There are several misconceptions concerning cardio’s involvement in fat loss.
Cardio can help you enhance the function of your heart and lungs, build your endurance and stamina, and, when done correctly, it can help you lose fat. If you practice exercise incorrectly, it can actually harm rather than benefit your weight reduction efforts.
Today, I’d like to discuss a few cardio fallacies that are impeding your development and potentially leading you to gain fat or lose muscle, which is the exact opposite of why you’re probably doing cardio in the first place.
Increasing Your Cardio Will Help You Lose Weight
One of the most common myths is that all forms of cardio are good for fat loss. This is simply not true, and there is plenty of evidence to back it. For example, a meta-analysis of 14 research with 1,847 overweight and obese participants investigated whether cardio aids in weight loss. The researchers concluded that, for these patients, isolated aerobic exercise is not an optimal weight loss therapy.
Now, I understand that may seem unusual. Cardio consumes calories, and since fat loss is primarily about creating a calorie deficit, cardio should be beneficial… right? Well, it’s not that simple. One disadvantage of cardio is that it results in constrained energy expenditure. This means that burning calories through cardio reduces your overall activity and energy expenditure throughout the day, which frequently cancels out the calories expended from the cardio session.
When you don’t exercise, your body still burns a lot of calories during the day. This is referred to as non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT, and it burns a significant number of calories. Due to limited energy expenditure, your body will seek shortcuts to save calories. This reduces the effectiveness of doing exercise only for fat loss.
Aside from that, many people feel that doing exercise will allow them to eat more, but as many of you are aware, you cannot outrun a lousy diet.
Cardio is More Effective at Fat Loss Than Resistance Training
The next fallacy that many novices believe is that cardio is better for fat loss than physical exercise. It is true that adding both resistance training and cardio into your workout routine can be quite beneficial, but cardio-only programs have numerous disadvantages.
Resistance training is generally more effective when comparing cardio-only programs to resistance training programs, particularly over time. This is largely due to the fact that it does not result in constrained energy expenditure. This limited energy expenditure forces you to compensate for the calories expended during your aerobic workout by lowering your physical activity throughout the day.
These are subtle changes that you may not even realize, such as not having the energy to walk your dog, sitting and relaxing when you should be moving around, or simply fidgeting less during the day. Even though this may not seem like a significant deal, when your body tries to preserve energy, it is quite successful, and cardio encourages your body to do so.
Resistance training appears to do the opposite: it promotes non-exercise activity thermogenesis. This is particularly true on non-exercise days, which may result in stronger long-term adaptations to an exercise regimen. Furthermore, resistance exercise burns roughly the same number of calories as cardio.
That being said, resistance training is just as effective at burning calories as cardio, and unlike cardio, lifting weights helps prevent muscle loss while on a diet, which not only makes you look better when you’re finished dieting but also supports your metabolism, allowing you to keep the fat off.
Fasted Cardio Promotes Fat Loss
This next cardio myth is unlikely to promote weight gain, but you should be aware that, according to the most recent studies, fasted cardio is not better for fat reduction than cardio after eating. For a long, it was thought that because insulin levels are extremely low first thing in the morning, foregoing breakfast and maintaining them low while exercising would allow you to burn more fat.
This may seem to make sense because an overnight fast while sleeping lowers glycogen levels, making your body more inclined to burn fat for fuel rather than glycogen. Simply said, it would burn fat rather than carbohydrates because your stomach would be empty. The truth is that fed and fasting cardio have identical fat loss results.
Several research studies have shown that this is the case. In one of these experiments, the participants were divided into two groups, with both groups maintaining a daily calorie deficit of 500 calories. The sole difference between the groups was that one group did three hours of fasted exercise per week, while the other did the same amount of cardio while fed. Finally, the results revealed that both groups lost a substantial amount of fat after four weeks, with no difference between the groups.
In other words, both fasted and fed cardio were equally effective at fat reduction. According to a systematic study and meta-analysis, fasted cardio does not result in greater weight and fat mass loss than fed cardio does. Weight loss and fat loss via exercise are more likely to be boosted by producing a significant calorie deficit over time rather than exercising while fasted or fed.
You Can Eat Everything You Want if You Do a Lot of Cardio
Another common cardio error is thinking that increases in exercise lets you eat whatever you want. This is not correct. You cannot outrun a poor diet. Many people feel that simply adding cardio to their program would result in faster fat loss than focusing solely on dieting. They believe that they have permission to overeat or consume high-calorie foods.
Whenever you want to lose calories, you can either increase the quantity of exercise you do or reduce the amount of food you consume. If you don’t want to lower your calories any further, throwing in some cardio can be the best alternative. However, you should also be aware that you can burn as much, if not more, fat by simply focusing on what you eat.
This was demonstrated in a study aiming to assess the impact of maintaining a specified calorie deficit by food alone versus diet combined with exercise. Both groups attained the same calorie deficit throughout the research, and while body mass and body fat reduced dramatically in both groups, there was no meaningful difference between the two.
Simply put, if you maintain the same calorie deficit, you will lose the same amount of weight whether you do exercise or not. Energy balance alone causes practically all of the changes in the number on your scale, so even if you perform a lot of cardio and are still not in a calorie deficit, you will not lose weight no matter how hard you train.
If you consume so much that you have a calorie surplus, even if you exercise regularly, you will experience weight gain rather than weight loss. Always remember that cardio cannot compensate for a poor diet.
A Parting Thought from Roaming Hart Fitness…
Though this piece addresses damaging exercise fallacies, it does not indicate that cardio should be removed from your program. Cardio serves a purpose. It can enhance cardiovascular function, endurance, and stamina. When paired with proper diet, it may aid in the development of a calorie deficit. This is the condition that genuinely leads to weight loss. To make the most of your time and achieve the best outcomes, educate yourself about the process.