It doesn't burn a lot of calories.Cardio equipment usually asks you to punch in your weight
before you start your workout. You start the workout and
continue until you have burned, for example, 300 calories
according to the machine. This will take around 40 min if you
burn 8 calories per minute. Now, have you ever wondered why
the machines want to know your weight? If you answered to
calculate how many calories you burn you are right. What you
most likely failed to consider is the main reason it needs your
weight is to calculate your basal metabolic rate.
Let’s say a person maintains his weight on about 2500 calories a day. That means they need 105 calories an hour at rest. So the 300 calories burned are NOT calories burned above your basal metabolic rate, they are calories burned INCLUDING your basal metabolic rate. So for your time on the treadmill, you burned about 195 calories above your baseline. If you did this every night for a week, you wouldn't burn enough calories to equal the amount stored in one pound of fat.
Think about it...if we were so metabolically efficient as to burn 300 calories at the rate the exercise equipment says you do, would we ever have survived as a species?
The calories that would be burned hunting and gathering would have caused us to die of starvation before we could ever have found anything to eat - at that rate of calorie burn, we would barely have enough metabolic economy to survive a trip to the grocery store.
Let us assume that you have the determination and time to do such a workout 7 days a week. If we take the 300 calories burned and subtract the basal metabolic rate of 105 calories, we are left with 195 calories burned. There are 3,500 calories in a pound of fat. If you kept a stable calorie intake, it would take you 18 days to burn off ONE pound of fat with the extra activity. That’s nearly three weeks and a total of 12 hours to burn ONE POUND OF FAT! This is assuming that no other variables are present. Unfortunately there is a big variable that almost no-one accounts for...MUSCLE LOSS…
It Destroys Muscle MassIn order to exercise long enough to burn 300 calories you have to perform cardiovascular activity at an intensity you can keep up for a prolonged time. Such intensity does not place much demand on the muscles, that is why it can be carried out for so long. The only thing the body senses is that its master demands traveling great distances. Your body settles down for a long period of slow exertion and begins doing something that many people don't expect...
When you perform this type of exercise your body can adapt by actually losing muscle, making its engine smaller so it can preserve calories. Additional muscle is perceived as dead weight when you are on the move for a long period of time muscle itself burns calories, so when the going gets tough your body responds by getting rid of as much muscle mass as possible to keep you going – a survival mechanism.
The body often responds in a way that seems counter-intuitive. Don’t drink any water? Your body tries to retain water. Does weight training build muscle? No it doesn’t. What actually occurs is a breakdown of muscle tissue and the body ADAPTS by building muscle.
So, if you burn of calories doing aerobic training, that same body adapts to aerobic exercise by slowing your metabolism and allowing your body to store more fat. This means that as the body gets rid of muscle mass our metabolism is lowered and requires fewer calories to run. Continuing with the example above, the person in question now only requires 2200 calories to maintain their weight, as their muscle mass has deteriorated thanks to intense cardio.
Most people get confused. Why isn’t cardio helping me lose weight? I run every day and I only seem to maintain my weight. Some days, I seem to again weight! People, knowing that cardio burns calories, blame themselves for not doing enough. They increase the amount of training they do, making the problem even worse! A good car is one that is economic with fuel. As you do aerobic activity to burn fat, your body becomes more economical. Like a good car, it needs less fuel to run – which means you burn less fat the better you become at aerobic activity! This is hardly the reason why people start doing it!
As you progress, eventually you'll need to do a huge amount of training just to keep your weight stable and keep the accumulation of fat at bay. Furthermore, the stress hormones that result from such overtraining also stimulate fat storage and weaken the immune system which opens the door infections. Have you noticed how often long distance athletes complain of colds and sore throats? Anyone who has attempted such a program of weight loss can confirm...you will end up feeling washed out, moody, and (worst of all) fatter. The truth is this: you cannot use physical activity to negate excess caloric intake.
Does muscle mass really matter so much? Yes. The amount of lean muscle on your body directly helps dictate the speed of metabolism and how much food you can “get away with” eating.
Extensive cardio.
Less muscle mass, slower metabolism, smaller “engine”. Burns less calories.
More lean muscle mass, faster metabolism, bigger “engine”. Burns more calories.
Think about what happens when you hit your 30’s. Remember when you were a teenager and could eat everything in sight and not get fat? Somewhere in your 30's things changed. Now it seems like just looking at food can make you fat. What happened? The answer is simple: your muscle mass started to decline. This is natural. As we age we lose muscle mass unless we give it a reason to stay. And as stated many times now – with reduced muscle mass our metabolism goes down. So if you’re past 30, you’re accelerating the ageing process even more if you throw prolonged cardio into the fray.
Your weight loss goals are like a carrot on a stick, and you are actually destroying the very thing that burns calories round the clock – muscle mass.
Tip: You can find a beginners guide to weight training that will help you build muscle mass at http://fortiusfitness.com/beginnerstraining. Suitable for both men and women.
In weight training, as you get better, you add more weight or more reps and there is literally no finish line. In aerobic training, it will take less work to run 5 miles as you get fitter. So to continue to improve can you either go further (do more work for the same amount of calories) or you can run faster. Going further kind of defeats the purpose. Why run 40 minutes to burn the calories you once burned in 30 minutes? What kind of progression is that? It’s the law of diminishing returns! And going faster isn't a solution either. Pretty soon you will run into another problem. You can’t keep on increasing intensity - you have to slow down sooner or later.
So, if we accept that muscle mass is a major factor in your fat burning engine and aerobic training makes that engine smaller (i.e. it reduces the amount of muscle on your body) and more efficient at burning fat (remember more efficient means it burns LESS) - how can you hope to lose weight when the very activity that is supposed to burn fat makes you a smaller, more efficient fat burning (you burn less of it!) machine?
It Causes InjuriesLong slow aerobic training remains the biggest practical joke in fitness. If you do long, slow cardio, it’s only a matter of time before you end up in a physiotherapist’s office with all the others that do too much of the same thing. Whether it’s running or spin classes, overuse injuries are far too common in the cardio world. I know of many people who run to get fit yet they have back pain, knee injuries, shin splints, muscle imbalances and other problems!
The reason for this is that the overwhelming majority of people move poorly. When you take a body that moves poorly and move it this way for an extended period of time - add in ground reaction forces - you make lots of physical therapists happy.
Aerobics are an extremely damaging form of exercise, yet for some strange reason, the ability to withstand pain has become associated with athleticism. The epitome of withstanding punishment by way of aerobic overload is the marathon. The story behind the Marathon Run is based on an ancient Greek legend of the soldier, Pheldippides, who ran 26 miles to tell the emperor that their army was victorious in battle over the Persians. Then he dropped dead. As much as I may admire the physical and mental toughness it takes to finish a marathon, it has little to do with one's health or appearance. It certainly won't enhance it. The ability to tolerate punishment and damage is not a very accurate gauge of one's health or strength. An activity such as running, besides being unnaturally stressing to the knees, ankles, and lower back, will also increase free radical damage due to the higher ingestion of oxygen. That means you age faster!
When you’re active you burn calories. Many people believe that they burn fat when they perform prolonged aerobic activity. This is where the theory of the fat burning zone comes from.
We have three energy systems that the body uses.• Fat-based: Used in low intensity slow activities such as walking and the muscles preferred fuel at rest.
• Our third energy system is carbohydrate or glycogen based: used in medium intensity activities such as running, cycling or jogging for long distances. It’s an inefficient and costly affair for the body to use this energy system. Carbohydrates or glycogen is stored in muscles and the liver, which can only hold 500-600 grams of glycogen - fuel for about an hour of continuous work. When these stores are empty, you will start cannibalizing your own muscle tissue for fuel. You can also eat some simple sugars that hit the bloodstream fast delivering immediate energy. But why eat during exercise if fat loss is the objective?
We just weren't designed to operate at medium intensity for long periods of time. We evolved to walk long distances,
gathering food, tracking prey etc, sprinting occasionally to escape a predator or catch an animal to eat, climbing, throwing and lifting heavy things. We're meant to
alternate periods of kicking back with short periods of kicking ass conserving as much energy as possible – not running to keep the heart rate up or reach some type of fat burning/aerobic zone.
Yes, the body burns some fat during aerobics, but most of the energy that’s burned is carbohydrates. Have you ever noticed bike riders and marathon runners always have their little energy gels with them? These are simple sugars that give instant energy to the muscles. If the primary fuel was fat, they would have eaten oils instead. Now, if you burn so much sugar during the activity, what do you think the body craves after the workout? Yep, sugar. And lots of it. Meaning that you will easily eat the amount of calories burned during the actual session...and probably more!
No EPOC (Excess post-exercise oxygen consumption)If you compared a 45-minute cardio session to a 45 minute resistance training session, you'd find that you burn more calories minute-to-minute doing cardio than you do lifting weights. This is why most people are under the assumption that cardio burns more calories overall and is the most efficient approach to fat loss.
However, what many trainees don't take into consideration is EPOC, which describes the calories you burn AFTER you train. Once again, the cardio “logic” begins to fail when we look at things in more depth!
How many calories you burn during a training session is only a small part of a bigger picture.
To get a real idea of what a training session is doing, you need to take a look at the total number of calories you burn in the 24-48 hours afterwards.
The common cardio “logic” doesn't take this into account. Most people simply think of the gym as an isolated experience in the day and ignore what happens after.
When you run, step, spin or other cardio activities you burn some calories, but as soon as you stop doing these things, nothing more will happen. There’s no damage to the muscles – that’s why you can do it every day. The time and calories required for the body to repair the damage are minimal.
When you train with weights, you break muscle tissue down. Your body needs energy (calories) to repair and build them up again. Compare this to steady-state cardio, where there is little to no "spark" as far as metabolism is concerned and you can see which is more effective in terms of overall fat loss.
So, in order to really burn body fat and not muscle the key is to think not just how many calories we can burn during exercise, but about how many calories we can force the body to burn round the clock.