YOUR CARDIO RX FOR FAT LOSS

by Nicklaus Millican MS, RD, CES

Hello all of my SCAC readers. If your recent fat loss efforts involve cardio, you owe it to yourself to learn how to make that effort effective for your body. Most people spend countless hours on their treadmills, seeing little or no results; this isn’t because something is wrong with them, it’s because that type of exercise is not effective for sustained fat loss.

Of course, cardio is no substitute for other lifestyle factors such as sleep, stress, management, nutrition, and other forms of exercise; but this article will explain how you can use cardio as tool for your fat loss goals.

Cardio Science

Every second, of every day, your blood must carry enough fuel to provide your body with energy. If you are reading this while sitting down, your body doesn’t need as much fuel as if you were walking on the treadmill. If you’re trying to lose weight, you hope this additional fuel is coming from your stores of body fat. Effective fat-burning cardio, then, must force your body to release stored fat into your blood so it can be used as energy by the rest of your body.

Adrenaline

When you begin exercising, your body releases adrenaline—the same adrenaline which causes an “adrenaline rush” during an exciting event. Adrenaline makes changes to your body, necessary for your body to exercise effectively—such as making additional fuel available.

Adrenaline helps this happen by forcing your stored fat to be released into your blood…to be used by your exercising muscles. However, not all types of exercise release the same amount of adrenaline.

Types of exercise

Adrenaline is released in proportion to the intensity of exercise. In other words, more adrenaline is released with harder exercise than with easier exercise.

There are 2 considerations when measuring intensity.

1. How long that exercise can be maintained (without making it easier; it should make sense that you can do easy exercise longer than hard exercise. For example, you can walk much longer than you can sprint.
2. How hard the exercise feels; each person may feel the intensity of a given exercise differently. For example, if you are just starting an exercise program, “easy walking” may feel difficult.

Given what you now know, you can understand that harder exercise releases more stored fat than easier exercise. This also explains why the traditional types of cardio (long sessions of low intensity) do not lead to sustained fat loss success.

Cardio Recommendations

Clearly, your successful fat loss cardio strategy will require exercise that adequately increases adrenaline. However, the necessary level of intensity varies from person to person.

If you are a beginner, easy walking may be enough to cause fat loss...at first. However, as you get into better shape, easy exercise will no longer be effective and you will need to increase the intensity of your exercise. Eventually, near-maximal intensity will be necessary. If you continue with low intensity exercise, you will quickly become frustrated with your lack of results.

If you’re out of shape…

Before starting any exercise program, you need to determine what is safe. When I begin working with a person, the very first thing we do together is an in-depth Health Interview; part of this interview is assessing your level of risk from exercise. If you’re not working with a fitness professional, or the person you are working with never assessed your level of risk, I’ve included a simple risk assessment form below:

Has your doctor ever said that you have a heart condition and that you should only do physical activity recommended by a doctor? Do you feel pain in your chest when you do physical activity? In the past month, have you had chest pain when you were not doing physical activity? Do you lose your balance because of dizziness or do you ever lose consciousness? Do you have a bone or joint problem (for example, back, knee or hip) that could be made worse by a change in your physical activity? Is your doctor currently prescribing drugs (for example, water pills) for your blood pressure or heart condition? Do you know of any other reason why you should not do physical activity?  If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, see or call your doctor before you start becoming much more physically active. Once your safety is assured, it’s time to decide the appropriate level of intensity for your fat loss cardio. Some health professionals will be able to run very specific tests to help determine this. You can also simply start at an intensity that feels easy to moderately hard. As you get into better shape, though, your level of intensity will need to increase. As you get into better shape… A predictable side effect of safe and effective exercise is—your body will adapt; what once was hard becomes easier. This means, as you get into better shape, you will need to select more intense exercise to increase your adrenaline enough to help you lose fat. For example, if you started at 30 minutes of easy walking, a few weeks later you may jog moderately hard for 20 minutes; if you’re jogging, in a few weeks you will be doing 3 minute running intervals, then 30 second sprint intervals. interval training “Interval training” is a cardio technique used for high intensities. Remember, high intensity is partly defined by the fact that it can only be done for very short periods of time. This means, you can only sprint for 8-30 seconds—which is not usually enough for optimal fat loss. Interval training consists of a short bouts of high intensity exercise (say 30 seconds of sprinting) followed by a few minutes of rest before another high intensity bout. At first, you may only need to do between 1-3 intervals once or twice per week. Gradually, you can increase the number of intervals and do them 3-4 times per week. Don’t be over eager to increase how much—this type of exercise is very demanding and too much will cause you to burn out. Conclusion I appreciate you reading this article, and truly hope it will be useful for you. If you have questions, or you’d ever like to connect with me, just pull me aside at the gym. Otherwise you can always send me an email at nicklaus.millican@gmail.com.