Arvind Ashok: Fitness & Nutrition Simplified

Redefining Fitness: Part 2 — Cardio

20
April

In the first part of this series, we looked at the inad­e­quacy of the work­out pro­gramme — the cookie-cutter one thrown at you as a one-size fits all. Let’s move on to car­dio, and aer­o­bics. I am refer­ring to steady-state car­dio for extended peri­ods of time — like run­ning on a tread­mill for 60 min­utes (or the ellip­ti­cal machine, or endurance run­ning out­side). With­out even get­ting into effec­tive­ness and draw­backs, the larger prob­lem is too much work, and a lack of rest and recov­ery — which is extremely sig­nif­i­cant for what­ever you did yes­ter­day to be use­ful. You will be in far supe­rior shape if you just skipped your car­dio day and took a long (>1 hour) stroll in the park or the beach. Even if your goal is body-building and not get­ting fit­ter in a broader per­spec­tive, car­dio is still work­ing against you.

What’s with all the screens!?

The issue with steady-state exer­cise, like run­ning on a tread­mill is

  • adap­ta­tion to a con­stant stimulus
  • repet­i­tive mus­cle use, and a very small group of muscles
  • trains only aer­o­bic capac­ity, and does not trans­late out­side of this nar­row domain. On the other hand, expand­ing anaer­o­bic capac­ity trans­fers across to improved aer­o­bic capacity!
  • cuts into recov­ery. Too much activ­ity causes stress, and it is not a case of “More is more” — it actu­ally hurts your fat loss goals
  • work­ing at aer­o­bic capac­ity for extended peri­ods of time burns a lot of glyco­gen, which trans­lates into crav­ing sweet things
  • chronic car­dio increases sys­temic inflammation
  • And finally, car­dio exces­sive car­dio­vas­cu­lar activ­ity, like long dis­tance run­ning causes heart dis­ease! If you are a run­ner, you should read the arti­cle I’ve linked to — it talks about the prevalance and pat­terns of myocar­dial issues in marathon run­ners. Update: A reader posted a valid com­ment — that my use of words is too tabloid-ish, which I do have to agree with. But I do not think he is right on his thoughts about the study being incon­clu­sive. So, at the risk of repeat­ing myself, if you are a marathon run­ner — do read the link, read Dr Kurt Har­ris’ inter­pre­ta­tion, and then go on to read the actual paper, if you are into that sort of thing.

Mark Sis­son has a bunch of posts about chronic car­dio, includ­ing this one which talks about 3 studies

Short “inter­val” exer­cise, like sprints or strength train­ing, can offer the same fit­ness ben­e­fits (and then some) com­pared with tra­di­tional endurance train­ing. That’s from this study in Sci­ence Daily.

A study (PDF) from the Uni­ver­sity of New South Wales fol­lowed the fit­ness and body com­po­si­tion changes in 45 over­weight women in a 15-week period. The women were divided into two groups and assigned inter­val or con­tin­u­ous cycling rou­tines. The inter­val “sprint” cycling group per­formed twenty min­utes of exer­cise, which repeated eight sec­onds of “all out” cycling and then twelve sec­onds of light exer­cise. The con­tin­u­ous group exer­cised for 40 min­utes at a con­sis­tent rate. At the end of the study, the women in the inter­val group had lost three times the body fat as the women in the con­tin­u­ous exer­cise group.

In addi­tion to addi­tional fat oxi­da­tion, the study’s results linked inter­val exer­cise with lower plasma glu­cose, increased epi­neph­rine response, lower insulin con­cen­tra­tion and increased fat oxi­da­tion dur­ing the recov­ery period. This is from another study, orga­nized by researches in Japan and Denmark.

The Cooper Insti­tute are the guys that pre­scribed aer­o­bics way back when, which is kinda how they got pop­u­lar. But today, they pre­scribe strength training!

So yeah, car­dio is just a poor method for fat loss. And if you are inter­ested in adding mus­cle (oth­er­wise why are you lift­ing weights the other 3 days?), it is detri­men­tal. Vary­ing the stim­u­lus, adding in pro­gres­sion, and using tech­niques that pro­vide sig­nals to your body to make it view fat stor­age as a lia­bil­ity — that’s some­thing that will last.

That’s it about the inef­fi­cient work­outs. Under­stand this — your gym is not sell­ing you fit­ness, they are rent­ing equip­ment. The work­outs pre­scribed are inef­fi­cient, does not trans­late to any­thing func­tional. Just sub-par stuff. In the next part, we will look at the nutrition.

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Posted on by Arvind

5 Comments

Category: Dive Into Details, Exercise, India Tags :

  • Guest

    Dear Arvind:

    While I appre­ci­ate that you have some­how, in your spare time, cracked the rid­dle of fit­ness that so many exer­cise mavens have worked on for decades now — and even proven that sat­u­rated fats are good for us — I feel I must point out the sheer irre­spon­si­bil­ity of this statement:

    “And finally, car­dio causes heart disease!”

    First off, this is a link to a blog that in turn links to a study in the jour­nal “Radi­ol­ogy.” While the blog­ger you link to seems to have read the orig­i­nal jour­nal arti­cle, you clearly haven’t — because even the basic Pubmed abstract does not claim to prove causal­ity in any way.

    Sec­ond off, an exer­cise buff like you should know that while long-distance marathon run­ning — the sub­ject of that “Radi­ol­ogy” arti­cle — does qual­ify as car­dio, so do swim­ming and cycling and even the long walk in the park that you rec­om­mend so highly.

    Third, these marathon run­ners being stud­ied were aged between 50 and 72 years. The study showed that these run­ners “have an unex­pect­edly high rate of myocar­dial LGE.” An “unex­pect­edly high rate” may mean sim­ply that instead of a rate of 0.001%, the dis­cov­ered rate was 0.01%. Would you say that marathon run­ning has “caused” myocar­dial LGE in this case? (The sci­en­tists also say, as of now, that this “may have diag­nos­tic and prog­nos­tic rel­e­vance.” They’ve been much more reluc­tant to come to a defin­i­tive con­clu­sion that you have.)

    Fourth, since you are fond of link­ing to stud­ies, there are plenty more stud­ies out there that say that car­dio is GOOD for your heart. EXCESSIVE exer­cise? Yes, not nec­es­sar­ily the best thing. But reg­u­lar car­dio most def­i­nitely does not CAUSE heart dis­ease. Read, for instance, the “Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion Guide to Pre­vent­ing and Treat­ing Heart Disease.”

    Fifth, I invite you to think of your read­ers, who may read this post and go away think­ing that they should just stop reg­u­lar car­dio (not just long-distance run­ning, but even swim­ming and cycling) alto­gether. If you think this kind of sim­pli­fied under­stand­ing won’t hap­pen — it already has, when you, after read­ing a post by a blog­ger who in turn had read a med­ical jour­nal arti­cle, decided that you would sim­ply write: “Car­dio causes heart dis­ease.” That’s a tabloid head­line, not a state­ment that should appear in any way on a blog that claims to be seri­ous about exercise.

  • http://twitter.com/arv43 arv43

    Hey,
    Thanks for the really detailed, and mostly polite com­ment. Let me work through the var­i­ous points you made. I do clearly say, imme­di­ately behind my tabloid head­line, “If you are a run­ner, you should read the arti­cle I’ve linked to — it talks about the prevalance and pat­terns of myocar­dial issues in marathon runners”.

    First, the arti­cle in radi­ol­ogy jour­nal is some­thing I’ve read — I tend to read every­thing I link to, mul­ti­ple times. The rea­son I try not to link to actual stud­ies but to inter­pre­ta­tions of stud­ies by blog­gers I read is sim­ply because not every­one can read aca­d­e­mic arti­cles. And let’s get to the third point as well — what you see as an incon­clu­sive study. The study con­clu­sively finds that 12% of marathon run­ners have evi­dence of myocar­dial dam­age vs 4% of the seden­tary con­trol group. So, 12 cases of total inci­dents in the run­ners group vs 4 in the con­trol group. It is not a case of cau­sa­tion by cor­re­la­tion, as you say. The study is show­ing that there is a 3x fac­tor of increase in risk — result­ing in a myocar­dial inci­dent — brought upon by exces­sive run­ning. And if you had con­tin­ued read­ing the blog arti­cle, you will see the other study — http://eurheartj.oxfordjournal… — which con­clu­sively states that more marathons = bad for your heart.
    And I will hon­estly admit, sta­tis­tics was def­i­nitely not my strong point in Maths. But I do think you are seri­ously misinterpreting/misrepresenting the data, in your 0.001% vs 0.01%, for exam­ple. Like I just explained, there was a 3x fac­tor in num­ber of inci­dents (which is less than the 10x fac­tor in your example).

    “The 12% preva­lence of myocar­dial LGE in run­ners was unex­pect­edly high com­pared with the 4% preva­lence of myocar­dial LGE in age-matched con­trol sub­jects, who pre­sum­ably did not reg­u­larly engage in endurance sports. We observed a dif­fer­ent regional dis­tri­b­u­tion for the dif­fer­ent pat­tern of LGE, which sug­gests a dif­fer­ent cause for a CAD pat­tern of LGE ver­sus a non–CAD pat­tern of LGE. Dur­ing almost 2 years of follow-up, severe coro­nary events occurred more often in the pres­ence of myocar­dial LGE than in the absence of myocar­dial LGE, sug­gest­ing that myocar­dial dam­age has a prog­nos­tic role in run­ners even though the absolute num­ber of car­diac events is low. It is inter­est­ing to note that myocar­dial dam­age was detected despite the fact that all run­ners were asymp­to­matic and free of obvi­ous car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease at the time of study inclu­sion. The clin­i­cal rel­e­vance of this find­ing is that the pres­ence of sub­clin­i­cal myocar­dial dam­age may place the run­ners at higher-than-anticipated risk for a coro­nary event” — I think the study is pretty sure about its con­clu­sions. I am not sure where you saw that they are reluctant.

    Sec­ond, Absolutely. A lot of things are “car­dio”. But like I say clearly in the open­ing para — “I am refer­ring to steady-state car­dio for extended peri­ods of time — like run­ning on a tread­mill for 60 min­utes (or the ellip­ti­cal machine, or endurance run­ning out­side)”. Dead­lift­ing at a medium inten­sity mul­ti­ple times is also gonna give your heart a work­out, as do swim­ming, cycling etc. In this arti­cle, I am merely talk­ing about what is referred to as car­dio inside a gym, and a cou­ple of straight­for­ward exten­sions (run­ning on a tread­mill vs run­ning out­side, for pro­longed peri­ods of time).

    Fourth — yes, there are plenty of stud­ies for every­thing. I main­tain my point — car­dio on your 2nd, 4th, 6th day of work­out is eat­ing into rest and recov­ery. Doing noth­ing is supe­rior. If this sort of car­dio was the only form of exer­cise you are get­ting, yes — it is pos­si­ble you are bet­ter off than sim­ply sit­ting at home. If you are doing too much of this, the pos­si­bil­ity of a myocar­dial event is gonna go up.

    Fifth, I don’t think my read­ers are as sim­plis­tic as you make me out to be. That said, I def­i­nitely agree with the “tabloid head­line”. Con­sider me suit­ably chas­tised for that. I do think you should give the full paper another glance — or just the blog arti­cle by Dr Kurt Har­ris. Do lets con­tinue the dis­cus­sion, and intro­duce your­self next time around.

    Cheers

  • Guest

    Dear Arvind:

    I’m sorry, but this seems to me to be dis­sem­bling. You’ve mostly defended the study — which needs no defense — and not your inter­pre­ta­tion of it. Again, let’s seman­ti­cally look at what you’ve implied, ver­sus what the study says:

    1. “Car­dio” — the study under dis­cus­sion, by Breuck­mann et al. looks at peo­ple who do long-distance run­ning / marathons. The sub­jects had to have run at least five marathons dur­ing the past three years, and to have done some­thing like that, they must have trained exten­sively for it. I was being partly flip­pant when I said ear­lier that even a walk in the park counts as car­dio. But even the car­dio under dis­cus­sion in your post — say an hour on a tread­mill three days a week, run­ning maybe seven-ten kms per ses­sion — does not fig­ure in the same league as run­ning a marathon. Car­di­o­log­i­cally speak­ing, a marathon is an extreme form of car­dio­vas­cu­lar activ­ity. So to look at a study con­ducted on marathon run­ners and then deduce that most forms of car­dio are harm­ful is incorrect.

    I point out here that I am not quib­bling with the fact that alternate-day car­dio can eat into your rest and recov­ery. I’m quib­bling with your cau­sa­tion link between car­dio and “heart disease.”

    2. “Causes” — This is a tricky word. The sort of cor­re­la­tion proven in this piece is not a cau­sa­tion cor­re­la­tion by any means. (In fact, in the very same issue of “Radi­ol­ogy,” an edi­to­r­ial warns: “There is not enough evi­dence to impli­cate marathon run­ning in the devel­op­ment of a dan­ger­ous sub­strate for coro­nary events.”) The authors of the study say that their find­ings “MAY have diag­nos­tic and prog­nos­tic relevance.”

    What does this mean? It means that if a 60-year-old guy goes to a doc­tor and asks if he can take up marathon run­ning, a doc­tor will say: “Sure, but be warned that there is a higher chance now that you may have a myocar­dial event.” (This is prog­no­sis.) Con­versely, if a 60-year-old guy dies of a heart attack, and some­body tells the doc­tor that he was a marathon run­ner, the doc­tor can think: “Ah, that may explain a part of it.” (This is diagnosis.)

    So this is not the same thing as say­ing “Smok­ing causes lung can­cer.” No doc­tor will look at this study and then tell a senior marathon run­ner that he must give up running.

    Which brings me to my main point. This study, as I pointed out ear­lier also, exam­ines men in the age group of 50–72! This is well after the age of 45, at which men acquire an inde­pen­dent risk fac­tor for myocar­dial infarc­tion in any case! To take a mid­point of this age bracket, viz. the age of 60 — doc­tors would in any case advise them to take inten­sive exer­cise care­fully. Should a doc­tor advise a 60-year-old to be care­ful about run­ning marathons? Sure! But she would also advise a 60-year-old to do high-intensity inter­val train­ing or any other form of inten­sive exer­cise / phys­i­cal stress that can lead to a myocar­dial event.

    3. “Heart dis­ease” — This is just sloppy. Heart dis­ease is a huge, huge term, incor­po­rat­ing, for instance, hyper­trophic car­diomy­opa­thy, which is a genetic dis­or­der and has very lit­tle to do with lifestyle choices. The type of coro­nary event the study is talk­ing about is pri­mar­ily a heart attack — a myocar­dial infarc­tion, prob­a­bly a Type 2 infarc­tion, which comes about because your body sud­denly needs increased vol­umes of oxy­gen. A myocar­dial infarc­tion is a symp­tom / result of coro­nary heart dis­ease, and not heart dis­ease itself — a mis­take com­monly made by peo­ple who look at defib­ril­la­tors in use on tele­vi­sion and think that all coro­nary events are the same. Car­diac mus­cle can degrade or dete­ri­o­rate for many, many rea­sons — and NOBODY, includ­ing this team of sci­en­tists, has shown that car­diac mus­cle will degrade because of car­dio­vas­cu­lar exer­cise. In fact, many stud­ies have shown that reg­u­lar car­dio­vas­cu­lar exer­cise will stave off the even­tual degra­da­tion of car­diac muscle.

    What, there­fore, you should have said would prob­a­bly have run as fol­lows: “If you’re a male, senior cit­i­zen marathon run­ner, you should read the arti­cle I’ve linked to, which shows that the chances of a myocar­dial infarc­tion can increase if you’re doing long-distance run­ning.” I realise that can­not be con­densed into a snappy “Car­dio causes heart dis­ease” state­ment, and that it would in fact work against the larger point you’re try­ing to make about car­dio­vas­cu­lar exer­cise rou­tines. But even leav­ing aside your desire to pro­vide counter-intuitive exer­cise wis­dom, your inter­pre­ta­tion of this par­tic­u­lar study is just plain wrong. You can­not gen­er­alise from a study test­ing 50–72 year-old long-distance run­ners to advise that peo­ple of all ages avoid jog­ging on a tread­mill. That’s pre­cisely the one-size-fits-all type of advice that you oth­er­wise claim to dis­credit else­where on your blog.

  • Guest

    * But she would also NOT advise a 60-year-old.… (is what I meant to say.)

  • http://twitter.com/arv43 arv43

    As weird as this sounds, I think we are sorta in agree­ment. I think your prob­lem with my line is that it is not 100% seman­ti­cally cor­rect, just by bas­ing off of that one arti­cle. Then again, this is my blog. And it car­ries my opin­ions, which is built on not just one arti­cle or study that I read — but builds on every­thing I’ve read. So, if I read some­thing that con­tra­dicts my cur­rent line of think­ing — I find it very inter­est­ing. On the other hand, if I find some­thing that is more evi­dence of some­thing I’ve been see­ing (as in this case — that steady state pro­longed car­dio­vas­cu­lar activ­ity like run­ning causes a lot of issues), my opin­ion is formed not by just that one arti­cle — but a lot of other stud­ies as well.
    If I wrote a line like you say (and you agree too), most of my read­ers will stop read­ing me. I will write a longer piece on run­ning, and its issues — and not ‘car­dio’ as it per­tains to a gym.
    If you dis­agree with my larger con­clu­sion — that exces­sive car­dio­vas­cu­lar activ­ity causes heart dis­ease (yes, the term is vague but it has to be) — we can have a pri­vate con­ver­sa­tion. Here’s my line of rea­son­ing, in a gist — excess cor­ti­sol release, increase in sys­temic inflam­ma­tion, increase in plaque buildup, immune sys­tem break­down, skele­tal tis­sue degra­da­tion — all of these are var­i­ous find­ings from dif­fer­ent stud­ies, as it relates to exces­sive activ­ity. I chose my favourite arti­cle that breaks down a study in really good fash­ion — so that the few of my read­ers who go through to read it can really learn a lot. It is my blog, and I do take cer­tain lib­er­ties — that does not mean I enforce a wrong opin­ion. Every­thing I write reflects my cur­rent line of think­ing today.