You MUST DO Cardio For Fat Loss

hey folks dr mike here for renaissance periodization fitness myths number 15 of the series you must do cardio to lose fat this is a myth interesting let's find out why so the claim here is something like the following when a fat loss program begins most people do oh about three things they generally cut out junk which is good idea a lot of them cut carbs which may or may not be a good idea and almost everyone starts doing some kind of cardio the major ways in which they do the cardio is for example like early

morning runs that's a huge thing people on fitness journey seem to love love love is they're like all right i'm gonna wake up every morning at 5 00 am and run i can't think of too many things that set up failure more than the early morning run bs because sleep is a motherfucker you love getting it so do i and if you're cutting into your sleep if even from a physiological perspective it's stupid for fat loss why exactly are we running that early in the morning what ends up happening is as the weeks go by

you skip a couple sessions you realize you like sleep more and you just get out of the habit because you really designed a habit that was the hardest possible thing to do at the worst possible time and it's kind of designed to fail ideally fitness habits are easy and very integratable into your life in early morning runs are the opposite opposite opposite of all that it can work for you and i'm super happy it does if it does but this is a terrible mistake a ton of people make or they'll do a thing where they'll

say okay i do three or four or five whatever number x number of weekly sessions in the gym on a cardio machine for x y z amount of time 30 minutes an elliptical four times a week and a lot of times they're like that'll take up loads of time especially if they drive to the gym to go use the cardio machine which is kind of curious you could just walked around the block by then and gotten the same amount of calories burned uh and also like they'll be super hard weight training and they say well

i still have to do cardio because i got to lose fat so they stay after the weight training they get on these cardio machines they do it for 30 or 40 minutes after the weight training and it probably blunts the adaptations of weight training which is to say it becomes more difficult to hold on to muscle mass and strength because you're sandwiching cardio right after training ideally you would do it very very far apart but people don't want to give up these habits they still want to get up they still think they should be getting

up early in the morning to go running they still think they have to make it to a physical gym four times a week to do cardio they still think they have to do cardio after training because they say okay i'm in a fat loss plan that means i do cardio that's what fat loss plans are you got to control your diet you got to do cardio because everyone says that's the truth now apparently that's wrong apparently it's a myth so i said in these slides let's find out why first fat loss is always and ever

about calories in versus calories out if you're weight training and nutrition mostly eating enough protein a few times a day training hard in in the gym with weights if it is designed to prevent muscle loss which is not very hard then if you generate a caloric deficit fat loss will occur cardio or not it has to occur there's nowhere else for the tissue to come from cardio can dig the deficit deeper so if your diet deficit plus your normal physical activity is 500 calories below maintenance if you do 300 extra cardio calories per day and

you don't make up for it by being lazy or other times then now you're 800 calories in the hole it'll dig the deficit deeper but it's not some kind of magical fat loss tool as a matter of fact almost all pills and potions and powders even that work they just dig your deficit deeper for you like people you know will do the other side of you know sort of drugs that are have to be approved by doctor are not super legal they'll take thyroid drugs they'll take drugs like dnp and oh it's a fat loss

drug like it just digs a deficit hole it just burns off calories for you you could be burning them in any other way by reducing food or increased physical activity and they seem to just like they say oh i gotta take this drug to get lean that's not true so i gotta do cardio because cardio is the special thing that's outside of a caloric deficit somehow makes me lean and that's just not true cardio for fat loss only really does one thing it just creates a deficit that's it okay and if you can get the

deficit done some other way you're actually maybe better off here's to the second point if you work a physical job or are pretty active anyway you could already be burning tons of fat that way you're already generating a huge deficit so let's say you're super active and you're 160 pounds you need to eat 3 500 calories per day to just keep your weight all you got to do is cut your calories to 3 000 which is like super easy just cut some junk foods out through the week and then all of a sudden you're losing

like a pound a week having changed nothing and say well aren't you doing cardio like i work as a factory supervisor i walk 25 000 steps every day that is fucking cardio just as a baseline low activity is under 5 000 subs a day moderator is 5 000 to 10 000 steps a day 10 000 to 15 000 is considered high 15 000 plus is considered like question mark question mark question mark so i physically know people that are factory foreman or supervisors and they walk around all the time they get 20 000 plus stops

per day they ask me like should i be doing cardio if i want to lose fat the only thing i say is cut out your junk or cut down on junk cut down the amount of refined sugar and extra fat you have in your diet and watch and they do it they're like holy crap i'm losing two pounds a week for the last eight weeks it's super easy if you're already super active you don't need the magic potion of cardio on the other hand there's a downside here potentially if you do extra cardio on top

of that it may interfere with your schedule imagine being a factory supervisor and working 10 and 12 hour days and then also having to do cardio what the hell for you are already super active it's a terrible for your schedule and you're very likely to start to try to quit and then if you quit on cardio some people think put on the cardio why the hell am i even controlling my diet i know from the other youtube videos i've seen it's cardioplus diet got to do both if i can't do one i might as well

not be doing the other and that's just not true point number three if your diet fatigue starts to rise very high which means one of the things that really the thing that predicts that is the magnitude of your deficit how much in the whole are you from calories consumed versus calories produced right if your deficit gets really big by adding a ton of cardio for example what can happen is your non-exercise activity thermogenesis just your normal amount of movement you have through the day starts to decline your body's exceptionally good at conserving your energy and

trying for you to not sort of whittle away all of your body mass so if you're starting to do a ton and this has been shown in some very interesting studies as your cardio levels go up what ends up happening is the amount of physical activity you do at other times of the day start to go down so for example if you know your wife's in the kitchen and she's like honey can you take out the trash it's trash day tomorrow if you've done a ton of cardio that day you're more likely to be like

oh baby i'm super beat can you please do it she's like yeah no problem i'm on my way out there anyway and then you don't take out the trash and that's calories you didn't burn you just sit on a couch like this so normally you'd burn a thousand calories just walking around through the day now you're burning 500 because you turned into a lazy asshole we say well where are the other 500 coming from were you doing 500 calories of like cardio and a machine instead of doing the machine cardio you can just do a

thousand calories of moving around you'll accomplish more in your life and it won't lead to this crazy reduction where you feel like crap all the time it interferes with your work and your life enjoyment and everything there is this idea that the more cardio you do the better but that cap of where your body stops letting you do more activity will hit and if you power through during cardio it will hit you in other points of your life walking to and from a mailbox moving around and when you talk to your friends on the phone

instead of pacing you just sit there all this other stuff it turns out adding more cardio at some point doesn't even burn any more calories or very few and if you keep the cardio in you say okay well i hit on my cardio sessions you may still think you're generating a huge deficit but because you're now less active your body's like whoa cool we can't have this much activity the deficit's still the same size so you could say ooh i'm hitting my cardio i'm fine i should lose lots of weight week after week after week

you don't lose a lot of weight you could think like what the hell is going on why am i not losing the weight i'm supposed to be it's because you reduced your regular activity and increased cardio i don't know about you guys but doing regular stuff accomplishes things that cardio does not cardio just accomplishes you doing this on a treadmill and maybe you watch a video or listen to music or a podcast you can do that stuff doing chores around the house generating the same deficit and being more useful to everyone including yourself now that's

a whole lot of anti-cardio for one slide what about grains of truth where is this more or less correct if your daily activity is very low just naturally you don't have a lot to do around the house or something like that or you work a very sedentary job you sit at a computer all the time cardio can help however i would encourage you to get a step tracker and just be more active walking doing stuff here's my step tracker it's the myfit mi.fit it's a chinese company i'm probably being hacked right now but uh who

knows jk it's a fine step tracker any one of them works and i just have a goal that on my massing phases i have to do at least 9000 steps on average per per day over the course averaged over a week or so and then on a fat loss phase i'm like my average is like 11 000. that's it as long as i hit those numbers i'm good to go and i know i'm creating enough of a deficit where the diet adjustment does the rest of it right because if you get a step tracker it

actually monitors all your physical activity mostly walking but also just taking stuff off of shells and stuff like that it registers that as well what you can do is count all of your physical activity through the whole day to generate deficit it's it's uh scientifically more accurate because when you say to yourself you get out of trouble say oh i did 500 calories on a treadmill you're actually not measuring the you know 15 other hour 15 other waking hours of the day where you could be doing a lot of activity or little and then your

activity is actually fluctuating a ton and when you're not losing weight in a more linear pattern like you think you're like fuck what is it i think i'm eating properly well you could be but your physical activity could be all over the map if you get a step tracker you more or less automatically know to a much higher degree of precision what you're actually doing on the calories outside and since you control the calories inside with food it really closes the loop and it makes your life so much less stressful because you never have to

question am i doing enough cardio because you know like even if you're doing enough on the elliptical you're ooh but am i not being energetic enough in my other parts of the day and am i slowing down to make up for it to give my elliptical cardio a bit more energy you never can tell unless you have a step tracker huge recommendation point number two if you like cardio machines or you like your morning run then by all means keep doing them i'm not trying to talk you out of cardio cardio is great if that's

the best solution for the problem and if you actually like doing it and it fits your schedule i would still consider adding a step tracker to the rest of your life and even while you're on the machine to make sure your total activity is at your baseline level for what it isn't maintenance or a little higher when you're trying to lose fat because that way you don't get into this sort of conundrum of like oh i know i'm hitting the cardio but am i slacking on everything else if you have a step tracker you can

still hit your cardio just like you like but because the step tracker is always on it counts your cardio and it counts all the other stuff for the day so you can say ah okay you know i hit 12 000 steps every day every day every day i know i'm doing the right thing the out of the equation is taken care of the anti take care of with diet it's a closed loop and no problem i can lose all the weight that i programmed to lose no problem all right best practices first diet always comes

first control it or your chances for losing fat and weight are going to be very low there's tons of infographics about this i'm sure you can search but if you search like what kind of activity levels require the burning off of various calories of junk foods like ice cream cone or donut or lollipop fuck lollipop who the hell eat the lollipops we ate i guess i don't know i'm in a lollipop mood if you look at those charts good god it's depressing because like one donut you gotta run like three miles to burn that shit

off what fuck that so if you're like yeah i would control my diet but i love donuts too much i'll just do more cardio like you have no idea what you're saying there's marathon runner training levels of cardio you'd have to do to compensate for five or six donuts it's unbelievable control your diet and you could start losing weight without any cardio at all without even fucking step tracker when you get more serious or more meticulous you can get a snap tracker you can do formal cardio diet has to be in there the idea that

i'll just do it with uh with you know training only and i don't have to worry about my diet it's going to fail for almost everyone you're not a trained marathon owner so you're probably not going to work for you second make sure your physical activity is on the moderate high side not on the extreme high side because as mentioned earlier that's excessively fatiguing and it's unsustainable you'll you're just going to peter off and eventually going to be so tired you're not going to be able to keep it up if it's on the low side

you'll have to cut your food a crapload in order to see the results that you want as far as weekly weight loss and that sucks you'd be starving and low on energy moderate to high for most people that means somewhere between ten thousand and fifteen thousand steps and there's no bonus going from ten to eleven eleven to twelve twelve to thirteen ten to fifteen anywhere that matches lifestyle is good if you can do more than fifteen sustainably and you're not super fatigued after a few days or weeks by all means keep going if anything close

to seven eight or nine beats you up and you're just too much hey respect it's okay do what you can but ideally the goal is like around 10 000 and between 10 and 15 especially on that lower side between 10 to 13 or something that's the golden zone for many people not all but that's really good if you think well the more i do the better remember fatigue can catch up to you and then sustainability is out the window if sustainability is out the window oh look you're not losing fat over the course of a

week that's visibly different in your body it's weeks and weeks and weeks and that way something sustainable has to be a thing point number three if your pre-planned cardio like the elliptical or my morning run if it fits your schedule is sustainable and you like it by all means keep on going super super awesome to do but point number four if you're losing weight and fat just fine without any kind of formal cardio there's no need for formal cardio of any kind and that's really the myth the idea that you need formal cardio you got

to get on a machine or you got to run in order to get results and all the stuff kind of is very well exhibited in like office conversations where people are like man you're losing a lot of weight i can tell you like oh thanks jim that's really great and he's like what are you doing for cardio like there's a need to have to answer that question right and it's a little disappointing when you go actually you just have a step tracker and our ten thousand steps and that's it jim's gonna kind of be like

huh so you're not doing cardio and there's like kind of a subtext of like oh you're lazy asshole or you could get better results none of that's true if you generate a decent deficit like 500 calorie cut and you keep your activity level from falling and you keep it at a moderate high level so maybe two or three hundred calories more than you normally would on maintenance holy crap at 700 800 calorie deficit that's like a pound and a half a week you could potentially lose a fat that really is that golden zone that sustainable

zone give it some thought folks see you next time you