As I mentioned in The Truth About Cardio – Part I, I signed up for Rob Poulos’ Fat Burning Furnace newsletter to give me some good pointers. Here’s the second installment from his newsletter. You can sign up for his newsletter below.
Here’s what Rob says:
In the last newsletter, I talked about the truth about long duration frequent cardio or aerobic exercise for fat loss, fitness, and health. What I concluded was that this type of exercise can actually give you the exact opposite results you’re after. Here’s a quick recap why:
With this type of exercise, your body will be burning stored body fat as its primary source for fuel. While this may sound good, its actually bad news. What happens after the workout is far more important than what happens during the workout. After this type of workout is over, your body responds by holding on tightly to its stored body fat so that it’s available the very next time you perform this exercise.
From a health perspective, this type of cardio can actually reduce your body’s natural ability to deal with stress (or life, as I like to call it!). You see, long duration moderate intensity exercise conditions your body and cardiovascular system to be efficient. And efficiency means a smaller everything…heart, lungs, muscles, etc.
In effect, you are shrinking the core elements of your body’s powerhouse, and while it may get better at jogging for hours at a time, when faced with something truly stressful, you’ll be outmatched and in big trouble. How often does life require you to continuously jog for great distances? That’s right, almost never.
Now, a lot of experts out there have discovered that if you perform cardio with intervals (where you alternate short burst of high intensity with low intensity) is far better for fat loss and actually quite powerful and efficient. And normally I’d recommend it, but I don’t. Let’s talk about why that is.
Well, first off, instead of burning stored fat as fuel during the exercise, interval cardio burns the calories stored in your muscle tissue.
Instead of training your body to store fat for the next session, you’re teaching your body that it doesn’t need body fat for fuel… because you’re never using it! Your body stores more calories as fuel for your muscles this way, preparing for the next time it needs it (your next interval cardio workout). Literally the complete opposite effect of regular cardio.
And would you believe that this exercise also makes your cardiovascular system (your ‘powerhouse’) stronger, not weaker?
It’s true…you are preparing the body to handle intensity instead of duration…a big benefit to long term health.
So at this point you may be asking, “Why, Rob, do you say no to interval cardio if you just espoused it’s benefits?!” Well, I actually do recommend interval cardio to my students on occasion, depending on their unique situation. But let me explain why that is rare…
You see, while interval cardio training helps you burn fat and stay healthy, if you truly want life changing results fast you must include some form of resistance training in your workouts. Building lean muscle and strength has an overwhelmingly positive fat burning and health building effect on the body…in fact, no other type of exercise can even compete.
And the proponents of interval cardio would mostly agree with me on that fact. When I discovered interval cardio a few years back I incorporated it into my weekly workout scheme, which included resistance training too. Well, it didn’t take long for me to realize that, while this was a whole lot better than regular cardio, I still had 2 separate workouts to perform (cardio and weight training).
This kept me in the gym longer and more frequently than I’d wanted. I knew there had to be a way to combine these two forms of exercise, get all of the benefits and save even more time.
Well, after several months of experimenting, I discovered there was a way to get the benefits of both types of exercise in one short simple workout. It takes less time and it’s more effective the way I do it.
And that’s why I don’t typically recommend cardio of any type to my Fat Burning Furnace students. Interval cardio is ‘built-in’ to the FBF resistance training workouts. Now, don’t get me wrong, the FBF workouts are far from easy, because they call on maximum intensity combined with several other key variables to deliver such kick-butt and permanent results fast.
But that’s why I enjoy workouts that last 15-20 minutes and must only be performed 2-3 times each week. Any more than that and
most people will actually get worse results!
But don’t rush out and try just any resistance training program while dropping the interval cardio…there are key elements that
must be included if you are to reap the benefits of both type of exercise properly. It’s not rocket science, but it took me several years and lot of my own money to put it all together.
To get all the complete information: Read the Fatburning Furnace Blueprint – you can download it today!
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