CARDIO. What is it all about?

From the minute you walk into a gym, one of the first things that you can hear is the word “cardio” being mentioned in every other sentence. Also, the other thing you would notice is that half the gym is equipped with cardio equipment. This cardio business must be very important and serious.

There are different schools of thought regarding this subject, if we take things logically and look at the whole process of cardio we should come to the correct outcome but hell we are human beings and we very rarely look at things in a logical way.

When will be the best time to do cardio?

How long one should do it for? What type of cardio should I be doing? How intense should it be? Well you get one of the above wrong and you would be wasting your time and energy doing something that actually could be counterproductive to something you’re trying to achieve.

The thing is that most people do cardio to lose body fat and not to just get fi­t for the sake of fitness. Therefore, if you are reading this article it is more than likely because you are doing some kind of sporting activity or just training to look better or maybe, even competing in some type of fitness or bodybuilding competition.

The most ludicrous statement and advise that I have heard been given by so called self-proclaimed experts and guru’s doing cardio on empty stomachs as it will make you lose more fat because your stomach is empty. This the most ludicrous, stupid, backward and thick statement I have ever heard.

It is all to do with blood sugar levels, glycogen levels and cortical levels that would dictate the calories that you burn while doing cardio would come from and trust me if you get that wrong your calories that you would be burning would be coming from your muscle, not fat.

The body ­finds it so easy to burn muscle for energy actually if it was to be even more accurate

you could put on fat on top of doing it the wrong time e.g. straight after doing one hour, hour and a half of persistent training (weight training) and then going to do another hour cardio.

Reason being by then you would have depleted all your glycogen levels from your muscles and

because you have not allowed enough time for your body to replenish your muscles with more glycogen or even if you did not eat enough, your body should convert fat into glycogen if you are on the correct diet with having healthy fats e.g. omega 3-6-9 what would happen is that by going

straight to do cardio when the body is depleted, the body sends signs to other parts and your body starts producing more cortisol and also makes your muscles secrete BCAAs and glycogen out of the muscles and stores it around your waist area as future energy to be used when you are under ­fight or flight situations which will not occur for other various reasons, which it means you keep losing weight (muscle) but are not getting leaner because you’re storing thin layers of fat in specific areas.

You should only do cardio when you are well rested, not exhausted and should never do it for long periods of time. For example, doing 45 minutes twice per day would be much better for fat lose than doing one and half hours in one session.

If somebody has been training doing resistant training for quite some time and then started doing cardio while they are still training the cardio will not have the same effect if someone started to do cardio only.