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"Cardiovascular Exercise"

By Jason Goggans

The terms cardiovascular exercise, cardio respiratory fitness and aerobic exercise are all synonymous. They all refer to exercise that requires large muscle movement over a sustained period of time, elevating your heart rate to at least 50% of its maximal level. Some examples of cardio activities are walking, jogging, biking, and swimming.

While there are numerous activities that could be considered cardiovascular in nature, not all cardio activities are created equal. The purpose of this chapter is discovering what type of cardiovascular exercise is best for you.

Benefits of Cardiovascular Exercise

The benefits of cardiovascular exercise are enormous. Some of them include:

Lower blood pressure

Increased HDL levels (good cholesterol). HDL (high-density lipoproteins) is responsible for removing LDL (bad cholesterol) from the cells in our arteries and transporting it back to the liver for removal from the body.

Decreased LDL levels

Decreased body fat

Increased heart and lung function and efficiency

Decreased anxiety, tension, and depression

Increases blood flow which keeps muscles and organs oxygenated, and helps our body process and deliver nutrients more efficiently (VERY IMPORTANT)

All of the above benefits lower your risk of cardiovascular disease by reducing factors like:

Obesity

Hypertension

High blood cholesterol

Some additional benefits are:

Weight loss (when combined with strength training and proper nutrition)

Improved function of the immune system - cardiovascular exercise tremendously helps your immune system perform effectively and fight off infection

Increased stamina

Disease reduction

Increased life span

If you are not doing cardio regularly?Why not? The evidence is overwhelming. Now that you feel guilty and wish you had never started reading this chapter, let?s discuss how to design an effective cardio plan.

Types of Cardio

For the purposes of this chapter, I am going to limit the types of cardio I discuss to two:

moderate intensity

high intensity

A third type of cardio training is primarily for the endurance athlete (marathoners, triathletes, etc.) If you fall into this category, this chapter is not for you. I am focusing on those who want to lose weight, lose fat, and get in good cardiovascular condition.

For decades now we have been taught that long, slow, methodical cardio workouts are necessary to loose weight and get in shape. This is called moderate/low-intensity cardio. Moderate cardio is what 95% of the population does to ?get in shape?. Moderate cardio consists of performing a cardio exercise for an extended period of time (45 minutes to 2 hours) elevating the heart rate only slightly. These are the people that you see walking or lightly jogging around the neighborhood at a seemingly swift pace for hours on end. You see them day after day yet there bodies never seem to change. You may even be one of them or know someone doing this.

This leads to frustration, confusion, and ultimately an end to your exercise program. You begin to say things like, ?I?m different, and exercise does not work for me. Well guess what? It is not your fault. You are only doing what you thought was right. You have been given misinformation for years without even knowing it. In fact, misinformation is one of the main reasons that we have a worldwide obesity epidemic. I believe most people want to loose weight and feel great. However, after trying diet after diet and exercise routine after exercise routine with little to no success, they are forced to give up.

Let's discuss why moderate cardio is not very effective in the fight against fat. Hopefully by now you have a good grasp on the concept that lean muscle (NOT CARDIO) is our body's primary fat fighter (discussed in the January and February chapters). Muscle is metabolically active tissue that raises your RMR (resting metabolic rate). This means you burn fat as energy all day. In fact, one pound of muscle will burn between 30 to 50 calories per day; conversely, one pound of fat will burn 2 calories per day. If you gain 10 pounds of muscle, that can add up to 300 to 500 extra calories expended per day AT REST! An additional 500 expended calories per day equates to one pound of fat loss per week. That being said, we must do EVERYTHING in our power to salvage that lean muscle. That includes eating properly, and doing cardio properly.

Let's go step by step through the energy processes that are going on inside your body when you do cardio. For the first 20 to 25 minutes of cardio, you body is using glucose (blood sugar) as its primary energy source. Your body is steadily burning away that sugar and that is a good thing. It is also burning a LITTLE BIT of adipose tissue (fat). That is a very good thing. After about 25 minutes the glucose has been completely burned away. The body still needs sugar for energy, however. This means that it has to go get it. The body stores sugar all over the place for situations just like this. It stores it in the muscles, brain, liver, etc. The body is not going to touch the sugar stores in the vital organs unless it absolutely has to. As a result the body goes straight to the muscle.

Sugar stored in the muscle is referred to as glycogen. At about the 25-minute mark your body will begin to burn the glycogen from the muscle and this is a very bad thing if you are trying to salvage lean muscle for fat loss. Another negative is that glycogen burns away very quickly (3-7 minutes). You are only 32 minutes into your cardio session and you have burned away all of your glucose and glycogen, NOW WHAT? If you keep going your body will still need sugar to burn so it has to get creative. Remember it will not go to the brain and liver.

The next step for the body is to go into the lean muscle and pull out the amino acids (the building blocks of muscle protein), convert the amino acids into sugar molecules and burn them off as energy. At this point you are obliterating your muscle tissue, your METABOLICALLY ACTIVE muscle tissue. If you continue on for fifteen, thirty, or forty-five more minutes, you can kiss that beautiful muscle goodbye. It will render your resistance training workouts obsolete. Imagine all that hard work you put into your workout, all for nothing. Depressing isn?t it?

Many people do lose weight doing moderate cardio. Weight loss is not our goal, however. Fat loss is our goal. Weight loss from moderate cardio is typically water weight, muscle weight, and a small amount of fat weight. Unless these people are engaging in extremely intense weight training programs, they are becoming what I refer to as ?skinny fat people?. This means that they look skinny but they have very little muscle and poor body composition. The minute they stop the long distance cardio, the fat weight will sky rocket again, but the muscle weight will not. I see countless people in my studio that used to be long distance runners and are now extremely overweight. They lost all of their metabolically active tissue and did nothing to gain it back. Yet moderate, long distance cardio continues to be the method choice for most people. We have all been misinformed.

So What Should I Do?

The second type of cardio is called high intensity interval cardio. This is often referred to as HIIT training (High Intensity Interval Training). HIIT is very challenging and is not intended for the beginner or the meek. It is something that should be built up to over time. HIIT training means performing short, intense bursts of cardio followed by a very short rest period. An example would be as follows:

Minutes 1-4:

Warm-up at 50% of perceived maximum effort followed by:

Minute 5:

Sprinting for 20 seconds

Rest for 10 seconds

Sprinting for 20 seconds

Rest for 10 seconds

Minute 6:

Sprinting for 20 seconds

Rest for 10 seconds

Sprinting for 20 seconds

Rest for 10 seconds

Minute 7:

Sprinting for 20 seconds

Rest for 10 seconds

Sprinting for 20 seconds

Rest for 10 seconds

Minute 8:

Sprinting for 20 seconds

Rest for 10 seconds

Sprinting for 20 seconds

Rest for 10 seconds

Minutes 9-12:

Cool-down at 50 % of perceived maximum effort

HIIT training has many benefits. When HIIT training is used, the percentage of fuel from carbohydrates is increased (remember carbs are sugar so if you are burning your carbs you will not store the sugar as fat), while the amount of fat utilized is greater than or equal to that burned during low-intensity exercise. It is the best of both worlds.

Research has shown that HIIT not only burns more fat than low-intensity cardio, it also burns fat tissue more effectively. In fact, it burns fat up to 50% more efficiently. HIIT speeds up your metabolism and keeps it stoked for an extended period of time after the workout. This means that you do not have to cardio near as long to get even better results. The latest research shows that HIIT training actually keeps your metabolism raised for up to 48 hours after the session. That is very good news. HIIT also burns far more calories (142% more) than low-intensity training which results in more FAT loss (since the majority of calorie burning occurs after the workout, ignore the calorie counter on the treadmill, elliptical, or stationary bike).

1Recently, Dr. Izumi Tabata, Ph.D., and colleagues from the National Institute of Health, and Nutrition in Tokyo, Japan set out to discover an aerobic program that would most efficiently increase fat burning and cardiovascular fitness. Their conclusion?HIIT is the only way to go. As I mentioned above, the HIIT training burned more fat, carbs (sugars), and calories than the low-intensity training.

Dr. Tabata also found that HIIT training increases your VO2Max (your maximum oxygen capacity; the more oxygen your lungs can take in, the more oxygen your body has to utilize). This is the best measure of aerobic fitness. HIIT also increases your anaerobic capacity. This means that it helps you build muscle while improving your VO2Max. Not only does it build muscle, but since your cardio (HIIT) sessions are less than 25 minutes, you do not burn muscle either. It is the best of all worlds. The key is to keep your rest periods very short. If you extend your rest periods, you loose the extreme aerobic effect and only get the anaerobic (muscle building) effect.

In their research, Dr. Tabata and associates pitted two groups of subjects against one another. One group performed low-intensity (moderate) cardio five days a week, one hour a day, for six weeks. The second group performed the HIIT program outlined above (8 INTENSE 20-second sprints with 10 second rest periods) five days a week for six weeks.

The results were not very surprising. The moderate cardio group recorded a rather significant increase in VO2Max (about 10 percent). The moderate regimen had absolutely NO impact on anaerobic capacity. On the other hand, the HIIT group recorded an amazing 14% increase in VO2Max and a 28% increase in anaerobic capacity. This means the HIIT group not only increased their cardio level, they also built lean muscle (our fat burner).

This is believed to be the first study showing that a single cardiovascular regimen improved both aerobic and anaerobic power so significantly. Even more exciting is the fact that the 14% increase in VO2Max in only six weeks in the HIIT group was one of the highest ever recorded in exercise science.

To sum up, HIIT training dramatically increases your VO2Max, it increases lean muscle, salvages lean muscle, burns more fat, more calories, and more carbs than traditional low-intensity, long-distance cardio. In essence you are accomplishing in 10 minutes what would take two hours with moderate/low-intensity cardio. When people ask me whether or not they should do HIIT training, my response is, how could you not. If you are unhappy with your current physique, your current body fat percentage, if you cannot see your abs, if you get winded walking up the stairs, HIIT training is an absolute must. To me the proof is in the pudding. Close your eyes and picture the body of an Olympic sprinter. Do you see a lean, extremely muscular body? Sprinters never do long distance, low-intensity cardio. Now, picture the body of a marathoner. You should see a skinny, almost emaciated person. They look gaunt and sometimes unhealthy. To me that says it all. Make no mistake; I have the utmost respect for marathoners. That is one thing I could NEVER do. However, when it comes to fat loss and sculpting the perfect physique, I would prefer the body of a sprinter. It is all personal preference, however.

Applying What You Know

It is easy to see why HIIT training is the best way to go if fat loss is your goal. As I described above you cannot just delve into this type of program. You must first set the foundation. As much as I preach against moderate cardio, it is the only way to go if you are a beginner. Moderate cardio coupled with resistance training will strengthen the ligaments, tendons, and muscles so that you can begin a HIIT program. HIIT training is very demanding on the body. If the proper foundation is not laid, injury is a strong possibility. There are also several health conditions that will prevent you from taking part in a HIIT routine. A fitness professional or doctor should be consulted. While your ultimate goal is to perform each sprint at a gust-busting pace, it may not be realistic to start out that way. Sprinting is very, very difficult. You may want to do sprints that are at 80 to 90% of your perceived maximum effort to begin.

HIIT training is extremely demanding and taxing on the body. Be sure you are doing HIIT training only on your off days from weight training. Anything more will lead to overtraining. Also, it is suggested that you engage in HIIT training for a maximum of eight weeks at a time. Your body will need a rest after that. Following an eight-week cycle, move to moderate cardio for a month or month and a half. Once your body has recuperated, begin another eight-week cycle. Repeat this over and over until you have achieved the body of your dreams.

If you are currently unable to perform a HIIT program due to health complications or your current fitness level, do not get discouraged. Maintaining a moderate cardio routine that does not exceed 25 minutes in your target heart rate zone in conjunction with supervised resistance training, and proper supportive nutrition is still VERY effective. It is just not AS effective. If you fit into this category, make your goal to work your way into a fitness level that will allow you to perform HIIT training. It is a great goal to shoot for.

HIIT on the Elliptical, Treadmill, or Stationary Bike

Performing HIIT on one of these machines is quite easy. The only real difference is that the ?sprint phase? on these machines is a little easier than doing it on the street or on stairs. As a result you will want to up the intensity level on the machine. The default setting will be at level 1. Up the intensity to a minimum level of 5. From there it is done exactly as described above. If traditional sprinting is an option for you, I highly recommend it. It will be more effective than doing it on a machine.

Cardio Workouts

Below you will find some sample cardio programs. There are a couple of ways to implement them. If you are ready, willing, and able to perform the HIIT programs, I would begin immediately.

There are a few ways to do it. You can perform the HIIT training three days a week (only on off days from weight training). You can do two days of HIIT training and one day of cardio solutions (see below). You can do HIIT training one day, cardio solutions another day, and a moderate cardio session on the last day. You can mix and match any way you like as long as you are getting in at least two days of HIIT training. Find a combination that you enjoy and will stick to!!!

If you are just beginning or have a health condition that prohibits you from HIIT training, begin with the moderate cardio program. Do it for one full month. After a month begin to increase the intensity each time by going faster. Once you feel that you are able to perform the HIIT program, slowly begin to make the switch. Perform HIIT at 60-70% of your perceived maximum effort one day a week and do moderate cardio the other two days. After two weeks, if you are feeling good, move it to two days a week and one day of moderate cardio. Wait two more weeks and add in a third day. Once you are doing three days a week of HIIT training you can start to up the intensity to 100% of perceived maximum effort. If you just love your long runs it is okay to do HIIT training only two days a week and a longer, low-intensity cardio session the other day. To stay consistent you must enjoy what you are doing.

Warm-up/Cool-down

Always remember that a cardio session should always be preceded by a warm-up and stretch, and end with a cool-down. It is best to do a 5-minute warm-up then pause for the stretching. You should never stretch a cold muscle. That can lead to injury. The cool-down should last until your heart rate is back down below 100 BPM. Failing to cool down can lead to some potentially serious health risks including heart attack!

1I. Tabata, et al., ?Effects of Moderate-Intensity Endurance and High-Intensity Intermittent Training on Aerobic Capacity and VO2max,? Med. Sci. Sports Exerc. 28.10 (1996): 1.

Muscle Media Magazine, October 2001, Guerilla Cardio. Senior Science Editor David Kennedy.

About the Author:

Jason Goggans is a certified personal trainer located in Alpharetta, GA. He ownes a Fitness Together personal training studio in Alpharetta, GA. His website is http://www.FTalpharetta.com