Before you start wasting hours and hours on those boring treadmills, stationary bikes, and elliptical machines, let's see if low-to-moderate intensity, long-duration cardio exercise is actually good for your body or mostly a waste of time. When you're done reading this article, I hope you'll agree that there's a better way to get in shape that doesn't involve spending hours on boring cardio machines.
People who want to avoid heart disease or lose weight often get advice from fitness experts and doctors to do low- to moderate-intensity aerobic training (cardio). Most of the time, the advice is something like, "Do 30 to 60 minutes of steady-pace cardio three to five times a week while keeping your heart rate at a moderate level." Before you give in to this common belief and become the "hamster on the wheel" doing endless hours of boring cardio, I'd like you to think about some recent scientific research that suggests that steady-pace endurance cardio work may not be all it's cracked up to be.
First, you should know that our bodies are made to move in short bursts of effort followed by rest, or stop-and-go movement, rather than in a steady state. Recent research suggests that one of the most important things to think about when training is how your body changes. This tendency can be seen in nature, where all animals move in a stop-and-go way instead of in a steady state. In fact, humans are the only animals that try to do physical activities that are called "endurance" sports.
Except for long-distance running and cycling, most competitive sports are also based on stop-and-go movement or short bursts of effort followed by rest. Look at the bodies of marathon runners and sprinters to see an example of how endurance or steady state training is different from stop-and-go training. Most sprinters have a body that looks very lean, muscular, and strong, while the average marathoner looks more often like they are sick and emaciated. Which of these would you rather be?
Another thing to think about when thinking about the benefits of physical variety is how different kinds of exercise affect our bodies on the inside. Scientists have known for a long time that too much steady-state endurance exercise (which means different things for different people, but is sometimes defined as more than 60 minutes per session most days of the week) causes the body to make more free radicals, can damage joints, lowers immune function, causes muscle loss, and can cause a pro-inflammatory response that can lead to chronic diseases. On the other hand, highly variable cyclic training has been linked to more anti-oxidants and less inflammation in the body, a better nitric oxide response (which can help keep your heart healthy), and a higher metabolic rate response (which can assist with weight loss).
Also, steady state endurance training only trains the heart at one specific heart rate range and doesn't teach it how to react to different stresses that happen every day. On the other hand, highly variable cyclic training teaches the heart to respond to and recover from different demands, making it less likely to fail when you need it. Think of it like this — Your heart will be better able to handle everyday stress if you do exercises that teach it to beat quickly up and down. Stress can make your heart rate and blood pressure go up quickly. Steady-state jogging and other endurance exercises don't teach your heart to handle sudden changes in blood pressure or heart rate.
For example, let's say you jog for 45 minutes and try to keep the same pace. As long as you didn't go up or down any big hills, your heart rate was probably about the same the whole time. Let's say it was 135 beats per minute. Now, let's compare that to a much better way to work out, which is to do 20 minutes of all-out wind sprints followed by a minute or two of walking to recover between sprints. With this more effective workout, your heart rate goes up and down quickly and on a much larger scale. This forces your heart to get stronger so it can handle different demands. During the recovery walks, your heart rate would likely range from 110 to 115 beats per minute (bpm) to 160 bpm or more during the sprints. This doesn't mean that sprints are the only way to use this type of training to your advantage. Any type of training where the intensity changes a lot will give you these better results.
The important thing about variable cyclic training that makes it better than steady state cardio is that it gives you time to recover between bursts of effort. For the body to have a healthy response to an exercise stimulus, that time to recover is very important. Another benefit of variable cyclic training is that it is much more interesting and has a lower dropout rate than long, boring steady state cardio programmes.
To sum up, some of the possible benefits of variable cyclic training over steady state endurance training are: better heart health, more protection from free radicals, better immune function, less risk of joint wear and tear, less muscle loss, a higher metabolic rate after exercise, and a heart that is better able to deal with the stresses of everyday life. Stop-and-go training or training with different levels of intensity can help you in many ways.
In addition to wind sprints, most competitive sports, like football, basketball, racquetball, tennis, hockey, etc., naturally involve a lot of stop-and-go movement. Also, lifting weights naturally involves short bursts of hard work followed by periods of rest. High intensity interval training is another way to train that uses periods of hard work and rest. You can do it on any piece of cardio equipment by switching between high and low intensity intervals. For example, a treadmill interval training session might look like this:
Warm up with a fast walk or light jog for 3–4 minutes;
Interval 1 - run at 8.0 mi/hr for 1 minute;
Interval 2: Walk 4 miles per hour for 1.5 minutes;
Interval 3 - run at 10.0 mi/hr for 1 minute;
Step 4: Walk at 4.0 miles per hour for 1.5 minutes;
Repeat these four intervals four times for a 20-minute workout that is very hard.
The main point of this article is that you should try to do most of your workouts at very different levels of intensity to get the most out of them in terms of heart health, fat loss, and a strong, lean body.
