First off, a disclaimer. Cardiovascular – or cardio – health is important. Your heart and lungs keep you alive. Nothing that follows below should be taken as a suggestion that you should not do your level best to look after it.

Secondly, an admission. I haven’t been doing any cardio training in the last year or so, having focused mainly on strength building instead. In case you haven’t read our previous article on training, exercise, and play, that doesn’t mean I didn’t do a damn about it. It means I didn’t specifically work on it in order to improve it.

Slow and steady doesn’t always win the race

Many people who practice cardio do steady state cardio – keeping a steady intensity over a length of time.

The problem there should be evident to anyone who sees people plodding along on a treadmill or casually pedaling on a stationary bike for months without any significant difference. Sure they’re going to be fitter than they’d be if they were doing nothing, but they’re going to plateau real fast. Like the machines they ride, they’ll just go through a lot of motions to get precisely nowhere.

As we discussed previously, the human body adapts to stresses that get thrown its way. Going at a steady 6km per hour for an hour might be a challenge the first time around, but if you’re doing that for months on an end, you’re not going to feel that. Your muscles, lungs and heart will have gotten used to that stress so they use less energy. Psychologically, you know you can do it, you know you have it nailed down.

You’ll have become really good at going 6km per hour, but, here’s the catch, no matter how long you go at this rate, and no matter how long you keep at it, you will never progress beyond this point unless you turn the intensity up a notch.

Intensity builds strength. Strength builds everything else.

Like any other aspect of your fitness, the concept of progressive overloading applies to your cardio system. Want to keep improving? Push harder as you get stronger. Short, intense bursts give you more bang for your buck than long drawn, low intensity activities. This is why High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) protocols, the unfortunately named Fartlek (Swedish for “Speed play”, in case you were wondering), and good old sprinting are still with us and are appreciated by endurance athletes.

They work. By pouring all of yourself into a task for a few seconds, pausing or slowing down, and then going at it again, you can work at your maximum intensity for longer than you would if you were doing one flat out burst. Not only are they more effective at improving your cardiovascular efficiency – those bursts are brutal – they also consume a lot of energy and make your muscles work. While they’re nowhere as efficient at building raw strength as an actual strength building routine, they still help. They certainly avoid the muscle wear normally associated with steady state cardio.

Besides, they have the considerable benefit of being brief. By their nature, high intensity protocols will tire you out very quickly, and because you need to put your maximum effort into them every time, they will always tire you quickly regardless of how good you are.

Most protocols only call for a few minutes of work, rather than the long, long, mind numbing sessions so repetitive that machines are often outfitted with video screens to help prevent death by boredom halfway through. There’s a tip, if your exercise needs to distract you so you stay awake while you’re doing it, it’s not exercise.

Cardio is not a fat loss tool

One of the frequently touted reasons for doing steady state cardio is fat loss. However, cardio training is not a silver bullet for fat loss. Cardiovascular workouts are good for – and I realize this might be a shock – cardiovascular workouts are good for your cardiovascular system! Even then, they need to be handled properly like any other form of training if you want them to leave you any lasting benefit. Doing what you’ve always done will only give you what you’ve always had.

Long cardio sessions can help build endurance, but this kind of training does not promote much fat loss. First, a body built for endurance burns energy much more efficiently. That is the opposite of what you need for fat loss.

Secondly, prolonged cardio reduces your muscle mass over time. Muscle burns through a lot of energy, so if you lose it, you’re also making it harder for yourself to burn fat. You’ll notice that many endurance athletes, such as marathon runners, tend to be extremely skinny, but since we’re not professional athletes what you or I would get is what we call skinny fat. Basically, flabby.

Most athletes try to balance out the cardio work with strength work. This not only compensates for any muscle loss, but it also builds strength, and strength builds endurance.

If your main concern is fat loss, you’re better served by eating better and hitting the weights.

Overkill?

Personally, I have mixed feelings about training specifically for cardio unless you are preparing for an endurance event. Training cardio takes away time and energy from other forms of training, and if you’re working on other things, your heart and lungs are getting a good workout too.

While having a strong cardiovascular system will not hurt you, and it is good to be able to call on it in an emergency, there’s a point beyond which further improvement will cost you a lot of effort for little practical gain.

What I’ve been doing recently is not to worry about it and just do stuff I like doing anyway – most of these things will work the heart and lungs anyway. Like martial arts? Do it. Enjoy running for the hell of it? Do it. Love swimming? Do it. All sorts of physical activities will help you with your cardio, and if you’re doing something you love, you’re also going to feel a lot better about it than you would about wearing your soles and souls out on a treadmill.

Header image: Fitness machines in a gymnasium in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey by Tom Sulcer (CC0 1.0 Universal – Public domain dedication)