The Power of Cardio: Essential Benefits and Beginner's Guide
Why Cardio Matters, What It Doesn't Do, and How to Start Your Cardio Training Journey
Cardio is often times seen as a boogieman within the fitness community. Some believe that cardio kills your gains, and others believe that it is the only way to lose weight. Cardio training is a fundamental component for anyone looking to improve their health and fitness. Cardio simply involves any activity that elevates your heart rate while performing a rhythmic and repeated activity that can be performed in perpetuity. This encompasses a wide variety of movements that extend far past just running. Understanding why cardio is important helps bring light to the reasonings as to why we would want to begin incorporating it. Cardio training improves endurance, helping strengthen the heart and lungs, and making daily tasks easier and less tiring. Regular cardio workouts can also elevate mood, reduce stress, and help with your sleep and hunger signaling. Cardio is great but there are things that it is not good for like body composition changes, pure weight loss, and muscle building. My overall goal here is to show the reasons to do cardio, the reasons not to do cardio, and then provide a guide for beginners to understand how to get going and how to progress into making long-term changes. It doesn’t need to be complicated but there are steps that we can take in order to make sure we are avoiding overtraining, stress-related injuries, and following simple guidelines to make this a regular part of your life.
Essential Benefits of Cardio Training: Why You Should Consider Making it Part of Your Routine
Let’s first dive into why cardio is a very important factor for us to consider and why we may want to dive into cardio training. Any of these factors are just as important as the others and just as valid. Cardio training is incredible at improving your endurance, the ability to handle more low-intensity tasks day to day without getting worn out. Cardio training can help improve your recovery for your strength training. Cardio is a fantastic regulator of your hunger signaling and appetite and can benefit your metabolism but we will chat about that. Lastly, the biggest piece is that cardio has a strong link between all causes of mortality. Now this one is more of a correlation but the correlation is so strong that I believe there is an incredible link which I will dive into a bit later.
Improving your endurance may be one of the easiest ones to understand as it is directly what we are training with cardio. Endurance is simply the ability for you to handle more and more low-intensity activity, this will encompass more than just increasing your walks. It will let you get more done around the house without getting tired. If you have a laundry list of chores, you’ll be able to take fewer breaks and accomplish more. This improvement in your endurance also makes sure that since you’re trained to handle more, the low-intensity activities that you’re accomplishing don’t wear you out so you still have your evenings without needing to take a nap and recover. Another big factor that I hear all too frequently is the desire to be able to keep up with children or grandchildren. That ability doesn’t come by accident nor is it something that people just naturally have the ability to do, it comes with intentional training and maintenance of your cardio capabilities. This one doesn’t need much explaining as it is such a clear direct translation from the exercise that you are performing and the increase in what we want to see.
Another factor why cardio training is important and something that you may want to consider, is the recovery benefits that attenuate an improved level of cardio. I am sure if you have done any activity in the gym or outside of the gym, you have felt that fatigue that comes from high-intensity output. The rest times between sets or that you need to take when doing intense things in your day-to-day is simply giving your body the chance to clear metabolic waste buildup that happens with intense expenditure. The good thing with cardio especially when you’re incorporating more speed work is that we can train your body to get more efficient at clearing out these waste products to allow you to get back to high-intensity activity quicker. If that is something that has been limiting your abilities in the gym or you find work putting you down for longer than you’d like, this may be another reason that we want to incorporate cardio.
Next is the influence that cardio has on your hunger signaling and your metabolism down the road if handled properly. Cardio is one of the most significant influencers on your appetite regulation and hunger signaling. It has been found that cardio, even a lower level of cardio per day, will decrease the amount of hunger to bring it in line with your daily expenditure incredibly. People who are more sedentary have worse feelings of being hungry than people who participate in any sort of regular cardio activity. This then correlates strongly as your cardio increases, your body will feel hungry for more food as it needs that fuel in order to recover from these bouts of exercise. The effects that I want to chat about regarding your metabolism here are incredibly important. One of the shortcomings that people have when they perform cardio is they won’t change the other variables of fitness, mainly their nutrition. If you are increasing your cardio capabilities and listening to your body when it is asking for additional fuel, you will get a correlated increase in metabolic activity. The problem arises when we have excessive cardio with no increase in fuel. This is another way that we can plummet our body into starvation mode, causing significant metabolic downregulation.
Then the last part that I want to chat about in why cardio is important is the very strong correlation between increased cardio activity and a decrease in all-cause mortality. This is an interesting correlation that I want to highlight because I think it speaks more than just doing more cardio decreases the risk of cardiovascular disease, decreases the risk of age-related illness setting in, and decreases the risk of severe metabolic disease. All of these are incredible things that will help decrease any further complications as well. I think that it also goes on to tell more of a story of the people who participate in regular cardio training and the habits that they perform. Not only are they more likely to recover quickly from any event happening as they oftentimes have the emotional space to perform but they will also have the increased recovery ability from training and increased resiliency from performing it each day. They are also more likely to have other healthy habits such as good nutrition and proper sleep which further decrease the risk of negative health outcomes. I believe that it extends far past just cardio decreases risk of all cause mortality but cardio training facilitates a lifestyle and a community of people with shared interests that prop you up to perform your best and be your best self.
These are some of the most important reasons for you to consider cardio training and making it a regular part of who you are and what you want to accomplish. If any of these resonated with you then you might be the person who wants to incorporate some real cardio training into your day-to-day life. It can be time-consuming and have a large recovery toll but the benefits are definitely worthwhile if these are a priority for you. Next, I want to chat about what cardio isn’t and some of the misconceived notions that people have when considering cardio.
Dispelling Cardio Myths: Understanding its Role in Fitness
Let’s chat about what makes cardio a bad choice for people to incorporate or some of the ideas that people have when introducing cardio. If these ideas are the reason that you want to do cardio you should spend time considering some different outcomes as it is not the primary cause for cardio. Cardio is not a good vehicle for weight loss. Cardio does not build muscle nor will it give you slim muscles. Cardio will not kill your gains in the gym.
The first factor that needs to be spoken about is the idea that cardio will increase your daily expenditure. There is no getting around that, if you incorporate an hour of jogging each day, that’ll likely be nearly 500 additional calories each day that you’re burning. This is a significant expenditure, but it is significantly easier to eat that many calories as it is to burn that many with exercise. This exercise will also come at the expense of your body regulating down your non-exercise activity. So the 500 calories burned for the exercise may be closer to 250-300 in your total daily energy expenditure as your body regulates out a good amount of movement from the increased activity. This is one of the big reasons that you can’t fully trust the amount of calories burned in being able to eat that much more. Cardio also has a huge recovery toll so if you’re burning calories, and not fueling your body well enough, your body still needs to make sure that it is replacing those essential proteins in your body to make sure you can live. Those proteins have to come from somewhere, which is going to be from the muscle that you worked hard to grow. Thus further plummeting your expenditure down.
The next thing that we need to talk about is the idea cardio will build muscle or will “slim” your muscles down. This is a strange one, on one hand, cardio will build a certain type of muscle fiber which is going to be your type 1 muscle fiber. Very aerobic muscle fibers, but they don’t have a large potential for growth. The growth capabilities are incredibly slow and small, this is why many marathon runners have very thin legs. Their legs are so small since most of the muscle on their legs is going to be that type 1 muscle fibers, all others are limited greatly. Now why this won’t give you slim muscle, is because muscle is muscle and takes a very long time to build no matter how you slice it. If you run to build muscle, you will be training the muscle that has the smallest potential for growth. Making little to no visible changes within your leg. Then as you lose weight and reveal what has been built, there won’t be a large change causing frustration. There needs to be a baseline of muscle built no matter the amount of work that you put in, cardio itself won’t be building the muscle tone that you look for or it will take significantly longer than you think. It is much more performance-focused.
Then the last factor that I want to touch on is the misconception that cardio will kill your gains in the gym. This is oftentimes a misconception by many gym bros as a reason for not doing cardio. It is founded on the idea of the interference effect. The interference effect is the idea that your body won’t be able to repair as much muscle and doing cardio inhibits your muscle growth signaling. This idea has been completely overblown, the recent understanding is that this interference effect doesn’t truly kick in until we are nearing marathon training mileage. If we are under 50 miles a week, then the interference effect is something that you shouldn’t even be concerned with. When we look at linemen in football, they are all big strong guys but they can also run as they need some incredible conditioning in order to be able to perform for a full football game. They embody the idea that even if you lift and are strong you can still do cardio. This cardio also benefits your lifting with better recovery times and pushes each set further.
If some of these things are concerns for you with cardio and are holding you back, then we should definitely look at moving past those. Reframe the idea of why cardio is something that you want to incorporate. Then we should be honest with where you are and we can dive into the next piece on how to start.
Foundations of Cardio Training: Starting Slow and Building Steady
When we are looking at beginning cardio training, we should first assess where you’re currently at. If you are starting from absolutely nothing it is important to start slow and progress on time. The first and most important thing to increase cardio is to begin increasing the time on feet. Taking it slowly and gradually until we get to the point that we want to be at. This increase should be done about 5-10 minutes per week using those compound efforts over time to eventually take you where you want to be. Cardio builds quickly but it is also one of the few things that we can’t rush. If you rush it then we run into quick overuse injuries and setbacks that cause more problems down the way.
Assessing where you’re at, if you’re overweight, you may want to just start on an elliptical or walking, these lower-impact activities will put less stress on your joints and help make sure that you’re doing something that keeps you staying active rather than getting overwhelmed and injured. Taking these in bursts is going to be your best bet, 2 separate 15-minute walks, adding on 5 total minutes each week will stack up until you’re at the part where you can begin adding in some jogging and eventually running. You will know you’re ready by seeing that your heart rate won’t be climbing into an aerobic zone during your walks, this is when we can step it up to the next level.
On the topic of heart rate zones and making sure that you’re staying in them. During this beginning phase, you want to make sure that you’re keeping your HR in a controlled zone. A very easy and quick way to find the zone is to take 180 and subtract your age. That will give you the upper end of the range, subtract another 10 from that will give you the bottom end of the range. For myself using this equation, 180 - 25 = 155. Take out another 10 and I want to keep my HR between 145 and 155 during my low-intensity aerobic sessions of cardio. It is important to keep it in this zone as this is the zone that is called your aerobic base-building zone, which is essentially just endurance endurance-building zone.
To start, keep it simple, progression is key, keep your heart rate low and the pace slow, then just stay consistent with how often you are doing it. We will now dive into some more advanced progressions as you get more confident in your cardio capabilities and your goals expand. I will chat more about how to do the progress past 5-10 minute additions each week.
Advanced Strategies for Progressing Cardio Training: Moving Beyond Base Building
Looking at these move advanced progressions, as you are getting more confident and being able to consistently run for the desired amount of time will be when we want to look at adding in more advanced cardio progression tactics. Starting by adding time will ensure that we are always increasing the time on feet, at a certain point though we will want to transition to increasing mileage. Increasing mileage is going to give a much more empirical number for you to go off of. Once we get to this number of progression, we still need to have an overall goal that we want to hit. If the goal is a 5k, 10k, half marathon, etc. Then we will want to come up with a plan to bring your running up to the total amount there. This is done strategically by breaking up your running sessions, we still want to keep a minimum of 80% of your running at that low heart rate and slow intensity. Now we want to introduce the idea of long run days to really double down on increasing the time on feet and aerobic base building zone. Increasing your time on your feet and pushing that up makes up a large majority of the base of training in getting to the desired mileage.
Once you have established near the required mileage on your long runs, we are free to begin incorporating some speed work within your program. This is when we will apply different styles of speed work, from fartlek runs, tempo, thresholds, repeats, etc. This should be done once or twice a week keeping that margin of 80% of your running should be done at the lower heart rate. At the end of the day, the speed work will help with turnover and increase your body’s ability to clear waste products. A large majority is the main endurance-building work that equips us for the events that we want to handle.
I do this with goals in mind as typically when we get increased past an hour-long run it is with an intentional goal in mind. If you are just training to keep up with your kids and grandkids, we can still focus on similar things, but the first step is increasing the long run and making sure that you are overall increasing the time of feet. That time on feet has incredible carryover with simply just increasing that low-level activity.
Cardio training is often misunderstood in fitness, but it offers substantial benefits for health and well-being. It enhances endurance, aids in recovery, regulates hunger, and correlates strongly with reduced all-cause mortality. These advantages highlight why integrating cardio into your routine can lead to a healthier lifestyle.
Yet, it's essential to dispel misconceptions: cardio alone isn’t optimal for major weight loss or muscle building. Understanding these limitations helps set realistic expectations for their role in your fitness regimen. For beginners, gradual increases in activity time and intensity are crucial to prevent overtraining and injury. Monitoring heart rate zones ensures effective training for endurance development. As you progress, advanced techniques like mileage increases and speed work can be introduced to meet specific fitness goals. Embrace cardio where it makes sense for you, leveraging its benefits while understanding its limitations, this will help you properly assess the applicability within your day-to-day life and if embracing a cardio goal is appropriate for you.
I am excited to begin building a community to connect people with similar interests, making the fitness journey easier and more enjoyable for everyone. If you're interested, have any questions, or need personalized guidance, don't hesitate to reach out to me at sidneyabartlett@gmail.com.
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Sidney Bartlett, CSCS