Why Cardio Doesn’t Work for Fat Loss

By: Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS
http://www.turbulencetraining1.com/

Cardio exercise is such a strange thing. In theory, it should work
so perfectly well for all men and women, but as anyone who has
tried it knows, the practicality of it just doesn’t add up.

After all, some men and women do cardio 6 hours, 9 hours, or more per week, and still have belly fat to burn. On the other hand, it works just fine for others.

British researchers wanted to get more insight into this paradox, and studied 35 overweight men and women, who weren’t previously exercising.

(Reference: International Journal of Obesity 32: 177-184, 2008). (more…)

I am old school when it comes to training. Not all of the education in the world means a whole lot when dealing with the human spirit. As a fitness coach I can monitor heart rate, and breaths per minute and measure someone’s estimated anaerobic threshold, and all of the other “physiological markers” and it really doesn’t tell me much in the grand scheme of things. The majority of people out there will quit mentally way before their body gets to a point of any real danger. I have taken people to their own personal limits, only to discover that there are entire new boundaries that can be and need to be pushed through with a little more work and a lot more mental training. In fact, I have not trained many people that have come close to the real physical breaking point. Some people have suffered muscle cramps, asthma attacks, dizziness, etc…but in the end, all of these people were fine physically and in almost every case, it was other factors that caused these scenarios and not the actual training that was taking place. This is not to say that these people were not trying, or consciously gave up. Rather, these people have yet to learn how to push through the barriers that have caused them to stop. It’s a tricky problem for most. Each time you push through a new barrier, you become more resistant to “quitting” the next time out, while training at that same level. (more…)

When I was a kid playing sports, I would, like most kids, have endless excuses to why I didn’t perform well, or why I lost on a particular day. Kids want to impress their parents, coaches and friends all of the time, so the natural defense mechanism is to make up excuses. “My arm hurt,” “I feel sick,” “I am tired,” “it was the other guy’s fault,” “it was my coaches fault,” etc… Interestingly enough, these are pretty much the same type of excuses I hear from fitness members, clients and other people I deal with that are trying to ‘get fit.’ Excuses come out constantly and they are much like the ones I used (and most other kids) as a child. (more…)

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Without getting deep into the exercise physiology of the thing, I will do a little back log into the WHAT, HOW and WHY of HIIT.

High Intensity Interval Training is just what it says it is, performing very high intensity, intervals for a short period of time. Why is it effective? To answer this question we need to backtrack a little and look at the more traditional type of training and the one that most people out there still do; Low Intensity Cardio training. (more…)