Should I do more cardio? (Part 1)

By Ryan Humphries
Co-Owner/Coach: Axistence

​Should I do more cardio???

The short answer: Yeah, probably.

The long answer: Depends on your goals :) 

A lot of people are convinced that they just need to “burn more calories”, and they’re right….sort of. It’s true that in order to lose weight, you must be in a caloric deficit, and burning more calories than you consume will put you there. However, HOW you go about burning those calories could determine your long term success.

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If you want to LOOK, FEEL, and PERFORM better, it’s my belief that you MUST have a combination of strength and conditioning.

The cardio zealots will tell you that all you need is a good spin class and the heavy lifters will tell you that all you need is the iron. When it comes to cheating death and decreasing your risk of disease, both camps are correct. 

Look, exercise is medicine, and you need to find the medicine that you actually enjoy. Why? Because if you enjoy it, you’ll stick with it. Side note, there are those psychos out there that will tell you to push the pain away, and stay hard, and run till your legs break, and blah blah blah. If you were one of those people, you wouldn’t be reading this. My advice is to find something that sucks enough for you to get results, but is fun enough for you to stick with it.

Ok, back to what it means to be in a caloric deficit. You either need to burn more calories than you eat, or eat less calories than you burn (It's the same thing).

Here are two examples of how a person could lose over 20lbs in one year:

1. If you’re currently consuming 2000 calories a day, and 250 of those calories are coming from a Starbucks latte, you could replace the Starbucks latte with a calorie free beverage (WHILE DOING EVERYTHING ELSE THE SAME) and you would be in a 250 calorie deficit.

2. If you’re currently burning 2000 calories a day, and you decide to take up walking at a moderate pace (burning about an extra 250 calories), you could expect the exact same results (IF YOU KEPT EVERYTHING ELSE THE SAME).
Here’s the math: 

There are 3500 calories in a pound of fat, we can take 3500 divided by 250 per day = 14 days. If you put yourself in a 250 calorie deficit per week, you will lose a half pound a week. Half a pound per week is 2lbs per month, and twelve months later, look who’s 20lbs lighter :) 

On the flip side of that, imagine regularly walking on a college campus for at least an hour a day. Then you graduate and you get your first big kid job. No more walking. Add a Starbucks latte on the way into that new job, and in the first year out of college, that’s 20lbs in the wrong direction. 

Let’s go back to our two hypothetical humans who have lost over 20lbs. One of them is now also “healthier” from a metabolic standpoint. If you guessed human #2, you’d be correct. This person now has a habit of being active. By walking everyday, they’ve not only dropped weight, but it’s likely they’ve improved things like blood pressure and blood sugar.

Sooooo, what if I don’t wanna just lose weight but I actually wanna LOOK like I workout.
Well my friends, that’s where strength training comes in.In order to do this, it’s not just about a calorie deficit. It’s about building muscle, and developing total body strength.

Plenty of people drop 30lbs only to think to themselves, damn, I thought I’d look different. Those are typically the people who use either a food calorie deficit (cutting back only on calories consumed) or those using cardio for their caloric deficit (increasing their calories burned). While both people have improved their overall fitness, they probably don’t have the physique that they wanted.

In order to see muscle or what you might call “muscle tone”, you have to build muscle, and then lose enough fat to see it.

The way to do that is through both strength and conditioning.

Stay tuned for part two on exactly how to do both of those things!