Cardio Training

Today it seems everyone believes cardio training is necessary for health. I'd like to examine the proposed benefits of cardio in-depth. Let's start with the most important reason: heart health. From there, we'll move on more generally to training, fitness, burning fat, and overall health.

In terms of heart health, let's back up a moment and look at the human body from the perspective of evolution. For survival, the hearts of early human beings needed to be able to power them to do a few things. These early humans needed to walk long distances to find food, carry water from the stream, or build homes, and they also need to be able to escape the immediate danger of predators. Therefore, two speeds are required: moderate and full. The first can be taken care of by walking, dancing, playing catch, working around the house, etc. Anything active. The second is where we'll focus, and that is going from standing still to a max-effort sprint in order to avoid a predator.

Based on the above reasoning, the heart should have evolved to be like a sportscar: capable of humming along at normal speed with a large reserve capacity available when a burst is required. This discussion is also relevant to heart attacks, which occur when the demand on the heart is suddenly increased and the heart cannot meet that demand. In order to give the heart the reserve capacity that it needs to power a human for these bursts, it is necessary to train at or near maximum effort. This can be done in interval training of any type. We happen to prefer extreme isometrics, as well as rebounds and altitude drops, but interval running or bicycle sprints will create these same cardiovascular adaptations. As a side note, the interval running is best done on real ground rather than a treadmill or elliptical; more on that in a later post.

Let's now examine what happens during LSD, or long, slow distance training. During LSD, there is a constant stress on the heart. This constant stress will cause the body to adapt, but not in the way we hope. The body will actually respond to continued LSD training by making the heart, lungs, and blood vessels smaller, so that you can go longer distances more efficiently. During LSD, the dangerous oxidation of LDL is increased. The constant stress also causes cortisol (stress hormone levels) to be chronically high. Men, this means less testosterone! Women, high cortisol levels are equally as bad for you too because they can cause you to retain fat and lose bone and muscle mass.

What about burning fat? It is true that LSD burns fat as fuel during exercise. More important however, is the overall effect over an entire day or week -- most people do spend more time away from exercise (including work and sleep). Interval training will raise the body's metabolic rate, so that more calories will be burned during the whole process of recovering from exercise and the overall number of calories burned will be greater. Burning fat during LSD also signals the body to store fat for future bouts of exercise, and that combined with elevated cortisol levels will make it difficult to lose those extra few pounds.

In closing, I must re-iterate that we are not against all running. Interval sprinting is fine, even encouraged, but LSD running is not. Interval training and Ultrafit training will improve maximal cardiac output (that very important reserve capacity), promote the loss of body fat, and prevent cortisol levels from rising too high, which benefits mental and sexual function, the ability to sustain energy throughout the day, as well as maintaining bone and muscle mass.

There is one other important factor in this discussion, and that is inflammation. For now, let it be known that inflammation increases during LSD. Much more on this in the next post. Thanks for reading, and I welcome any comments, questions, or feedback. Feel free to contact me directly at garrett@arpwaveaustin.com, or leave a comment on the blog.