Redefining Cardiovascular Training and Mitochondrial Health

Before we get off the topic, there are two more important messages Luke wanted to share. first that cardio isn't just a tool for fat burning and second that doing a lot of cardio won't make you fat roderick chavez who is a biologist from delaware and he was over here in australia giving a seminar and he's a he's a like a world champion power lifter and he got up on stage he goes oh let's talk about the cardio word i hate that fucking word and we were like i was like oh shit he's gonna bash cardio and he goes stop calling it cardio because when you when you take cardiovascular and turn it to cardio, you lose all the meaning of the actual word. So whereas most trainers will think about cardio as just burning fat or burning calories, we need to really look at it as what it is. It's a tool to increase your cardiovascular system, which is kind of important for results because dying is really not good for results. So here is how Luke approaches cardiovascular work and all the benefits it provides. If we talk about it as being cardiovascular or cardiorespiratory, we look at two branches. You have aerobic or pure cardio work, which would be under 70 VO2 max or over. So when I first get somebody, we're doing aerobic work, which is going to be a lot of the protocols we use is from Joel Jamison at 8weeksout.com. And we'll use 130 to 150 beats per minute, depending on where they're at. We want to stay under lactate threshold, so we don't want to be building up any lactate while we do this. We are just working on global conditioning and working on the heart, the vein system, and the lungs. That allows you to transport more oxygen, pull out more carbon dioxide. You get better gas exchange. Your mitochondria love that oxygen. It's going to build mitochondrial networks, which makes you lose body fat faster and enables you to create more things faster, like hydrochloric acid to break your food down, pancreatic enzymes and insulin and everything else, and even testosterone. If you don't have good mitochondrial health, you're not going to have good testosterone. And so cardio, if it's done correctly and programmed correctly, increases testosterone, not decreases it, and it helps you to recover and it helps you to grow and lift harder and faster. It's all about balance.

right? We're going to balance out the aerobic and anaerobic system. It doesn't mean you need to go run marathons, but you need to have a good aerobic base. The positive of that is it's going to increase your anaerobic performance. Luke started talking about this stuff four to five years ago, and people thought he was crazy. Everyone knows that cardio makes your cortisol go up and cardio makes you fat. And that's fucking ridiculous. And people are like, well, look at marathon runners. They're all fat. No, if you look at elite level marathon runners, They're like 5% body fat. Now, they're tiny because all of that running, yes, that's going to create a situation where it's going to break your muscle tissue down. But you're not going to see an elite level marathon runner who's fat. That's fucking ridiculous. And it is kind of ridiculous. There are quite a few fitness personalities I used to follow who are constantly alluding to the overweight, carb-fueled marathon runner. Go watch Breaking 2 documentary by National Geographic and tell me those guys have poor body composition.