Archive: Around Town

When myths become so embedded into society, science has an almost insurmountable obstacle to overcome.  The biggest exercise myth is that you have to do “cardio” to lose weight.  Cardio is low-intensity continuous movement that involves the bigger muscles of the body.  Practically, this is walking on the treadmill, ellipticall-ing on the elliptical, or spinning on the stationary bike for long periods of time.  You do not have to do hours of low-intensity cardio to lose weight.

Cardio is the popular exercise choice for weightloss because it is easy to do. All you have to do is what you already know how to do—walk, jog, or spin pedals. It also involves an easy intensity. Look across any gym floor and hardly any work is really being done. Gym members are cruising away at no-effort paces.  The irony is that people may want to exercise, but not really work. But we all know that “success (weightloss) only comes before work in the dictionary”—Vince Lombardi.

Secondly, people do no-sweat-necessary cardio because it’s what they think they have to do.  Thanks to the aerobic movement of the 1980’s spearheaded by the Cooper Institute, aerobic exercise became the exercise of choice.  Thirdly, gyms across America and mainstream examples like The Biggest Loser maintain the cardio-to-lose-weight myth.  What is the first thing you see when you enter a gym?—cardio equipment.  What is usually hidden or non-existent?—open space and free weights.  This isn’t to say that you can’t do higher intensity exercise on cardio equipment, though.  It’s just that hardly anyone does.

You still you have to exercise, though—exercise is still the required catalyst for change. Effective exercise for weightloss has to force your body to change.  Effective exercise for weightloss, therefore, has to cause a metabolic disruption.  If your exercise isn’t getting down and dirty, agitating the cellular metabolic level, it won’t result in weightloss.  During steady-state or low-intensity aerobic exercise, oxygen has to be available in order to use bodyfat as energy.  This sounds like the textbook answer to losing bodyfat. But this also means that you have to get out of your steady-state comfort zone and force your body to need more oxygen through higher intensity disrupting exercise. One highly used justification for this is the physiological effect of post-exercise oxygen consumption. The theory is that the higher intensity your exercise, the more recovery oxygen you need after you’re done with the workout, and therefore more calories end up being burned.  Strength coach and author Alwyn Cosgrove calls this the “afterburn.”   

A practical cause of metabolic disruption is multiple periods of shorter, more intense activity.  This can be done through resistance exercises or high intensity interval training.  I do “maximal disruption circuits” with my personal training clients.  Philosophies like CrossFit, P90X, Turbulence Training (Craig Ballantyne), and thousands of bootcamps also know the real deal.  For a new exerciser, walking just may be the intensity that is enough for disruption, though. But the body adapts quickly to low-intensity walking; otherwise, millions of Manhattan residents would be the healthiest people in the country because of all the walking they do. Simply put, improving your fitness means weightloss and low-intensity cardio does not substantially improve your fitness.

Try this new weightloss motto to replace “eat less, exercise more:” create disruption and live a healthy lifestyle.  The choice is up to you: stay with the status quo or get results with higher intensity exercise.

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