Sep 08
30
The concepts of weight loss are straightforward: your body needs to burn off more calories in a day than it takes in. The way to do this is by exercising to burn off calories and limiting your intake through proper dieting. But when you want to gain muscle, in addition to losing unwanted fat, things get more complex. Cardiovascular exercise, practiced on its own, is not an effective way to gain muscle mass along with your fat loss goals.
Cardiovascular exercise has a reputation for being the best way to lose weight, but this reputation is entirely undeserved. It can take as much as ten hours (!) every week to lose weight and this weight loss is minimal; about a pound. You will also experience a plateau of weight loss if you are doing the same exercises all the time – so you can keep working out very hard while getting nowhere!
Cardiovascular workouts can take a long time to get noticeable results. Not all of us have the time to spend half of our lives at the gym; it takes half an hour at least to even begin buring calories in a cardio workout.
It is known that cardiovascular exercise is beneficial for the heart, but it can actually be bad for the bones and joints in return. Fast running and other high paced cardiovascular exercises can put a lot of strain on the joints, which can lead to joint pain and even arthritis in the future. It can then in return make it harder to work out, since you are left sore the day after an intense cardio workout.
Cardiovascular exercises need to be done more than just several times a week for maximum results. When each of these sessions has to last for at least an hour, that’s a big time commitment that people should not be forced to make. When you skip a day or two, you can immediately regress because your body has been relying on those long workouts to burn off the energy it has.
If you want to see true fat loss from cardiovascular exercise, you have to get into a specific zone called the fat burning zone. The fat burning zone represents a specific range of heart and breathing rate, both of which are very high. That means that low intensity cardio workouts are not effective for burning fat, even though you are still burning calories. High intensity workouts are not ideal for everybody and without them, cardio workouts won’t help you lose fat.
While cardio exercises have always been touted as weight loss programs, they have never been touted as muscle builders. You are working your muscles in a different fashion, and usually only the lower half of your body is receiving any kind of stimulus. Running or riding a bike for example, don’t involve your upper body at all and while they will make your legs stronger, it will be hard to actually put on additional muscle.
It is possible to get all of the benefits that cardio has to offer without doing it, such as the ability to workout the lungs and the heart without having to run. It is also possible to exercise without causing joint and bone pain, and without having to do it for an hour every single day of the week. Turbulence training offers all of the benefits of cardiovascular exercise, while getting rid of the disadvantages at the same time.