Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2375: Is Summer the Perfect Time to Implement More Cardio-Based Workouts?

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

Is Summer the Perfect Time to Implement More Cardio-Based Workouts? Cardio is terrible for fat loss. (1:28) Cardio can be used as a tool to turbocharge fat loss the right way. (2:49) The misconceptions surrounding cardio. (3:54) Cardio 101.  #1 - Do appropriate cardio. (6:22) #2 - HIIT vs steady state. (13:37) #3 - Watch your performance. (17:40) #4 – Always incorporate strength training. (20:13) #5 - Diet is paramount. (22:00) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Vuori Clothing for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! ** No code to receive 20% off your first order. ** Special Promotion: MAPS Cardio 50% off! ** Promo code 50CARDIO at checkout ** Mind Pump Apperal 4th of July sale is live! Get 25% off Freedom tee, Rebellion tee, and Freedom flag. Our equipment and other apparel will be 20% off.  This includes Tees, the Love Yourself Collection, Socks, Headbands, and Kitchen items. Mind Pump #1845: How To Do Cardio & Not Lose Muscle HIIT vs. LISS Cardio - Which is Better For Fat Loss? - Mind Pump Media Mind Pump #2372: Five Steps To A Faster Metabolism Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump with your hosts Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is mind pump. Today's episode we talk about cardio and summertime. Is this the best time to start adding cardio to your routine? Of course, because it's summer, everybody wants to look good in a bathing suit. So that is what this episode is all about. Now it's brought to you by a sponsor, Viori.

Viori makes the best at leisure wear you'll find anywhere. Looks good, lasts a long time. And if you go through our link, you'll get yourself a big discount. Go to Vioriclothing.com. That's V-U-O-R-I clothing.com forward slash mind pump and that link will get you 20% off. By the way because today's episode is talking about cardio our Maps cardio program this is a cardio strength training based workout program. That program is gonna be 50% off right now you can find that at

mapscardio.com but you have to use the code 50CARDIO for the discount. Alright, here comes the show. Alright, it's summertime. Lots of people ramp up their workouts right around now of course because they want to look better in a bathing suit. Now is this the right time to start implementing more cardio? Should you ramp up your cardio? What's cardio good for? In today's episode, we're going to talk exactly about that. Coming from team, no sweat. Yeah, I know. Let's run. You know, first, I think it's important we

address what we've talked about many times on the podcast, which is that cardio type workouts. Now, cardio workouts are things like running, swimming, biking. You could throw circuit training in there, high intensity interval training type stuff. Those kinds of workouts are not effective if they're the primary or sole source of

exercise for fat loss. We've talked about this many times on the podcast as to why. It tends to cause the body to want to pair muscle down as it improves endurance and become more efficient with calorie burn. So, um, essentially slows the metabolism down and then studies show for fat loss, strength training is just superior if you were to pick one or the other. But however, cardio, if implemented in short stints in four weeks, six weeks, eight week periods can accelerate fat loss because

right around that time, then you start to get maybe that negative adaptation potential, but we'll talk about how to offset that as well. But in those short periods of time, then you can see accelerated fat loss. Cycle it in in short periods. You do actually acquire some really good benefits from it. But yeah, it's really about staying ahead of that. So that way it doesn't turn into a problematic situation. So when I used to coach competitors, the thing the way I would the analogy I would tell them is that it's like nitric oxide. That's how NOS right? That's how we want to use this.

Like I want to dial in every other aspect of the car, right? This is the suspension, the steering, the tires, the horsepower, the torque. Like we want to dial all that in, which is our nutrition or sleep. I was like all the macros like that's, we want to dial all that in. And then when that is like running sweet, we're, we're seeing every, all the response we want then in those final weeks, when it, when it comes down to that, then we hit the nitrous. Then we use that. We do not want to come out the gates hitting the nitrous before we fine-tune everything else. That's how I used to explain it to the competitors. And not just that, but the real good,

pure fat burning effects minus the potential negatives for muscle happen in like that short stance. When you go beyond that is when you start to kind of see negatives. But of course you also want to combine it with good strength training. So cardio can be used as a tool to kind of turbocharge fat loss if you do it the right way. Now cardio is when it comes to all forms of exercise, the best for other things, one of them being endurance. Like if you want endurance and stamina, that's the best way to do it.

Now you can lift weights for endurance and stamina, you can do other forms of exercise for endurance and stamina, but for pure cardiovascular endurance, it's the best. And so there's a lot of value there. It's also valuable for health. All forms of exercise are valuable for health, cardio included. So those are all the reasons, good reasons why you should implement cardio.

Well, this is important to talk about because this is where the misconception around our points on cardio are at. Like if it's for fat loss, you'd heard us say, anti-cardio a lot, right? That's been a lot of the conversation that's come out of here. If I had a client that that was their specific goal, it doesn't matter whether I would use it the last four weeks or not, the point that I try to get across to that client was that that's not the go-to move

for us to go towards cardio. Different scenario, the small percentage of people that come to me and say like, hey, I wanna be overall healthy, or I want to build endurance. If you say things like that to me as a client and your primary goal isn't fat loss then it's a no-brainer that we're incorporating cardio training within our within our training routine because

Endurance most certainly cardio is the best tool for building endurance and overall health is that has some sort of incorporation of Cardio in there also piece of the formula for that. Yeah, I also like it too I mean not especially for athletes, but also just like your everyday average weightlifter, it's going to cross over and benefit in terms of the endurance and stamina while you're getting through your sets. And so just cycling that in every so often,

once, twice a year, where you do a good few weeks of really focused, dialed in cardiovascular training is going to really help, uh, you know, carry you through some of those, like grueling workouts. Yeah, totally. And, uh, again, when it comes to fat loss, if we're talking about short stints, like I said, four weeks, six weeks with other aspects being controlled and done properly, then what it will do and what it can do is take fat

loss and just make it happen a bit faster. It's like a turbocharger. Like Adam said with competitors, I'm pretty sure you didn't incorporate cardio or didn't ramp it up until the final four weeks or five weeks or sometimes even less. Because you would see that accelerated fat loss. Beyond that, you start to see that kind of adaptation. I think the first point around cardio though, needs to be made, which is, this is true for all forms of exercise, including and especially strength training, which is you need to do the appropriate amount. People overdo exercise across the board.

They think if some is good, more is better. And cardio tends to be the one that gets abused the most in this category. And I think it's because you can abuse it more often and not necessarily feel as beat up. Like, you know, it's, it, it, you'd be hard pressed to find somebody abuse strength training in the same way where they're going to be in the gym. I mean, there, there are people that do it, but in my experience, uh, you know, overdoing cardio tends to be more common, although overdoing exercise in general is common.

And it's more detrimental than if compared to strength training. Like if you both are abused, I think that both strength training and cardio are abused in the fitness community. The idea of more is better is a constant conversation that I think that we're always having. The difference though of abusing cardio versus abusing resistance training. Normally if you abuse resistance training, it causes a hard plateau. You don't see a lot of results. Abusing cardio will actually put you in the opposite direction of your goal a lot of times. Like if your goal is-

It's hard to lose muscle. Yeah. If your goal is to reduce body fat and you just do tons and tons of cardio, what you see sometimes with clients is actual body fat percentage go up. Even though their scale went down and so they think, Oh, I'm doing the right thing. So they continue on this hamster wheel, but then it ends up even hurting them more because they ended up paring down so much. Yeah. And I want to, I want to explain that because someone might've heard that and said, what? They lost weight, but their body, they gained body fat.

How's that possible? If you keep the same amount of body fat on your body, but you lose muscle, your body fat percentage went up. Or if you lose the same and you got smaller, your percentage. Right. So, body fat, it's all about body fat percentage. Okay. So 20 pounds of body fat on a 200 pound man is lean. That's 10% body fat.

20 pounds of body fat on a 100 pound man is fat. 20, now it's 20%. Now your, now your body fat percentage is quite high. So it's really about percentage. That's the important thing to consider here. And overdoing cardio, it gets your muscles, your body wants to pair down muscle when you overdo it. Um, and so it needs to be appropriate.

You need to feel better at the end of your cardio session than you did getting started. You should feel invigorated. It's okay to feel like you worked out. I don't mean like you feel relaxed, but when you hop off the treadmill or you're done, you shouldn't feel like you're just, you just survived. You should feel pretty damn good. It's okay to be tired because you just exerted yourself, but you

should also feel really good. Um, it should not impede or crowd out, uh, strength training. If fat loss is your goal, if endurance is your goal, that's perfectly fine. Strength training then becomes more of a supportive role. And it definitely shouldn't crowd out things like sleep. And you definitely shouldn't try to replace a poor diet with cardio. But it needs to be appropriate. And I think the best way to kind of encompass that is you need to be able to do enough, the right amount of cardio for your body, for your fitness level, for the context of your life. So if you are doing no cardio and you don't work out and you're listening to this, you know, two 10-minute walks a day is going to be great.

If you're listening to this and you do cardio all the time, you get great endurance and stamina, what's going to be very different for you? Or if you're listening to this and you have poor sleep and a lot of stress, you just had a baby or whatever, too much cardio is going to stress your body and you're not going to be able to recover very well from it. It's just going to put your body in a really, really high position of stress. So you have to pick the appropriate amount of cardio. Now, in my experience, cardio, shorter bouts frequently tend to do better for most people versus the long bouts done infrequently.

So instead of doing an hour and a half or an hour or two days a week, 20 minutes a day or 15 minutes a day seem to work better for a lot of people I work with. Now, what does that have to do with our body's energy systems, right? I remember reading that if you were to do intense cardio for longer than an hour, it's like the body shifts over into like this.

Yeah. So it's, you know, it's funny about that. So we've done studies on that and it's like, okay, it takes this long to burn up your glycogen and you start to tap into fat. But if your calorie intake is higher than your calorie burn, it doesn't matter. Doesn't matter that you're, you know, that you fasted and now you're in ketosis. Even if your calories too high, you're going to gain body fat. If they're below what you're burning, then hopefully you lose body fat.

So really it's just about frequent shorter bouts of cardio tend to be easier to be consistent, easier to schedule. They tend to not beat up the body as much. You know, if you watch the way somebody uses a stair master or a treadmill past the point of fatigue, their form starts to get real sloppy and crappy. So injury risk kind of goes up.

Um, it's easy to recover from it, but it feels more recuperative. So, uh, it just, in my experience, it seems to be better to do a little bit daily versus a lot. Well, that's a really good point to make too Sal, like understanding through the mechanics of the cardio that you choose to do too, I think is so important. Like, you know, you might typically tell someone to

go for a light jog or run, but if that person has really poor running mechanics, we might be better off going for a swim or doing the elliptical or choosing a piece of cardio equipment that is more conducive for their mechanics versus you have somebody, and a lot of people make this mistake of thinking that just because they can go run, that they're doing a good job and they're not making things worse. It's like, just because you can pump your arms and move your legs a little faster than a walk,

doesn't necessarily mean that you're helping yourself. Think of the, everybody you ever see running when you're going for a walk or outside. Easily 95% of them have terrible running mechanics. Most people shouldn't run for cardio because they don't know how to run properly because they stopped running when they were kids. It's a skill at the end of the day. It's a skill.

If you look at it, you do see, it's rare to see good mechanics. It's rare to see somebody with good form and they've actually been coached as to how to run and how to do that appropriately. And it's definitely something that you can invest in, a coach, and get somebody to help you. If that's like your thing, if you wanna be a runner,

you should really go get a coach to help you. Yeah, so if you're getting started and you haven't run for years and you're not like an athlete in that sense, I don't think you should choose running as your form of cardio. There's cardio machines that make it, that are less technical, I think is the

right way to put it, right? Running is very technical. It's a skill that once you lose, you got to rebuild it and relearn it. That could take a while. Those lower impact options. You can go on a stationary bike, stationary bike, elliptical.

I mean, walking, I love walking. I think that's another great, and so yeah, when it comes to appropriate cardio, it's like, yeah, pick the one that you feel like you can still move well within that you don't start to feel your knees and your joints start to bother you. The irony of that is I feel like a lot of people choose what is hardest thinking that that's what's best for them. It's like, yeah, this is the most difficult for me to do.

Therefore, I think this is the best form. Then the burnout is like immediate. Yeah. And the truth is it's more often than not the opposite of that. It's like it's the one that is, that you can be more consistent, that isn't putting all kinds of pressure on your joints

or causing any sort of other issues while you're doing it. That's probably the better form of cardio to choose. Totally. And now another point is to kind of go over the different general categories of cardio. On the one hand you have the most commonly done form of cardio, which is steady state. So this would be you're on a bike and you're going the same speed for 30 minutes or 40 minutes, or you're going for a walk, it's the same speed, or you're jogging,

it's the same speed, or whatever. Steady state meaning it's steady. It's steady, consistent, and it's about just how long you could do it for for or you're doing it for X amount of time. Now, would you guys, when you, so when I would explain this to a client, I used to use the talk test to teach them like, how do I measure how hard I'm going? How do I know I'm not pushing too hard or I'm not, I say you want to push yourself hard, but to a point where you can still hold a conversation while you're doing it. Yeah, if you can't talk. Yeah, if you're running so hard or you're doing the elliptical so hard

that I can't have a conversation with the person next to me, that means I need to scale back. So that would be how I talk to people. Yeah, and I know some people are familiar with heart rates and zones and breathing patterns, but when you really start focusing on those things, it's such a distraction. And a lot of times it ruins the rhythm of what you're doing, it interrupts a lot of the process. I think that's the most simple way to evaluate how intense you're going is the talk test. Totally. Then the other general category of cardio is high intensity interval training.

This is cardio that's characterized by sprints of exertion followed by really low intensity movement or rest. So it would be like the different steady state on a treadmill would look like a slow jog for 20 minutes or 30 minutes. High intensity interval training would look like a sprint for 15 seconds and then a walk for 30 seconds to catch your breath and then a sprint and then a walk again. High intensity interval training you burn the same calories of steady state in a shorter period of time. So in terms of calorie efficiency you can do less and burn more calories than you can in that same time. So it's efficient. Now the downside of it it's more intense. It is way harder.

If you're somebody that can hurt yourself easily on steady state, you're going to hurt yourself for sure on high intensity. It also requires a greater ability to recover in my experience. If somebody is high stress and they're just getting into working out or they already work out a lot and they want to add more, more exercise. They don't want to over train, uh, HIIT style training, high intensity interval training. It just, it, it, it hammers the recovery system way more rest. Steady state can actually be quite recuperative in comparison.

Yeah. I would just say like a prerequisites out there. If you have any kind of joint restrictions or like pains or like, it's probably the form of cardio I would avoid for most people. But in terms of like if your body's able to handle a kind of stress, very effective, very efficient form of doing cardio and you get it done in that nice little window. Keep in mind too that high intensity is relative

to your current level too. Yes. So the mistake that like, and this is where I used to see stuff like this, I get clients that would come in and be like, hey, I got this hit protocol this is where I used to see stuff like this, I get clients that would come in and be like hey I got this HIIT protocol and it says I supposed to go speed whatever for this much time it's just like well that's a really generic formula depending on where your cardio level is at right now would dictate how I would tell you to push. So again this is one

of those things where it's like you know you go as hard as you can for 15 to 20 second you know all out when you're all out might be a super hard power walk. That's I was just going to say. So I use the example of a sprint. I hate cardio for some of my clients was an uphill power walk. Yeah. Yeah. Just a quick little steep as you could go power walk and then coming right back down. And so it's important that they understand that it's like, you are pushing just your max exertion for a very short period of time,

and then bringing it all the way down to like a slow movement or no movement to gather heart rate. And that's the idea is to let the, you want the heart rate to come all the way back down to almost to where, not quite resting. You're not gonna get resting at that state, but your normal heart rate, right, throughout the day.

That's what you wanna come back down to. Now the next point, and we love making this point with strength training. We love making this point with mobility, with any form of exercise, which is watch your performance. Now there's other things to measure too, like fat loss and stuff like that, but when your performance is improving, it means you're probably doing a lot of things right. When your performance is decreasing or declining, many times it means something's off.

Either you're training too hard, too often, you're not getting enough sleep, something's off with the nutrition. Now I do understand that fat loss being a calorie deficit can cause a reduction in performance. So it's not a perfect measure, but if your performance is improving, especially if you've cut your calories and your performance is proving, man, you are doing great. So I like to tell people to pay attention to their performance with their cardio. Last time you did 30 minutes, this time you did 30 minutes, same speed, did it feel different?

Oh yeah, like my perceived exertion this time, like last time it was kind of hard. This time it felt a lot easier. Or I did hit, you know, I would do a 15 second sprint with 30 seconds of cruising. Now I only have to cruise for 20 seconds. Like if you see your performance improving, then you're probably doing a lot of things right. So I like to tell people to focus on that. Plus the mirror and especially the scale can lie. If you're watching your weight go down, like the example we got Adam gave earlier,

you might lose weight, but go up in body fat percentage. A lot of people don't realize that. They'll stand on a scale, see they've lost weight, and they're celebrating, but they don't realize that they're flabbier because they're lying to themselves because the scale went down. Because we talked earlier about how this is abused so much and even more detrimental than resistance training. When I would move clients up, like when

we're trying to push the performance in the cardio world, it's very incremental. Yeah. Like I would, it would be a, like a adding 15 seconds or, you know, 0.2 on the speed. Yes. It does that each time. What's really neat about cardiovascular training

is almost every single workout you can see like an improvement. And there's no need for you to go from, you know, you pushing like, let's say five, speed five is really hard for you. And then the next time you come to the gym, you get to push speed six or seven. It's like, no, you just make a goal for yourself to incrementally really small amounts or shaving time off by a couple seconds each time and after a month or two months of training this way, you'd be surprised how, how much you've shaved off or how much that you've improved your performance just by doing these

real subtle incremental changes or increases in intensity. Yeah. Now next up is to always incorporate strength training. Now, fat loss is your goal. Strength, and that's your ultimate goal. Strength training should be the cornerstone of your routine. You shouldn't be doing more cardio than strength training. Now, if endurance is your goal, then it flips. Now strength training is there as a support. But the reason why strength training should always be there is because it benefits all other forms of exercise because strength is the foundation for all physical pursuits and it'll also prevent injury.

If you do it properly, it prevents injury, improves mobility, and it maintains and strengthens performance in almost every, if I can, I mean, every physical pursuit. And maintains lean body mass during this time too. That's it, 100%. So always strength train. Now, again, if endurance is your goal, you're an endurance athlete, you might only strength train

once a week. If fat loss is your goal and you don't care so much about endurance as much as you just, I like it, then strength training should be more frequent than that. And an example that Sal would be with, uh, we had a client who hired us that is training for an OCR race or a marathon or triathlon has very specific endurance. Cause some people will say things like, well, I want more endurance. Well, what they mean is they want more

stamina during the day. Exactly. So that's important to note that it's like, if you're, you still are going to have strength training as a cornerstone, even if you quote unquote want more endurance, the only time where strength training, I would limit someone all the way down to just one time per week.

And then the rest of it is endurance training is if we have a very specific thing that a goal in mind, like we're trying to do a marathon, triathlete, whatever, something like that. If you're just trying to improve endurance, well, you still are going to have strength training as a core stone because not only can we intermittently do these bouts of cardio, but we could also do things within the training program too that's going to help build the endurance also. Totally.

And then finally, this is especially true for fat loss, mainly for fat loss, although it affects everything. It's diet. Diet is paramount. Okay. So, you know, I'm sure a lot of people have heard this before, but, you know, I'll mention this because it just really illustrates it. Like, it's really hard to burn calories. It's really hard to burn. It takes work. It takes a lot of work to burn calories. And yes, you can speed up your metabolism and that's a great way to do so because then you don't have to do the work. Your metabolism does it for you. 100% true. That's what we talk about all the time on our show.

But nonetheless, even that is very hard in comparison to eating calories. Eating calories is easy. It's figuratively and literally a piece of cake. Like if you ate a couple slices of pizza and had 600 calories, it would take you two hours or three hours maybe of exercise of cardio to burn off those those calories. Although I know cardio machines lie they say you burn 800 calories doing 30 minutes. That's not true. It's a lot less. It's a lot of work right? One soda. Like how much you know that's 20 minutes or 30 minutes on a piece of cardio equipment. So your diet has to be really, really good or at least put you in a deficit with adequate protein if you're trying to get leaner and don't try to create the fat loss with exercise

alone. It's really, really tough to do. And the opposite is true if you are using this primarily for endurance. So if you're somebody who is trying to, again, triathlete or someone running for OCR, something like that, and you are running a program like this to improve your endurance, then staying fed becomes really important.

Fat loss is not our important, we're not trying to be catabolic at all. You need to be fed. So you wanna be fed. And I see this as a mistake a lot of times with those types of athletes is they're dieting to, you know, get lean or get in shape, but then they're also trying to improve performance. And that's conflicting right there.

It's like, you want to fuel, if you're really doing, if you're chasing the cardio for endurance and performance, like out on a triathlete, impede on that performance. A hundred percent. You got to make sure that you're getting adequate calories, adequate protein, enough fuel for that body to perform at a higher level and to continue to perform better. The opposite is true if you were trying to use it as a way to reduce body fat. But equally important to make sure that you're hitting your protein intake, because one of

the things that you see people do in pursuit of fat loss is they just cut calories and they don't realize that they also dramatically reduce their already low protein intake. Now that are even lower protein intake and they're sending this catabolic signal. So yeah, the body not only loses weight, it loses muscle along the way too. And endurance athletes, they're not making this mistake as much, but you still see this, this was very common, you know, just 15 years ago. And you still see it now, which is, you know, athletes know that carbohydrates are

the primary source of energy. But then, so when you look at their diet, it's a lot of carbohydrates, which is okay, but they don't eat adequate protein. Protein is just as important for the endurance athlete as it is for the strength training athlete. They need to eat adequate protein. Protein is just as important for the endurance athlete as it is for the strength training athlete. They need to eat adequate protein to repair their body because all exercise causes damage.

And I'm not talking about the minimum. Don't eat the minimum. Now you might not need to go one gram per pound of body weight, like somebody wants to build muscle, but it's got to be up there. Otherwise you're going to notice decrease in performance. In fact, that was my go-to with my, my, my

well-seasoned endurance, endurance athletes that would hire me who had already done 10 marathons or had done two triathlons or a half mer, a half iron man, when they would come to me, I'd look at their diet, I would increase their protein intake and they'd be blown away. What do you mean more protein? Shouldn't I be eating more starch, your

carbohydrates or whatever? It's like, no, the protein. But diet is going to be paramount, especially for fat loss. Cause if you're trying to create that calorie deficit, right? If you're trying to create a situation where the fat loss happens because solely because of the exercise, it's going to be a very slow, almost impossible process. Put yourself in the deficit with the diet and then compliment it with the

workouts and again, cardio within those short periods of time is a great way to help do that. Now, because we're doing this episode, we have a program called MAPS Cardio. It is a strength training cardio based workout program. It's the only cardio based workout program that we really have that specifically, that's why it's named this. It's great for endurance, great for for stamina It's a great fat loss program. It also has great strength training in it You're doing in fact you're doing some form of strength training three days a week one day a week is traditional Strength training in the program because of this episode. It's 50% off. So if you're interested in this go to Matt maps cardio calm and then use the code

What is that 50 cardio 50 cardio will give you 50% off maps cardio. Now you can also find all of us on social media. Justin is on Instagram at mind pump Justin. I'm on Instagram at mind pump DeStefano and Adam is on Instagram at mind pump Adam. 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 super bundle at mind pump media.com. and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Super Bundle

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