When You are Looking to Lose Weight, Cardio is Not the Way to Do It.
Researchers in an Australian study, analyzed 58 overweight women and men over a 12-week cardiovascular program. The participants worked out five times per week with approximately 500 calories burned per session. You will be surprised by the results. In total, the average weight loss for the group was 7 pounds below the projected weight loss! The problem was that only 32 people were able to lose more than two pounds over a three month period even though they sweated for nearly sixty hours.
From this, we can surmise that there needs to be less importance placed on cardio exercise for the purpose of losing weight.
Please do not think that I am de-emphasizing the importance of cardiovascular exercise. Everyone knows that cardiovascular exercises improve your health. Stress-relief, stronger stamina, lower cholesterol and blood pressure are some of it’s benefits. Combined with a sensible, balanced diet, you’ll get even better results. The research concluded, however, that cardio exercises should be de-emphasized for weight loss purposes.
Personal trainers, magazines, and health clubs need to stop promoting “cardio” as the magic formula for weight loss – it isn’t. Do not fall into the trap that cardiovascular exercise solves your fat burning efforts. If you depend on the calorie burning counters on cardiovascular machines, you are falling for the biggest fraud in fat loss today.
Don’t think that you can just go “burn off a big meal” by running on a treadmill for an hour. Just don’t eat that second serving of lasagna and instead build your body’s metabolism through strength training. Instead of tiring your body out with constant, repetitive cardiovascular exercises, simply say NO to cardio!
Once you grasp and believe how hard it is to lose fat through cardiovascular exercise alone, then you’ll find the process to be quite simple. What you need to do is to plan your meals in advance, prepare for your strength training workouts so that you don’t just “hang around not knowing what to do next” at the gym, set up social support or a buddy system, and recognize solutions for all of the obstacles in your life.
Here’s another study that demonstrates how well diet works. The study involved people of both sexes needing to lose weight who enrolled in a low calorie diet over the course of three months. They ended up losing over 36 pounds and 18 times more than the amount of weight lost by some of the participants in the cardiovascular study mentioned above. Which is solid proof that dieting is better than cardiovascular exercise for weight loss. However, there was a second part to the study worth noting.
The cardiovascular exercise study participants were divided into two groups. For 12 months, one group of subjects went on a high-protein diet while the other group went on a high-carbohydrate diet. At the end of the 12-month study, both groups on average gained back 4 pounds! The bottom line is that the two groups gained an equal number of pounds. People were able to retain a large portion of their original weight loss on both of the diets. But only 47% of the 180 subjects who began the study completed both phases. Forty eight percent is a large number of drop-outs!
So what is my point? Having people stay with their diet is the hard part. That is why it is so important that you need to determine which diet fits your needs, set your goals, and create a network of like-minded dieters to ensure your success.
People don’t diet because they are told it doesn’t work. In reality, it’s not that diets don’t work, it’s that PEOPLE don’t work at it. Continue to look for the diet that will work for you. You will still have to work hard to lose weight even if you are eating properly.
Combine that with short well balanced workouts, (a combination strength training, cardiovascular and stretching). Keep-off from doing repetitive cardiovascular exercise that take a long time to get results and you will finally see the results that you deserve.
1 Br J Sports Med. 2009 Sep 29. Beneficial effects of exercise: shifting the focus from body weight to other markers of health. King N, Hopkins M, Caudwell P, Stubbs J, Blundell J.
2 Am J Clin Nutr. 2009 Sep 30. One-year weight maintenance after significant weight loss in healthy overweight and obese subjects: does diet composition matter? Delbridge EA, Prendergast LA, Pritchard JE, Proietto J.
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