relevance for fat loss has been overblown. One study showed that even after 80 minutes of high intensity cardio at 80% max heart rate, only an additional 80 calories were burned from the afterburn effect. And a more recent systematic review stated that the afterburn effect is unlikely to account for any apparent greater fat loss potential. But even if we put the afterburn idea aside, HIIT still has the appeal of being more time efficient since you can burn the same number of calories in as much as 40% of the time commitment. Another upside of hit is that some people do find it to be less boring, and I do think thats a perfectly sensible reason to use it. However, while the time efficiency and enjoyability of HIIT can count as upsides, the biggest downside is that it does tend to interfere with weight training more and takes longer to recover from. You could also argue that HIIT is more redundant since weight training and HIIT are actually quite similar physiologically. With typical moderate to high rep weight training. You go at a high exertion for 20 to 30 seconds, rest for two or three minutes, go out of high exertion again for another 20 to 30 seconds and repeat. So some experts have said that you already get most of the benefits of hit through weight training. I'm not sure I completely agree with that. In my experience, HIIT does increase heart rate more and present a greater cardiovascular challenge than typical weight training, but it does still knock the unique value of hi t down a few notches. So if you are going to use hit, you should use it more sparingly. And in my decade of coaching experience, because of its higher recovery demand, I rarely prescribe HIIT sessions more than once or twice a week, and often only if the client prefers it. Okay, so mistake number four is doing too much cardio overall. Even if we do everything else right in terms of timing and intensity, it is still possible to do too much cardio. To give us some idea on this, let's take a look at the results of this NSCA meta analysis on the interference effect when it came to cardio frequency, they noticed a drop off in hypertrophy around the three to four day per week zone, although to be clear, the correlation wasn't that strong. So while this is a trend to be aware of, it isn't like your muscle is going to melt away if you do cardio more than three or four times a week. They also showed negative correlations between hypertrophy, strength and power, and the length of endurance exercise per day, with more interference seen the higher you get above 30 minutes per day. Still, we shouldn't look at this frequency and volume data in a vacuum because taking your dog for a walk isn't comparable to running suicide sprints. And so what I recommend for cardio will be highly individual and depend on the type of cardio you're doing. And I'll break all that down here in a minute. First, let's quickly cover mistake number five, which is banking on fasted cardio for extra fat loss. Now the bottom line with fasted cardio is that just because you will burn more fat during the session itself doesn't mean that you'll lose more fat. In fact, this 2011 study found that when you burn more fat during a cardio session, you burn less fat over the next 24 hours. And this systematic review found that performing exercise in a fasted state did not influence weight loss or changes in lean and fat mass, and that a meaningful caloric deficit is more important than exercising in fasted or fed states. However, recently a review paper from Escalante and Barakat looked at the research on fasted cardio in the context of competitive physique athletes. So people trying to get to very low levels of body fat. And while they once again acknowledge that there is no conclusive evidence on the superiority of fasted cardio, they do point out that research on physique competitors hasn't been performed and leave the question of whether or not it might be beneficial in the final stages of fat loss open. They also suggest that protein enhanced cardio, where you consume about 25 grams of protein beforehand, might have a slight edge in some advanced cases. Still, I think that for the most part, you should simply do your cardio at a time when you can stick to it the best, whether that means you're doing it fasted or fed. Okay, so what are my practical recommendations? Well, when it comes to volume, I suggest including cardio as needed to keep up with your desired pace of fat loss. Generally, losing about 0.5% to 1% of your body weight per week is a good range. If you're able to do this with weight training and diet alone, then you don't need to do any cardio. Still, I almost always include at least some because it will allow you to keep calories slightly higher, improve weight training work capacity long as it's not excessive, and set up good activity habits for weight maintenance. After the diet is over, I suggest keeping hit between one to two sessions per week lasting about 15 to 30 minutes per session, and then simply add in low intensity cardio as needed. This will depend largely on your occupation and lifestyle outside the gym. Folks who work a chair bound desk job might only burn 300 calories per day, while those working a more strenuous job in agriculture could burn up to 2300 calories per day through need alone. So depending on the client, I might prescribe anything from zero to five low intensity, steady state sessions per week lasting 2040 minutes per session while monitoring their strength and recovery in the gym. Now for mode, I generally favor lower impact cardio like walking, cycling, swimming and the elliptical over higher impact cardio like running on pavement because of lower interference. But if the client simply prefers the higher impact options, for example, I just enjoy playing basketball more. That certainly can be balanced by considering the other interference variables that we talked about. And before we wrap it up, I want to give you guys a quick sneak peek behind my video production process while thanking skillshare for sponsoring this video. Skillshare is a massive online community that has thousands of inspiring classes for creative people looking to develop new skills like video production, photography and self care. I get a lot of questions about how I make my videos for my channel and I really wish I had a resource like skillshare. When I first started making videos seven or eight years ago, I spent a solid two or three years just spinning my wheels without any real channel growth because frankly, I just didn't know how to make good, engaging videos. And it wasn't until I figured out how to brainstorm ideas, get engaging shots for b roll, set up good lighting and edit using basic software like Final Cut Pro that things actually started to take off on my channel. 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