Physiological Adaptations to Cardio

Now, some of the physiologic effects you get, okay, more angiogenesis, meaning you're building more capillaries, you get more blood flow. That's going to be helpful for basically reducing blood pressure and moving blood around the body. Also for fat loss, because one of the problems with fat, especially in stubborn areas, is just simply getting blood flow there to get the fat out. Right. And to get nutrients back in. You have increased mitochondrial biogenesis, which means you're going to increase the amount and the health and the the age of your mitochondria. OK, the more healthy mitochondria you have, you reduce inflammation. You can process more fuel faster. That will that will simply get your VO2 max up as well. You also see local adaptations in like most of what we talked about is like global conditioning effects, cardiovascular system effects. resizing the heart. So a lot of people that have high stress, left ventricle, the chamber will get really thick to push more because they don't have vessels that will dilate enough. So they get high blood pressure and that damages the vessels, especially the arteries. So it will increase arterial dilation. We'll also increase the chamber that's inside the left ventricle to kind of balance out that muscle thickness. Because the problem really is the muscle gets thicker, but the chamber doesn't expand. So you're pulling blood in there, but you're not pushing a lot of blood anymore. So your heart rate has to go up to try to perfuse enough blood. If I can expand that internal chamber, I can pull with more blood. Now my heart doesn't have to beat as much because it's pushing more blood, right? I mean, even for the brain, like you get an increase in BDNF, which is it creates increase in neurogenesis. So it actually, it makes you more smarter. We'll say, right. So you can, you've see increases in IQ by doing aerobic activity. Like a lot of this stuff can be done with anaerobic as well, especially hit interval training. But the problem with hit interval training is you can't do it a lot and it has to be super intense. So if you're not willing to work hard, it's,

It's not really going to work that well for you. And it's like, you can't like, you can't do a full leg session every fucking day. Like you can do an hour of heavy squats every single day. Right. It's the same thing with hit training. If you're doing it right, you got maybe two sessions tops a week and maybe three for two to three week blocks of time when you're getting over a plateau, if you have the work capacity and the recovery for it. Yeah. After a hit training session, the first few days, if they're not, i'm never doing that again and then you eventually get the amnesia to be like okay i gotta do if that's not your kind of mindset after doing it then you're probably not doing it hard enough i think a lot of people just they i think it a lot of issue with like the hit kind of cardio is a lot of people just like they use very very short rests so that they're just they just turn and end up turning into aerobic work you know that's right yeah i mean that's a it's a good sneaky way with people who won't do aerobics, it's a good way of getting them to do aerobics is just give them like a really small work to rest interval. And the first couple of minutes, it's going to be massively anaerobic, but then as, as they keep going, it then turns into aerobic. So that's a good way. Like give them 20 minutes of like 30 on 30 off. And after about three or four minutes, it's mostly aerobic anyways. Yeah. Yeah. As you were saying earlier, kind of hide the vegetables and i guess like um so i guess we have like the likes of hit we've got steady state like what would be some kind of general i guess um programming strategies that you kind of factor into somebody who's just kind of getting getting used to gym like kind of general population yeah so what i like is if we want to get them to do do more uh beginners probably not going to train five, six days a week with weights and they don't really need it. Like they, they, a very low level of stimulation is worth a lot more in a beginner than it is an advanced person. So if you have somebody training, say three full body workouts a week or an upper lower split that alternates every week, that gives you, you know, a good four days or maybe even seven, if they'll do the work of doing cardio, the nice thing about lists and, and, and to some point, uh, miss or moderate intensity, you don't really need to recover from it unless you're doing an excessive amount. If you're doing 30, 45 minutes a day, even up to an hour a day, you're not really going to have that much recovery. You just need to make sure that you're not driving too big of a deficit. So like, let's say somebody sets out their, their TDEE at 3000 calories and they chip 500 off to start losing four or 500 grams of weight a week. And then they add another 500 calories of cardio a day, they're going to get real fatigued really quickly, but it's not really, it doesn't really have anything to do with the conditioning. It has to do with they have a thousand fucking calorie deficit. So it's like, remember, you don't have to use it as a caloric funnel. So if you're using it for the adaptations up front, you could set your calories at say 3000 and just use the, the, the cardio as your deficit, because now you're still in a 500 calorie deficit. It's easier to pull calories, but pulling calories isn't necessarily going to give you the benefits that you're going to get from the conditioning. So it's like, OK, maybe if I have a new beginner and they're like, I don't mind doing 45 minutes of cardio a day. I'm like, OK, that's going to be for you, like, say, 300 calories a day. All right. So instead of 3000, we're going to eat 2800 and then the cardio is going to be 300 more calories. cool now we have a 500 calorie deficit um and and we get all the cool beneficial effects of increasing um endurance and increasing cardiovascular capacity yeah i think with the with the cardio i think it's just a lot of people maybe kind of struggle to kind of keep consistent with it i think it's more so because of how monotonous it can be when you're actually in it but i think that's where kind of using some of those more kind of fun strategies as you kind of mentioned with the the kind of fake the fake hit intervals or even just getting creative with like how you do program it so like i guess it doesn't always have to be you know you're on the bike for the next 30 minutes or on the cross train or whatever like that it could be like you know kind of circuits or could even be sometimes what i'll get like clients do if they're if they're really struggling to do it like by themselves i'll just suggest they go to like a class in like they're in their gym like it's is it exactly what like you know i would be i would ideally program maybe not because like you know yourself sometimes you go into a gym and i guess it's how i was taught to how i was taught to give classes or the conditioning classes make it so hard that they don't complain yeah it's too easy but sometimes you can train alongside that that can be you know cause other issues it's so weird these days because like if you were if if you were getting ready for a marathon and you had to train for like 90 minutes to two hours in cardio I could I that before Uh I done that for like rapid fat loss but not for like training for a marathon cause I not crazy I'm not built for a marathon. So I would never do one. It's just weird. Cause it's like 45 minutes, set up your iPad or your phone and like watch YouTube or watch a movie like it's the easiest, but you do get some people like, it's just so boring. I'm like, okay, well circuit training, either circuit training or a class, as long as the class isn't pushing them harder than what we need, because if we're looking at LIS, you've got LIS, MIS, and HIS, they all have their place. If we truly want, like, let's say somebody has high blood pressure, I probably don't want them doing moderate to high intensity steady state. I probably want to stick to LIS, which means, okay, we're going to get heart rate up to like 120, 140, and we're going to try to hold that the whole time. If you go over 140, I want you to dial it back. That's hard to do in a class. but then if they can, if they can regulate themselves and they don't get caught up in the moment, cause you know how it is in those classes, people get caught up in the energy. And next thing you know, they're in a heaping mess, sweaty mess on the floor. It's like, you gotta, you auto-regulate that shit and don't go quite as hard because we want to make sure that we're staying within the parameters of what you're, you can do your current capability. And if they go too hard, that's possibly going to affect like their weight training the next day and the the weight training is is just as important as the conditioning but in a situation where the metrics are fucked conditioning may have a priority over the weight training but the weight training is still so important they really they've got to do that too yeah so much to think about yeah there is there is there's quite a bit to all right yeah and i guess like one other thing that like people probably um they probably need to know i guess is like like cardio can also be progressed just the way your kind of weight training can be like you know of course if you've been using level 10 on the cross trainer for as long as you have been using the cross trainer like maybe that's like like there's a point when that level 10 was was kind of difficult to sustain for the time period that you're on the cross trainer whereas like yeah your body does get used to it like you know we do get the like mitochondrial adaptations and stuff like that and then it's time to maybe kind of up the ante there so i think that's like one thing i guess like you know i've always been very poor for doing cardio and i guess it was because i played a lot of sports when i was younger generally quite fit never really have any kind of issues resting heart rate is usually quite low so blood pressure is usually quite good and i never like even student powerlifting because it's kind of combining bodybuilding training with powerlifting you know doing set 15 something like squats would be fine you know be gas because it's just kind of like this stuff but like i could train after it for example right but when i when i was actually preparing for bodybuilding shows and even now um i'm doing cardio like i'm definitely noticing the the benefits to my sleep benefits to like even like my productivity and i think you mentioned like the bdnf like the brain derived neurotrophic factor like you just feel like more alert sharper uh after doing it and so like there is there's a like benefits that you can get because i guess you know even despite all sports there was like once i learned about steps i was like this like my out for like never really needed to do cardio because i just saw cardio as it's to burn calories it's not for health i guess when you're in your early 20s you could give a box about health you're probably doing two you're probably doing a lot of stuff in your early 20s that are probably counteractives here let's be real um but yeah Yeah, so I guess the point I was trying to get to was where do steps factor into this? Because I think steps are really popular now, and it's great that people are more conscious of that being a way to improve their overall activity levels and help out benefits too. But where would that factor into the cardio equation?