Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2157: Using Cardio as a Weight Loss Tool

Episode Date: September 7, 2023

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin cover seven things to consider when using cardio to lose weight. How to use cardio the RIGHT way for fat and weight loss. (2:20) Why cardio is a terrible method to lose body fat as your primary method of training. (4:23) Seven Effective Ways of Using Cardio as a Weight Loss Tool #1 - Use cardio for stamina. (14:46) #2 - Strength training to support metabolism. (19:49) #3 - HIIT is strength training cardio. (22:44) #4 - Use cardio for health. (26:51) #5 - Do what you enjoy. (30:28) #6 - Diet tips. (35:44) #7 - PRACTICE THE SKILL OF CARDIO. (40:35) Related Links/Products Mentioned For Mind Pump listeners only, join IHP and Equi.Life for 2 full days of live exhibitions, inspiring keynote discussions, and engaging expert panels at The Reimagining Health Summit on October 12-13 in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Visit here and use code MINDPUMP to get $100 off! Special Promotion: MAPS Cardio 50% off! **Code DOCARDIO at checkout** Mind Pump # 1845: How To Do Cardio & Not Lose Muscle Mind Pump # 1697: HIIT Training Doesn’t Work (Unless You Follow These Steps)  For a limited time only, Mind Pump listeners get a free LMNT Sample Pack with any purchase: Visit DrinkLMNT.com/MindPump Stop Working Out And Start Practicing – Mind Pump Blog What is NEAT and Why Should You Care About it? – Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources People Mentioned Grace Barga (@gracebarga) Instagram

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump, right? Today's episode, we talk about cardio as a weight loss tool. Look, everybody does it wrong. Everybody doesn't wait a way to where they lose muscle

and slow the metabolism down. We talk about how to do it the right way in this episode. Look, this episode was brought to you by Dr. Cabral and his team. Look, check this out. They put to something together. That's pretty amazing. If you're a trainer, a coach, or you're just

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They gave us a link for our listeners if you want to get $100 off and you want to attend this before it sells out. So here's what you got to do. Go to reimagininghealthevent.com, use the code MindPump and get $100 off. Also, in today's episode, we talk about cardio. People want to often know how to program this properly. Well, we have a program called Maps cardio. And because of this episode,

it's half off. So if you're interested, go to mapscardio.com and then use the coupon code, do cardio for the half off discount code. All right, here comes a show. Cardio for weight loss. Look, there is a way to do it and to do it right. Unfortunately, everybody does it wrong. If you use cardio for fat loss and you do it wrong, here's what happens. You slow down your metabolism. You don't burn fat effectively and you hit platos

that are impossible to overcome. Now, if you do it right, here's what happens. You become more fit, you get leaner, you feel amazing. In today's episode, we're going to tell you how to use cardio the right way for fat loss and weight loss. Watch this. So we had to do this episode because everybody thinks we're anti. Yeah, we're too. I sweat. The irony, though, of this episode timing is that I literally was just on the phone with Grace

Barga and she's getting her shot her out before, friend of ours, she's in our Maps Anywhere program. She's getting ready for a show and even though I didn't commit to coaching her, I've been kind of checking in with her and just kind of overseeing what she's doing with her coach and stuff and giving any sort of advice I can. And one of the things I'm so, first of all, she's like, I think three, no, she's like four weeks out still. She could go, I think she'll win tomorrow. She hits stage, like she's ready right now.

She looks so impressive and no cardio. Yeah, all-strain training and diet. Gangster, yeah. She does like, on the weekends, she goes for a long walk. She's active, yeah, she goes for a white like long walk. She's active. Yeah, she's yeah active, but no intentional stair master elliptical for hours,

waking up at five o'clock in the morning, do fasted hour cart like, you don't have to be on a hamster wheel. It's a major work. And the reason why I highlight that is because you know, cardio has been touted as such a great tool for fat loss. I think it such a great tool for fat loss. I think it's an awful tool for fat loss.

And that same breath, it's important and incredible for health and for performance. And there's lots of incredible benefits to it, but it's used, the most popular way it's used is wrong. Yes, 100%. So I think we need to break down first. Why cardio, it would be a terrible method. If it was your primary method or way

we're gonna try and burn body fat, or should we say the way that most people do it. So in order to understand why this is an issue, you have to understand exercise in general and what exercise does to the body. Exercise, if done properly, is a stressor. And the body adapts to that stressor by trying to become better at the stress

that you're throwing at it so that it no longer becomes a stress. So this is why you feel if weights, you get stronger, you do cardio, you get more stamina, yada yada, right? So it's your body adapting to get better at what you're doing so that it no longer becomes a stress. And of course what you do is you add weight to the bar

or you push yourself harder or you change your programming to continue that progress. By the way, talk about how unbelievably amazing that is. Oh, it's incredible. Like I think we take it for granted because it's just, we've known this for so long. This is how the body, but how crazy is that? We take it totally for granted. Our bodies have this ability to, you know, encounter a stress

repeatedly and then go, oh, I need to adapt and change. Like literally, like, you're the new environment on your metabolism, your muscular system, like, your central nervous system, your hormones, yeah, that is wild when you think about that. Every part of your body will adapt to stressors in some way. And of course, there's limitations, but it is remarkable. And we take it for granted, the way we take it for granted is we don't fully understand it.

And when we don't fully understand it, we end up working against it. And in this particular case, with cardio four fat loss, which we'll get into, people don't understand it. And they this particular case, with cardio 4 fat loss, which we'll get into, people don't understand it. And they end up working against their body's adaptation. When if you work with it, cardio can be an effective tool for a lot of different things. But let's talk about first the wrong way, right? So here's where it all started. We understood a long time ago that if you burn more calories than you take in, or you take

in less calories than you burn, that that results in weight loss. It's called an energy imbalance. So if you burn 2000 calories, you only take in 15 air calories, where does your body get that extra 500 calories? It's gonna take it from itself and hopefully from stored body fat,

which is a likely place to make up the difference and so you end up losing weight. So that's, and that's true, okay? That's 100% true. It's way more complex than the simple, you know, way I just explained it, but what I said is 100% true. The problem is we looked at exercise and we said, oh, which one burns the most calories,

therefore that's the best form of exercise. And we ignored everything else. So we looked at cardio and we said, well, an hour on the treadmill burns more calories in an hour of any other form of exercise. Completely true. An hour of running on the treadmill will burn two to four times more calories than an hour lifting weights, okay?

That's a fact, but that ignores the adaptations that you're inducing. You're just looking at what you're doing basically is you're looking at the surface and you're not looking beneath the surface where all the real stuff is happening. So what happens when that's your approach and you're just trying to burn calories

is your body views calorie burn, manual calorie burn, the kind of calorie burn you get when you're active as a threat. And it says, uh oh, we're burning a lot of energy doing this activity. We need to get better at this activity so we're burning a lot of energy doing this activity. We need to get better at this activity. So we don't burn as much energy. So it's really like, and this is the example

of use May times under the podcast, it would be like having a super advanced AI car that adapted its fuel consumption to your driving habits. So if I drove for 400 miles a day at 45 miles an hour every single day The way my AI car would modify itself would be to become a super efficient Machine it would turn into a one cylinder engine electric it would use solar it would do all these different things To minimize its calorie burn and to become more efficient at what it does It wouldn't turn itself into a dragster for example because why because why would it do that when now I would only last a mile

and I'd run out of gas and it's not gonna work? So what the body does when you approach cardio in this way is number one, it literally learns how to burn less calories while you do that activity. Okay, so here's an interesting fact. You take two athletes, very fit conditioned endurance athletes. You take a runner, you take a cyclist, both super high VO2 max, incredible endurance.

You watch the calories they burn doing their activity that they're trained at. Have them switch activities, they're more calories doing the other activity. The runner, all of a sudden, more calories cycling and vice versa, because their bodies have learned how to be extremely efficient at that activity. The second thing the body does, and this is just a very, again, it's a beautiful adaptation process, is the body looks at itself and says, where can we, where can we shave off energy consumption?

And it looks at muscle. Muscle is very expensive tissue in comparison to other tissues in the body. Meaning it needs a lot of calories to stay on your body. Just to stay on your body, it's very active. It's just expensive. It would be like you have a streaming service that's $1,000 a month versus one that's $5 a month and you need to save money. You're going to cut out the $1,000 a month one to save money. Your body looks at muscle and it says,

can we get rid of some muscle? Can we? Now, the answer if cardio is your button, if that's all you do to lose weight, then muscle is an easy place to pair things down because do you need to be strong to do lots of steady state cardio? No, you need very little strength.

You just need lots of stamina. You don't need a lot of strength at all. So what the studies show and confirm, which is what all of us who've been in gyms for years have seen, is that when people cut their calories and just do cardio for fat loss or weight loss, you start to see, and this is, again, the data supports this, muscle loss alongside the fat loss.

So you lose data shows us 10 pounds of weight on the scale, about three to four pounds of it is muscle. Now you're in a bad position. You lost some weight, sure you lost six pounds of body fat, you lost four pounds of muscle, but now your metabolism's a lot slower. And then what ends up happening,

is what everybody experiences is they lose some weight initially, very quickly, then they plateau and the only way to continue losing more weight, cut my calories more or do more cardio. What a terrible place to be in when your goal is fat loss. So that's the wrong way, that's the way everybody uses it. That's what we rail against because you're gonna screw yourself up.

However, there's a right way to use cardio for fat loss, for health, for performance. And it has nothing to do with the calories you burn while you exercise. In fact, I'm gonna tell people, and I've said this many times, ignore the calorie burn of your workout for the most part. It's the least miraculous part of the whole process.

Yes. It's the least like, it's like back to my original point. It's so amazing what our body can do in response to these stressors. And the least amazing thing that it does is just it utilizes energy. And so to focus on that aspect of it is so ridiculous to me. And I think it's because it's the easiest thing for people to understand. So they glom onto that as like, oh, this is how I'm just going to do that.

I'm just going to burn more calories, burn more calories, and then hopefully what I'll do is I'll lose all this body fat. But the reality is when you're sitting that loud of a calorie burn signal, you also are gonna pair down as equal amount of muscle, so what ends up happening, and we've seen this so many times. I remember as a trainer, like when this, this light bulb first went off, because this is even how I would have approached, you know, rapid fat loss. I remember we do

these competitions at the gym with all of my peers and my staff. And almost every young trainer did it the same way too, where they were just like, all right, we got a four week or six week challenge, like wrap up the, the burn, and then they'd all get their body fat tested, and yeah, they lost 10, 15 pounds on the scale on that month or whatever, but then their body fat percentage stayed the same, or in some cases went up, and they're all scratching their head like,

this doesn't make sense. Well, what happened was you overdid the cardio so much under did the eating, and the body did what it needed to do, which was survive, which was, can't rid of that expensive tissue, at the same rate it was and you told the body did what it needed to do, which was survive, which was get rid of that expensive tissue at the same rate. It was getting rid of the body fat. So they lost 10 pounds on the scale, but five of it was muscle, five of it was. And now you're going to have a higher, now the body fat you have is a higher or same percentage

of your body. And you have a slower metabolism. Terrible. You're in a worse spot. It's tough because it's your average person. It's easy. That feedback of like sweating and then moving a lot and getting hot. And then you see the scales start to move in the right direction in terms of like your

overall body weight starts to go down. And so that's a hard concept to really understand that your body is going to adapt. And you know, through that process, you probably lost a bit of strength, you lost a bit of muscle in that process. So that's a hard pill to swallow because your entire goal is to just lose this mass. And you want to feel like your body is shrinking down and you're losing that overall mass. When in fact, you can lose body fat and keep and preserve muscle, which is a totally different operating system to go off.

I was just gonna say, if you lose 10 pounds of body fat, and you gained 10 pounds of muscle, okay? Not that this would be likely, but let's just say you did it, and you lost fat, 10 pounds, gained 10 pounds of muscle. And the scale is the same. You weigh the same. You lost 10 here, gained 10 there,

you would lose about a quarter of the size of your body. Because body fat takes up. That's a radical difference. Right, a quarter, almost a quarter. It's body fat takes up almost a quarter more space, not quite, but almost a quarter more space with the same weight because it's more volume-ish. It's like 10 pounds of, you know, cotton versus 10 pounds of rocks or whatever,

not quite that dramatic, but just give an example that you just take up less space. So to put it differently, if you lost 10 pounds in the scale, but four pounds of muscle, you lost some size. If you lost 10 pounds of pure body fat, you lost more size. So even for people who just wanna see themselves

get smaller, you're going to look better if you just lose body fat. But you know what this reminds me of because the first point that we're going to make here, which is the most important, is the most effective way to use cardio is not for its aesthetic benefit, it's for its performance benefit. Use cardio to build stamina. This reminds me of how people screw up strength training. Use strength training. Use strength

training to get stronger and you'll build the muscle. If all you're focused on is building the muscle, at some point you'll start to sacrifice strength and lose muscle. The muscle is the side effect of the strength. The fat loss is the side effect of improved stamina and improved health. Cardio is the best way to improve general stamina. That's a fact, right? You could build stamina doing lots of different things, but if I wanted to build just stamina and endurance in a very quick period of time,

the tool to do that is cardio, and if you look at cardio to do that, then you're going to approach it in a better way. Now why? Because if I'm only approaching cardio from a weight loss perspective, I'm actually gonna start to find myself sacrificing stamina and endurance.

And you see people do this. They drop their calories, they have more cardio, drop their calories, they have more cardio. They start to feel like dog crap, and they're on the treadmill, and you can look in their face, and like, this person looks like a full-down. Now, someone is doing it for performance

where you're aiming for performance. And so, the diet tends to match it a little bit better. You have a more objective measurement, like, oh, my stamina's better. I'm doing better. Versus, I think I burn more calories or I'm just adding more cardio. So, use cardio for stamina, I would say,

is the most important part. Yeah, well, and that also feeds into your strain training because a lot of times, if you're somebody who's, like, like, say that also feeds into your strength training because a lot of times if you're somebody who's like Let's say the opposite in the spectrum somebody who never does cardio and they strength train Many times the limiting factor of you getting stronger or adding volume to your training is your lack of stamina Yes, you you get gassed out, you know, you do five sets of you know high-reps squats and your gped out will pour 15, 20 minutes into the workout. And so simply getting better stamina from cardio training is going to carry over

and benefit your strain training and building muscle. But it's such a fine line on how to do that because you can really go too far if you become so heavily focused on the cardiovascular aspect and you're also in a major calorie deficit. The combination of the two of those is a recipe for disaster.

So understanding how to feed yourself appropriately and how to do just the right amount of cardio that you don't overdo it and send the wrong signal. Yeah, and you know, along those lines, cardio done properly improves mitochondrial health, which is very important for the whole body, but including muscle. It also improves the ability of your body to use satellite cells to repair and build more muscle.

In other words, your lack of stamina and endurance could be a roadblock to building more strength and more muscle as well. I learned this firsthand years ago. I was at one point so extreme with the whole calorie burning that we talked about because my insecurity was being too skinny and I wanted to build muscle. My, it was the opposite for me. I was like, don't burn any calories

unless I absolutely need to, even though again, very stupid approach. It didn't know any better. And so I avoided any activity that burned calories that I thought would be, like, not need it, because I need to preserve those calories from muscle. So not only did I need to do cardio, I tried not to do anything that burned calories

aside from strength training. And I remember I did this challenge, this trainer, one of my trainers, it was very him and I were friends, and I remember him making fun of me, and he's like, it was very him and I were friends, and I remember him making fun of me, and he's like, I bet you can't do 20 minutes on a stationary bike.

And I got on it, and I remember 10 minutes in, I was gassed out, and I say, oh, this is probably not good. So I started doing a little bit of cardio, not a lot, but just enough, because I was kind of like embarrassed. Like, I can't even do a stationary bike. And then I noticed my strength training got better. And then I realized like, oh, my health,

my health was, and my stamina were getting in the way of me, building muscle. So. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. I went to that same process of just lifting weights and trying to get strong and avoiding cardio after playing sports forever and doing

the highest volume of cardio I could possibly have done to see the benefit of strength training by itself. But then you get to the point where in your workouts and you're just hitting that fatigue and it's affecting the way that you're lifting and you're technique and for me, it's always like, I'm always trying to improve whatever I'm doing

and be effective as possible at it. And I'm not as effective as I can if that fatigue sneaks into early there. And so to interrupt that and then focus more on cardio help to elevate, you know, my performance with just lifting weights in general. And so in between that, just getting up and down out of my chair and walking up the stairs and I'm strong, but I'm also like huffing and puffing. I shouldn't be doing that. I should be energetic and vibrant. Yeah, then do it right.

The next point here is to use strength training in your routine to support your metabolism. Now, here's the interesting thing about this. Well, first off, let's talk about the metabolism. Strength training directly tells your body to preserve or build muscle, okay? And muscle is a very important part to the calorie burn of your body at rest, that if you want to burn more calories, you probably, you definitely want to have a good amount of muscle mass.

It just makes fat loss easier in a modern society. Having a faster metabolism is an asset. Now, about a hundred thousand years ago, you know, the guy who had a super fast metabolism, well, he probably didn't die because it's hard for him to find 3,000 calories in nature, unless he was like the most successful hunter of all time, it was a bad thing. Well, today, if fast metabolism is not, is an asset.

It's a total asset. Like, if you burn it off, the negative effects of, even unhealthy food are largely negated, not 100%. But largely, I mean, they have studies where people go on a fast food diet, but drop their calories below with their burning. And almost all of their, you know, objective measurements, blood lipids and all of the stuff

start to improve. So a fast metabolism is this huge asset, and you gotta use strength training to support that. Here's the kicker. If your goal is purely stamina and endurance, some strength training will improve that as well. So even when I trained triathletes and marathon runners, one of the best ways I got them to get better at their sport was to have them build a little bit strength with some strength training. And then of course,

you know, it helped with them being able to burn more calories and a lot of stuff. So strength training should always be a party routine is the point here. And especially if cardio is how you like to work out, you got to have it in there. You actually have to have it in there. Well, yeah, no, you don't want to be weak and frail and trying to run. I also, this also reminds me too on from just a fat loss perspective. How much this is shifted from when I started as a trainer to now, like, so let's say somebody came in when I was a young trainer and I just started

and they wanted to lose 50 to 100 pounds. And say the first month goes by, we would be celebrating a 15 to 20 pound weight loss where the strength training to build your metabolism is so important that that same client, if I were to get them today, I wouldn't want to do that. I would want a month to go by and actually not see the scale go down. And that's really hard for the client and even coaches that are listening to this right now to wrap

their brain around that. That way, this person comes in, they want to lose 50 to 100 pounds and you don't want to see the scale go down in the first month at all. And it's like, yeah, no, I don't want to see that because I'm so focused on the building the metabolism aspect of strength training because of how important it is that I'm going to focus in that direction. That's something totally different I would do today than what I would have done when I started. And it made you far more successful.

I came to that same conclusion. I know you did too, Justin. All right. Next is when you look at cardio, if you're going to do it for, you know, and one of the side effects you'd like is fat loss, cardio isn't all the same. There are forms of cardio that are more like strength training and other forms of cardio that are less like strength training. The forms of cardio that are more like strength training. The forms of cardio that are more like strength training are more likely to preserve muscle.

In some cases may even build a little bit of muscle at the very least or the least likely to cause your body to lose muscle, okay? And one of those forms of cardio, if it's appropriate, I wanna say that because it has to be appropriate, is high intensity interval training type of cardio. A good example would be sprints. If you practice sprinting,

this is a short explosive form of cardiovascular training. Your body is less likely to want to pair muscle down because in order to produce power, you need strength. Here's your evidence. Look at sprinters and then look at long distance runners. Do they look the same at all? No, they don't. One of them is heavily muscled and the other one has very little muscles.

And they both technically run a lot. They both run. They both run a lot. But one of them is more strength focused. The other one is more purely endurance focused. So I would look at high intensity interval training as a form of cardio so that if fat loss is definitely something you're interested in because it's not going to result at least like other forms of cardio and the same risks when it comes to slowing down the metabolism.

Yeah, this is such a powerful one. Do you remember, do you guys remember when this like, when it hit like that study? Yeah. Oh, I remember it changed everything. I think all of a sudden everybody, yeah, the bike, right, the stationary bike and doing those intervals. Yeah, I just think that when that, when that first came, it was like in the... Those early 2000s?

Yeah, early 2000s or late 1990s, something like it was definitely in that era. And then from the next decade, I felt like that became the way that like all trainers trained. And like anything else, we take that bit of information or study... You go too far. And study and go too far. And then we go too far. There's still a balance to this that you don't want to overdo it. Because you still want to get the benefits of utilizing weights in the form of building muscle. You don't want to just circuit train or you're not resting.

So there's this fine line of learning how to utilize interval training for cardio, how to use interval training for cardio, how to use interval training for weight training and to not overdo it. But this is by far my favorite way to utilize any sort of cardiovascular training because I feel like you get the great benefits of stamina building. And then you also get these perks of burning body fat and calories. And then you also have a higher chance of maintaining and holding onto your muscle. I know it's like such a simple and a reductionist way to kind of look at this, but I would

just really focused on a lot of the body types. You see with sprinters or you see with speed skaters or you see with some of these guys on the cycles that they would sprint and do the cycle sprints. He just look at their muscles and just look at their physique and in comparison to anybody that's running any kind of distance in terms of like what that the high performance athlete looks like in general. And so you kind of like kind of reverse engineer that and look at their training habits and in the amount of volume of like aerobic versus anaerobic training. And so, yeah, there's definitely a sweet spot in there where you can get all the benefits

of stamina, but also too, you're not sacrificing that muscle. Yeah, and I do want to add this. I said earlier, appropriate application and you talked about Adam how people go too far. As we're talking, anything we talk about needs to be applied appropriately with good programming. We said hit, great form of cardio, least likely to cause muscle loss. Can you overdo it hit or can it be done? Can it be done by someone where they shouldn't be doing hit?

Absolutely. It is intense. It does stress the body a little more. There's people I would never do hit with. And then there's some people where it does very well. So the tool has to be appropriate, regardless of what we talk about. Okay, this next one for me is the most important. Okay, and that is to simply use cardio for health.

This for me is how I like to use cardio vascular type training. Stamina, as long as my stamina is good enough for me to do what I enjoy, which is play with my kids, go on the occasional hike and lift weights. I'm not, I don't really care too much about having tons of endurance and stamina just because it's not, it doesn't improve the quality of my life anymore. I don't compete in anything that requires it. If I did, I would train specifically for it. But I do like to feel healthy.

So what kind of cardio do I do? Hiking, walking, I'll do things like push the sled or do functional type of exercise in the gym. This for me is where I get the most benefit. This is how I used to apply it to most of my clients. Mainly because it requires at least the amount of skill, and it's the less stressful in the body, and if you do it this way,

it also is recuperative in a sense. So when I take the average person, and all I do is simply increase the amount of walking that they do appropriately, it doesn't stress their recovery ability to where I have to really look at my workout with them and compensate or change or reduce volume. If anything it tends to improve it.

This for most people I think is the way that they should look at cardio is, what can I do just to make myself feel better and feel more healthy? There's so many benefits to that. I know like non-exercise activity through magenta, so that's not cardio. Right, and there's a clear difference with that. So it's not any activity that's not cardio. And there's a clear difference with that.

So it's not any activity that's structured where you're rigorously kind of going through running patterns or jogging or anything. But like keeping that relatively low intensity, I mean, it builds up a lot of that potential activity that's restorative, recuperative to where you get a lot of blood flow and your heart gets adequate work.

So there's lots of health benefits to that and adding that into your routine. But again, this is where it's like if it's for health, like it's not necessarily the most intense bouts of cardio. I think that's why I like as a trainer positioning it this way, because I think when you communicate it for health, I don't know, for me, like, words that I attach to health

is balance. Like, health, when you talk to someone. There's performance and then there's health. Right, and when you talk about fat loss and building muscle, that sounds more performance. And so people's brains go just naturally gravitate towards, oh, more is better. Harder is better.

Harder is better. Harder, more of it is better for me, no matter how much you try and communicate otherwise, they just do that. Versus when I tell someone, like, oh, we're gonna do this for health, they just seem to have a better attitude, a better approach to it.

And it really is the way to do this. Like, I mean, it's the most important muscle in your body. So we need to exercise it. We need to train it. That's a given. And I know that we've been, I think, pegged as these guys that are anti-cardio, it's just that when we look at the sea of people,

it would be pegged. That are utilizing cardio. They're all using it the wrong way. Like nobody is using it the right, I shouldn't say nobody. Very few people are using it the right way. And so the reason why you keep hearing that message from us all the time is because we're trying to talk to the majority and a majority of people think of cardio as this great fat loss tool and it's a terrible fat loss tool. It is way better

served for building stamina and endurance and for overall health. And if you do it for those reasons, you'll get the fat one. That's the idea of it, right? Yeah, interesting. All right, this next point, I love because cardio is quite unique in this particular way, right? So if you look at strength training, there's definitely a variety of ways you could strength training

under the strength training umbrella. There's Olympic lifting, power lifting, there's bodybuilding. You can use kettlebells, you can do bodyweight type training, bands, that kind of stuff, right? So it is an umbrella that it does encompass different ways, but cardio encompasses a lot more. Cardio is pretty much anything that gets you breathing a little hard and it can be anything that's fun. I mean literally I can go play with my kids at the park for an hour and I did cardio. I could go on a hike and I did cardio. I could go do yard work and be productive and guess what?

It's cardio. So this next point is very important which is pick what you enjoy. If you enjoy doing any type of activity, that is gonna be one of the best forms of cardio for you because it's gonna be the one you enjoy doing and what's gonna be the one you do. In fact, anytime somebody asks me, hey, what's the best form of cardio, my question was always,

well, which one do you enjoy the most? Let's do that one. So if you enjoy swimming, then that should be your form of cardio. You're like hiking, there's your form of cardio. You wanna go play Frisbee with your kids and run around, there's your former cardio. Literally do what you enjoy, then becoming consistent is a piece of cake.

That's a beautiful part of hobbies and sports. It's like, it's just something that you fall into because you enjoy it. You don't really, you're not focused on turning that into a workout or some kind of work and it's something that you have to do. It's just, it's good because you're expressing movement, you're getting blood flow, you're, you're working your body in a way that's beneficial, but also too, it's just fun and engaging. You continuously want to promote and do this type of activity. So I'm always trying to find like some of those things

where it just gets me up off the couch and less sedentary so I can get out and do something, productive. Yeah, now to comment on that, here's why that's so important. Besides the whole, you're gonna be consistent because you like it. One of the biggest challenges that people have

with exercise is creating a relationship with the exercise, that's a positive one. Well, if every time you get up to do something that's a workout or for your health, and yet you hate it and it sucks, the relationship you're developing is a terrible one. It's one where you are getting up every day to meet somebody that you just don't like,

but I gotta do it, you know, type, at some point when stress gets a little high, schedule gets a little tough, one of the first things to fall off is the thing you don't like, that's just a fact, that's human behavior. Well, if you do something and you enjoy it, you're going to develop a relationship with it

where it's something that you wanna continue doing. Or in general, this is a wonderful thing, in general you develop a relationship with activity that is more positive. You don't, people don't realize this. There's this conscious and unconscious effect from this relationship building you get with exercise. The conscious one is you're aware, like,

ooh, I like this, this is fun. There's an unconscious one too though, which is, you know, when you're playing with your kid, for example, when I play with my kids, and I'm outside, I'm playing with my two and a half year old, and we're running around and we're playing, and I'm breathing hard and whatever. I'm not really paying attention to how much the breathing hard sucks. I'm paying attention more to playing with my two and a half year old and we're running around and we're playing and I'm breathing hard and whatever. I'm not really paying attention to

how much the breathing hard sucks. I'm paying attention more to how much fun we're having. Subconsciously, I'm building a relationship with breathing hard. That is fun, that's enjoyable. And believe me, this spreads out and connects to a lot of different things in life. And all of a sudden, the challenge of cardio becomes something that you've now developed

a positive relationship. But so I can't understate this. Doing what you're enjoy as a form of your cardio is so important for consistency life long that this should have been number one, in fact. I'm glad you went the relationship direction because I actually think this is one of the biggest challenges, even with people

that say they love to do these activities. It's like comparing somebody who does like a volunteer job versus somebody who punches in a clock. And you have these people that say that they love to play basketball, they love to play football, they love to go for long runs or whatever. But then they expect to get paid. Their expectations of what you get in return

are where the relationship is off. It's like, if you love to do these things, you should do those pursuant things. Just for the love of it. To just for the love of it, because you enjoy it, because you feel good when you do it, you enjoy doing it, and those are the right reasons. Where people get mistaken is they think that they should get paid.

They think that they should lose body fat. They think that they're supposed to get these returns that don't always align up with what everything else that they're doing. So I think it's important that you understand your true relationship with that, because I don't know how many people have told me they love to do this form of cardio,

but they say that, but then they're frustrated because they're not getting paid, because they're not seeing this huge body fat loss because of their approach at it. And so it's important you understand that. Look, look, I said this a long time ago, but it's the supplies, right? The man who loves walking is gonna walk further

than the man who loves the destination. You love what you do, you're gonna do it more than if you did it just because you were looking for fat loss, just the fact. All right, the next one, let's talk about diet because we can't talk about weight loss and fat loss and avoiding muscle loss, especially when cardio becomes one of the cornerstones of your workout, we have to talk about diet because this plays such an important role. So I would say the most important thing, number one, is to consume a high protein diet.

High protein is muscle preserving, period and a story. Even if you're doing everything you can with your workouts to lose muscle, if your protein intake is high, you'll lose less muscle than if your protein intake wasn't high. Now what's high? Well, it's around a gram of protein per pound of target body weight. I say target body weight because you've trained it lose 50 pounds. Don't use your current body weight, use the body weight. You want to hit, there's your protein targets. That's number one. Number two, don't consume calories that

are way below what you're burning. Don't do the whole. I'm going to be in a thousand calorie deficit or more. Too low of calories will send an emergency signal to your body that says ignore the muscle building signals that from strength training. Ignore everything else. We're burning way more than we're taking in. Number one priority is to slow the metabolism down. So a 500 calorie deficit for most people is right around where you want to be.

Unless your calories are already so low, in which case I'd say, I wouldn't even have you in a deficit. I would have you at maintenance or above and slowly reverse diet you before we can get to that point. Yeah, I have a real hard time talking about this one while we're talking about cardio, because it's so, this is where it becomes really nuanced. When you are, when you're using something like cardio, and if you are, if approaching it with this idea of fat loss, oh, but I also want to have better performance. Oh, and I want to be healthy.

You have all these different goals. How you eat in relationship to how you utilize the cardio to me is so, so important. And there's so many different ways that you could do that. There'd be times where I actually would encourage somebody who is actually weight loss, their goal is weight loss, to feed themselves or have like a liquid drink before they go do their basketball for an hour, because even though they want to do weight loss, I don't think it's smart for that person to be in this like to your point, large calorie deficit, and then go do something like high intensity basketball for an hour because of what potentially could

happen. Well, if you're training for stamina, that's exactly what you would do, right? Because it's going to give you more stamina, right? Right. So I think that's, I mean, that's why the diet part is probably the most nuanced part when you're also incorporating. It's not as straightforward, let's say, to somebody who you're just speaking to about building muscle and strain training.

Once you start adding the cardio element, learning how to utilize a deficit. And I think the biggest mistake you see people do is to add it in addition to also doing a massive deficit. I'll add this. If you're in a calorie deficit and you're doing this and you start to notice significant reductions in performance, you're eating too little.

Yeah. That's a great sign right there. Like, uh-oh, strength is going way down. Oh my god, my stamina is going down. You're probably eating too little. Bump your calories up and then start over at some point later when you're able to get your metabolism a little bit boosted. The high protein part though is consistent.

Oh, that's a crossbow. That's a no brainer. Yeah. You see this like the dead man walking where you get the load, uh, calorie, like in the deficit and high intensity cardio on top of that. You gotta just think about like, if that's what you're doing right now, you want to be effective at what you're doing. It performance wise and be able to move effectively. And if you're not giving yourself enough, uh, fuel to, to really get through that, you're not going to be effective. I do want to add because we didn't touch on this. And if you're not giving yourself enough fuel to really get through that, you're not gonna be effective. I do wanna add, because we didn't touch on this,

and if we are training and doing cardio in our routine like this, this is also, especially if you're a healthy person and you're eating well, this is actually where the sodium thing is becomes really important to pay attention to. That's something that I probably wouldn't have really highlighted or noticed as much. Great point.

If you consider yourself a health person or you're trying to get healthy and so that you're eating healthy foods and making good choices and you're also doing cardiovascular type of training, it's really important that your sodium intake is up and that you pay attention to that. So along the lines of diet, I would definitely say protein is the obvious focus, not being in too much of a deficit, probably even feeding yourself before you do these type of cardio bouts, and then also making sure you're sodium.

Yeah, in fact, I would recommend anybody in this category, unless otherwise told by a doctor, have electrolytes before and during your cardio workouts, we work with a company called Element, which is one of the best ones, and it's calorie free, so you're not adding anything other than sodium. And if your sodium is too low, your performance will drop, you will get cravings, and it'll make this much more, much more difficult. Lastly, okay, we talk about this for strength training, but it's also true for cardio. Depending on the form of cardio that you

do, you got to get good at the skill that you're performing so that the cardio becomes effective. All right, let me use an example. Let's talk about running the most common form of cardio that people attempt. Running is a specific skill. Now, if you haven't run consistently since you were in high school or younger,

and then all of a sudden you decide, I'm gonna go run and do cardio, you have better practice running and practice the skill of running before you try to attempt to test your stamina and endurance because when you get tired, your technique goes out the window even more. Now, what happens when you don't do this?

Injury, injury every single time. In fact, running is associated with more injuries in most any form of exercise, and it's not because humans were not designed to run. In fact, running is one of the things. Yes, and that's the thing, is your body has natural shock absorbers, if you're set upright and your gate is in the right direction,

you're striking with the pad of your foot. There's a whole process to this that you have to learn the mechanics of it to appropriately not take on too much of that blunt force into the joint. So, to be able to learn that is going to be crucial if this is a long-term passion of yours. Yeah. Well, cardio vascular activity is basically you can define it by repetitive movement,

right? That would be one way to define it. It's repetitive moving over and over again. If that movement you're doing is sub-optimal because it's constant and repetitive, then where and tear an injury becomes extremely common. And it doesn't matter what you're doing. Cycling, running, swimming, doesn't matter. If you don't have the skill down properly and you do it repetitively,

and then you do it under fatigue, which makes technique really go down. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when you'll hurt yourself and then you've lost the ability now to perform this form of exercise and maybe other forms of exercise. So the skill is very important. By the way, this is why the most commonly recommended form of cardio that I would give to people is walking. Because walking is the lowest skill form of cardio. Thankfully today, as of the recording of this podcast, people still walk, who knows what

that's going to look like in the future. But I could take the average person, tell them to walk more. Because they already walk daily to an extent, they've got the skill of walking down. So I don't have to like really make them like practice the skill. But if you're going to do anything other than something you already do, then what you want to do is you want to treat it like a skill. Now don't worry, you're still working out, you're still active. You're just not approaching it with this like, I gotta go until I can't breathe anymore. You're starting it and you're like,

I gotta get better at this as a skill. And this also tends to make people train appropriately anyway. But trust me on this, if you run well, you'll get way more out of it than if you run poorly, even if you train just as hard both ways. You know what this reminds me of. It was really common when I was getting ready for a show. You'd see other competitors and it's like you're heading into the final weeks and everybody's doing their bouts of cardio and so that. And you'd see these competitors just slouched over the stairmaster and just like, you know,

going as fast as their legs will and the sweats running off them and they're huddling on their... And I'd go over next to him and I'd be like, you know, why don't you cut the speed in half and focus on standing up tall with good posture, activate your core and pay attention to every step that you take. You'd have to move half as fast and you'll get the exact same benefits and more. Why is the injury risk? Yes. And just a bad pattern of like slouching a behavioral.

Yeah, just bad behavioral to be holding it down and no activation, the core, your slouch over there, but they're so addicted to the sweat and the hard and the move. But yet not realizing you could literally reduce the speed in half of what you're doing, stand upright, focus on every step that you strike, focus on activating your core, your shoulders, back wayway doing it. And your body's gonna burn as many calories if not more, plus work on your posture at the same time. Just was like so fun.

Yeah, totally. And that's why I always love the incline feature versus like speed, you know, for a lot of people, just because to that fact, like once you increase the speed of movement, like there's a lot more potential, bad patterns that come out. So yeah, it exposes all that. Yeah, totally.

Look, here's what we did, okay? Because this is a question that we get asked often, and because we've talked about it so many times, a little while ago, we said, you know what, we need to create a program that is cardio-based because the programming around cardio is so important. So what we did is we created a program called Maps Cardio. It is a cardio-indurance-focused plan. Of course, it includes strength training in there to support and build muscle.

But with this program, the goal is stamina-ind endurance with the side effect of some amazing fat loss And those of you meet heads out there who just love lifting weights going through a cycle of something like this We'll benefit your muscle building down the road and because this episode's all about cardio We took maps cardio and for the limited time because of this episode We're making it 50% off. So if you're interested in stamina endurance and the fat loss side effects, or if you want to improve your stamina endurance, your meat head, you're like, I haven't done a bout of really improving

my cardiovascular stamina, but you want well done programming to minimize muscle loss or stop muscle loss to get the stamina benefits, the fat loss benefits. That's what we did. We created the program, maps cardio, and again, because of this episode, it's half off. So if you're interested, you go to mapscardio.com.

And then the code for 50% off is due cardio. So D-O, cardio, use that code and you'll get half off. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at MindPumpMedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballac, maps for performance, and maps aesthetic.

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