Kicking The Cardio Habit
The HARDEST thing for some to learn and to actualy believe, is how ineffective, and even counter-productive steady-state cardio is for fat and weight loss.
After about 45 minutes of steady-state cardio, you have used all your available glycogen stores (your body converts carbohydrates into glycogen, a fuel used by your brain and muscles). Your body starts looking for more fuel, and guess where it goes? TO YOUR MUSCLE!!! It starts to chomp and chew on your fat-burning, metabolism-boosting MUSCLE as fuel for the rest of the boring cardio you’re making it do!!!
A rule of thumb: After 45 minutes…WALK AWAY from the treadmill. You cannot afford to lose any muscle. Your muscle is what burns up your fat and makes you lean. Remember—the amount of muscle you have influences your resting metabolic rate (RMR). The more muscle you have, the higher your RMR, and the more calories you will burn just going about your day! When you do excessive steady-state cardio, you lower your RMR, and you will have a VERY hard time losing fat and weight. The more you run….the more muscle you strip away…the lower your metabolism goes….the harder it is for you to burn any fat. It’s a BUMMER! Your just a victim of SKINNEY FAT!!
This is why you see the same people at the gym, running on the treadmill, riding a bike, climbing a stair-stepper, every day, every week, not making any changes…They still look the same. They do not look incredible. They never look different.
With steady-state cardio, you are burning calories, but only while you are DOING the cardio. Once you stop your exercise, that’s it. When you do an H.I.G.T workout, you jack up your metabolism, creating a fiery furnace that is going to burn insane amounts of fat and calories—not only DURING the workout, but for up to FORTY-EIGHT hours AFTER the workout!!! That means, you are burning calories all day long for up to 2 whole days after the workout, just sitting on the couch, sleeping…whatever! Talk about efficiency!!!
Do interval training for your workouts—not slow, boring cardio. Period.
The resistance training with multi-joint bodyweight is FAR superior to any single-joint movement or machine exercise you can do. You are stressing major muscle groups—lots of them at the same time. Your body is working incredibly hard during the workout because of all the muscles you are incorporating, AND after the workout, it is working incredibly hard to repair all the muscles you have damaged! Work your whole body at once and burn massive fat and calories all at once! With single-joint movements, you are doing one little muscle at a time…taking TONS of your time, that you might not have to spare!!
The idea with your workouts is to do MORE work in LESS time. Work harder and smarter! This is really the key of the whole thing. You are being more effective—getting faster and better results, and you are spending a fraction of the time to do it!!! H.I.G.T and others training programs are certainly the future of fitness and the key to life long weight control and health.