CARDIO MYTHS, AND HOW TO DO IT RIGHT!

Many people have been fed the myth that doing hours of cardio is the best thing for weight loss. This is built on by the cardio machine manufacturers who conveniently add calorie counters to each treadmill, bike and cross trainer. Have you ever thought about the accuracy of these? How they know how many calories you are burning yet know nothing about you or your metabolism! Do you think these machines estimate on the low side or hike up the calories your burning? I know which one I’d expect!

It’s not just that most of the machines found in gyms are totally inaccurate, but they are also open to wide-scale abuse that is seen each day in any busy fitness club. If you travel along at three miles per hour on a treadmill, all you're doing is lifting one foot up and putting the other foot down. You're not propelling yourself forward as you'd do if you were walking or running, but the calorie counter will fool you.

You may actually go at a decent pace and put the treadmill on an incline, but do you hold onto the support bar at the front of the machine? Again, this will throw off the calorie counter even further, but the machine doesn’t take this into account.

I would strongly recommend you ignore the calorie counters on these cardio machines as they are not serving you. Try approaching cardio training as follows:

1) REALISE YOU DON’T HAVE TO ALWAYS DO CARDIO! Unless you are into a cardio based sport or love to run, the primary role of cardio in most peoples plans is to help lose body weight. If you are happy with your body fat levels and already live an active lifestyle then you don't have to (but you can) include a cardio element in your training.

2) WEIGHT TRAINING IS OFTEN MORE IMPORTANT THAN CARDIO: If you can only schedule in a trip to the gym two or three times a week you should certainly prioritise weight training over cardio. A good diet will see you lose body fat whereas weight training is the only way you will gain muscle. If you are doing both I recommend you perform cardio after weight training.

3) DON’T OVERDO THE CARDIO: Cardio should certainly not replace weight training.There is a limit to how much training you can recover from before your recovery and workout performance begin to suffer. I would suggest medium to high intensity cardio are limited to two per week. HIIT (see previous GymWolfPT article on this) is great for high intensity cardio.

This doesn’t mean you can’t do low intensity cardio like going for a walk - there’s no real limit

4) HAVE FUN: Whilst strength training has a clear benefit to following a consistent set of exercises for a set period while you master the range of movement and progress to lifting bigger weights, this doesn’t apply to cardio! You don’t have to stick to a set cardio workout, unless you want to. Mixing it up can help stave off cardio boredom.

As usual, any questions fire them over to [email protected]

Ian David Worthington, Creator, Owner and Coach at GymWolfPT.com