The Role of Cardio in Fat Loss

Well, OK, so and again, there's so many different ways you can look at this. Do you need cardio to lose weight? No. A lot of people say it's a very inefficient way of losing weight because you don't burn that many calories when you train. And I'm like, well, it depends what you're doing. and it depends on the other things, the way you've orchestrated the rest of your strategy. At the end of the day, a lot of people who are really overweight, they don't do anything. They're fairly sedentary. And a lot of them are gonna have a hard time managing their appetite. So if they could manage their appetite, all of these new GLP drugs would not exist. Like that's basically what they're doing. Not all of them are doing that, but the main premise of that category of drug is to kill your hunger so that you don't eat. Okay, what does that sound like? A big calorie deficit. Cool. And a lot of output and not that much input. So I would look at it from a, I'm always looking at it from a mechanistic side as well. If you do, if we look at those category three people and we come to an understanding that they probably don't have good functioning mitochondria and we could make that better, what's the easiest way to increase mitochondrial content and and increase the performance of how the mitochondria function is aerobic training so it's like okay even if they're not burning a lot of calories and they do aerobics which is false which is false somebody doing a good decent clip of cardio for an hour especially if they're overweight they could be burning off 600 700 calories you go do jujitsu jujitsu an hour you could burn off 900 to 1200 calories in an hour if you're just constantly doing jujitsu, right? So I think it's a bit, it's fallacious to say that the cardio is not going to help and that you don't need to do it. Now, it's not a very time efficient way of doing things because yes, you're going to have to spend some time walking and doing cardio and doing, depending on how out of shape you are and depending on how overweight you are, you have to find the activity you can actually even do. So let's say you have somebody who's significantly overweight and their knees are hurting all the time from carrying that weight. Going out jogging is probably not a good idea. And I would say jogging for most people is not a good idea because they won't spend time learning how to run properly. It would be like you would never go into the gym and put 400 pounds on the bar for the first time you've ever bench press. You would learn how to bench press first and you'd build to that. But for some reason, people don't look at running in the same manner. They just go out and start running. And I used to because I lived in Austin, Texas for a long time. And it's a big it's place big for running. So you go out to there's a river. It's called a lake, but it's really a river that goes through the middle of Austin. And it's they call it Lady Bird Lake. Now, I will never call it that. It's Town Lake to me because that's what it was before they changed the name. But there's a huge running trails all around, around the river lake thingy. And I used to go out and watch people run and you could tell there was almost nobody, nobody they could run properly. And they're just limping along. You can tell they're not, they're not doing well. They're not loving this. It's like, then why are you doing it? So it's like, if you can't, you don't know how to run correctly, or you're too overweight or your knees hurt or your back hurts, go get on an elliptical, go get on an airdyne, Go get on a bike, do something non-impact that just lets you go as hard as you can comfortably go and within the constraints of your limits. But that's going to be massively beneficial, especially combined with, say, a lower carbohydrate or lower energy intake diet to increasing how well your mitochondria learn how to oxidize, which means that when that fat gets to the cell, gets in the mitochondria, you can actually do something with it and you can get it to come off really quickly. But we'll say they are right that it is all diet. Like you can't, I think, I think what people get confused on is they go, well, I'm going to eat and I'm just going to do training and the training will offset the food. That's only true if you don't eat those extra calories back. You can train, you can use training as your deficit if you have the time and the recovery and the capability to do that. So that's usually how I get lean. So if I know that my TDEE is around 3,200 with exercise, and if I eat 2,600 calories, now you can look at that and say, well, you're actually not using training as your deficit. You're using an actual deficit from nutrition. Then I could go, yeah, but let's flip that back around. Let say I decided to eat 2 but then I did 3 calories of work So now I actually exercising for the deficit So in that situation both people are correct Just depends on which side of the fence you're looking at it from, right? Because if I look at TDEE without exercise, mine's going to be around. If I get just a normal amount of steps, say 7,000, 8,000 steps a day, and I'm eating a good mixed diet, my thermic effect is okay. I'm going to burn off around 2,400 calories. The only reason I need to eat 3,200 is because I'm training five to seven hours a week. So now tell me that training is not creating the deficit. It is creating the deficit because if I remove that, I would no longer be in the deficit. Do you find that like that works better in certain situations or just in general for really anybody, if they can exercise more, you know, you obviously are able to eat a little bit more and still create that deficit. I think that would be, it would be time management and goal specific, right? I like to eat. So if I want to eat more, if I want to eat 3,200 calories a day, I'm going to have to train for that. So if I, if I, let's say one day I woke up and you're like, man, I just really don't feel like eating. Okay. I would, I would just go and I would train a couple of times a week and get my steps in and my little bit of cardio and I would just eat less. But if you're like me and you like to eat, then it's like, all right, well, in order to, I've got to, I have to earn those calories. So in order to be able to eat that much or diet on a higher amount of calories, those calories have to be put somewhere. Right. So but you go through you go through phases like there are times where I'm sitting, I'm chained to this desk or I'm traveling. I just don't have a lot of time to train. If I know that, then diet becomes the main the main operator. But if I'm at home and I can train a lot and I love to train and if you do love to train like cool training now is realistically a big part of that. that deficit because it's a big part of calories out and you just have to match, make sure that your nutrition is set up correctly so that you do stay in a deficit. But a lot of people that in this, I remember back in the eighties and nineties, this was the kind of the thing people would eat whatever they wanted to. And then they go to aerobics class and they, well, I burned all that off. I'm like, no, you either equalized it or you're still on a surplus. And like in the early stages of me becoming a trainer, I remember my mentor Charles would say this, he'd call it the chunky aerobics instructor syndrome. And it was true because all of these aerobics instructors who were teaching, say, four hours a class a day, they would eat whatever the fuck they wanted to, and none of them looked good. The only people that looked good were people that were teaching spin classes, and that's because they were competitive cyclists, so they kept their nutrition well because they were competing in their cycling and triathlons. So there was a massive difference between the people who would just get up there and do Zumba and then go eat a pizza because they danced around for an hour versus the guys who were cycling or like, I'm going to eat for my sport. And that's going to alter my body composition a very different way. And the other people like, well, I earned that pizza and that beer, the different mindset. Yeah. Yeah. No, it makes a lot of sense. Right. Like you said, it's, if you're not, you know, yes, we want to exercise and you can't exercise to, to, you know, help create that deficit. But like, if you're not like moderating that, it's like, that can easily get out of hand. And now it's like, you said, you're either offsetting it or you're eating in a surplus, which again, depending on if you're not tracking things and you're just eating whatever, I mean, it's super easy to do that and you get out of a, out of maintenance and into a surplus if you're not careful with it. And there's pros and cons of everything, right? So if you look at, well, if I keep doing more and more training, I can eat more, but I'm also building up a lot of fatigue and I also have to recover from all of that work. So you can't, you can't endlessly add more work and think, and think that's gonna, that's gonna fix things. But then again, it's like, if you, if you're not going to eat any food, you also can't do much work. So you have to pick your poison. I'm either, I'm either hungry all the time, but I don't have to train that much or I can eat more food, but fuck man, I'm tired from training. I feel like, you know, with all this, you know, I don't know if this is something that you feel like you've seen in the, in this kind of industry, but you kind of get that, like people scared of doing too much exercise, but really what it comes down to is like, obviously like poor programming and stuff, but just people have like, they don't, they don't do the stress management thing. They, they, they sleep terribly. And then they also try to pair it with like terrible nutrition. And then it's like, Oh, you gotta be worried about exercising too much. But I feel like if you can get those things nailed down, I mean, I feel like you, you're, you're a lot of sky's the limit almost in a way from now. Yeah, it really is. It really is.