2655: Ten Cardio Hacks for Fat Loss, Health & Endurance

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1:22That's right. You'll burn more fat, you'll get more healthy, and you'll build more endurance. That's what we're talking about today. By the way, this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, 8sleep. This is the most advanced sleep system in the world. It sits on your bed. It controls the temperature of your bed. And it uses AI technology to modify the temperature to maximize your individual sleep. Go to 8sleep.com. So spell it out, 8sleep.com forward slash mind pump. If you use the code mind pump, you get$350 off your own Pod 5 Ultra. By the way, they ship to many countries worldwide. You can also try it for 30 days for free.

1:58Return it if you don't like it, so there's nothing to lose. We also have a sale this month, MAPS Muscle Mommy, very popular workout program. It's half off, 50 % off. Head over to MAPSMuscleMommy.com. Use the code MUSCLE50 for that discount. Here comes the show. Cardio training. It can be an effective tool for fat loss. It can definitely help longevity and health, and it's one of the best ways to exercise for endurance, but a lot of people don't realize the way you do it, how you do it, when you do it, makes a difference. There is a thing called cardio programming. Today, we're going to give you 10 hacks, 10 ways you can make your cardio far more effective.

2:36This is going to be interesting. Cardio programming matters. I wrote down 10 for you already. Yeah. Well, so there's this belief, and there's a lot of truth to this, right? That strength training requires much more precise programming than let's say cardio. There's a belief around cardio that just do it, right? Just do it and you'll get the benefit from it. And there is some truth. Strength training does require a lot more programming. Things like sets and reps and tempo. And there's a thousand different exercises to choose from. A lot more of a learning curve with strength training. Definitely.

3:09Now, cardio, it's much more straightforward and simple and basic. But that being said, there are ways you can perform your cardio to make it far more effective than just doing it. and this is where I think a lot of people make a mistake with cardio. They just do it, which is okay. There's nothing wrong with that, but there are ways that you can dramatically improve its effectiveness and make it – It can be a lot more intentional, especially if you have very specific goals. If it's sports-related, obviously you could kind of match that to a lot of what you actually experience within that setting, in that sport, and there's just ways to maximize your effort.

3:45Don't you think the oversimplification of cardio, though, is where so many people go wrong. Yeah. I mean, I think part of that, it's relatively easy. Just get on a treadmill. Right. Like it doesn't like to your point about strength training, but because of that, I think it also gets - Overlooked. Well, abused and used improperly. That's right. And so, and I think, at least my experience of training the clients, most of them had the wrong attitude towards it or the desired outcome they had, the cardio that they were applying was not the right way of doing it. Yeah, totally. Yeah, so to kind of paint the context, there are ways to make cardio more effective for fat loss, more effective for endurance, better for your health.

4:37There's also ways of doing cardio that will improve your consistency or your adherence, right? Because the number one problem with any structured workout is not - Showing up again. Yeah, it's not, is it the best workout? Am I doing this right? Do I pick the best machine? Like those are all things that you need to think about. But if you really look at the data, the challenge is, can I be consistent? So some of the tips we're gonna give, the hacks that we're gonna talk about are ones that dramatically improve consistency because that's a very important thing to talk about. Let's talk about the first point.

5:08it is more effective for health, endurance, and fat loss. And the data trends in this direction. So there is some data that somewhat supports this, but a lot of this is based off of our own experience that doing one hour cardio in the morning is less effective, especially for fat loss than doing 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes later. For example, splitting up your cardio sessions is more effective. It results in less wear and tear on the body. You tend to do it with a little bit more intensity. People tend to be consistent more often with it because if you miss one session, you don't miss all your cardio.

5:46You only miss half of it or a third of it. And bodybuilders have known for a long time that splitting up their cardio results in better fat loss versus doing it all at the same time. And again, there's some data that shows that this may actually be the case. I haven't seen great studies on this, but it trends in this direction. So if you're an hour cardio, 45 minute cardio, three day a week type person, try splitting it up. I know there's a lot of emphasis on fatigue being a valuable part of this process. However, I think that especially if you're looking at a performance element to it and the actual mechanics involved, how you run.

6:23And I think people just overlook that aspect of what you're actually doing within that session. And to be able to split it up and be more effective and efficient and hold yourself in better composure and perform the actual exercise that you're doing better is going to serve you a lot. Well, I think also if your main goal is heart health and burning more calories, i.e. burning fat, then you're better off doing this way also. Just breaking it up in shorter bouts throughout the day. I mean, I'd love to make popular this idea that we could do four or five exercises a day, four or five little bouts of mini bouts of activity or cardio.

7:05And you'd see tremendous benefit from that in these micro workouts. And so I think where it becomes a little more nuanced is when you have a very specific cardio goal. You're running a marathon. Well, then you want to do it all at once. Yeah, then it makes sense. or you're trying to mimic running up and down the soccer field or the basketball court. Like, okay, it makes sense to mimic those things. But most people that pursue cardio are doing it for heart health or fat loss. That's right. And so if that's your pursuit, then this is one of the best ways to do it is just to break it up throughout the day and just create.

7:39And we share the story, all of us shared a similar story in our experience of when the first, like, body bug, which was the first like, you know, you know, metabolism reader or fitness tracker that ever existed. And what we found was in our clients, non-cardio days, they were burning as much calories and just much activity because they were, you know, mowing the lawn and going grocery shopping. Yeah. They were just more, and that really flipped my whole mentality around cardio on its head because up until that point I prescribed it. Oh, you need to do an hour here or a half hour area was just like, oh shit, actually we're finding it's far more beneficial.

8:20You just have a busy day. And so unpacking that and going, okay, how can I encourage my client to do these little 10 minute walks? It'll be as beneficial if not more. And splitting it up also seems to contribute to better mental health and cognitive performance. Sustained energy throughout the day too. Yeah. So like, let's just say you do 45 minutes of cardio three days a week in the morning and you feel great and it's going good. If you were to break that up into two sessions, you would probably see better performance at work, better productivity and better cognitive performance. What we see with activity is that there is a long-term effect from activity.

8:57So exercise makes us healthier, makes us smarter, improves symptoms of depression and anxiety. But there's also this acute effect that seems to last for a couple hours afterwards. So it makes sense to divide it up to produce those types of feelings. and we see this with things like trigger sessions and walks throughout the day, right? Brings us to the next point, which is if you can, doing it right after eating is one of the best ways to do cardio. The insulin sensitizing effects of this are remarkable. They truly are. I remember talking to Dr. Seeds about this. It was off air and we were having conversations about postprandial walking.

9:33And I said, I was making a comment to him. I said, my best results with clients was always, if they were to do a walk to time it after meals, they got the best results. And he said, this is where his exact words. He says, Sal, if everybody just walked or did a little bit of activity after each meal, he said, we'd solve a significant percentage of the diabetes in this country. When you move your muscles in one, when you move and flex your muscles, there's a, uh, there's a receptor called glute four that moves to the outside of the muscle cell, which makes the muscle cells very receptive to blood sugar.

10:06It's sucking it in. So when you eat and you're getting that, that sugar in your blood, now the muscles are far more sensitive and sucking up that, that, that sugar utilizing it. Uh, and it means that you need less insulin. You have, you become more sensitive to insulin. Your blood sugar is more regulated when it comes to health and longevity. That's one of the most important things. Uh, they'll call they'll say mitochondrial health. They'll say, you know, insulin sensitivity, just moving after me. One of the worst things you do after eating is just sit. Now, exercising, eating right before you exercise, there's a positive effect, excuse me, exercising and then eating, there's also a positive effect there, but far more of a positive effect from exercising right after you eat.

10:49So one of the ways you can make your cardio more effective is to time it after you're - One of my favorite parts about this hack is, you know, a lot of the things that we communicate is this is stuff that it takes a while for it to manifest. Like you're not going to show somebody 10 pounds of fat loss in a session. You're not going to show somebody a pound of muscle. It takes discipline and consistency. But this is one of those things that if I have a client that's never made an effort to do this, you will immediately feel better doing this. I mean, it was a big personal hack for me. I remember it was with Katrina when I first started to do this where we just made this effort that after we had dinner, we just go for these little short little walks and it was before we had a family now we do it as a family and it's like i never felt so good about the meal even when the meal isn't ideal like just you can tell you don't get the sleepy oh my god well that's the thing it's the yeah it's that midday lull a lot of times it avoids that right because yeah lots of when you're sitting right after a big meal it's like you just bonk oh you feel you feel lethargic and bloated and the energy dips and the opposite happens when you go for the walk i feel an increase in energy i don't feel bloated i feel like it like it gets digested really easy and i think a lot of that has to do with what you're talking about is it just and again you feel it right away so i love when i can give a client a tip around their their habits that they can go apply and then report back and be like oh wow you're right adam like i noticed eating and then walking right afterwards and being aware of how i felt i felt much better that's right uh now um when it comes to low intensity steady state cardio.

12:24That's the kind of cardio that you just, you know, like you're just doing it. You're not like sprinting. You're not pushing yourself super hard. You're just moving. You're moving at a decent pace. The best form of that for most people is walking. Nothing, almost nothing beats walking. And there's a lot of reasons for this. Number one reason, the number one reason being most people can still walk with good technique. Thankfully, uh, we still walk every single day. We haven't reach the point yet where we hover uh like the the the cartoon the animated film wally yeah so we can still walk so injury is low now running most people don't run they go pick up running suddenly to get fit and then they find and we see why running has one of the highest rates of injury well it's a it's a skill right walking we could still do walking doesn't require you to put on workout clothes i could do it in the middle of the day i can do it outside i get to go outside I could walk with other people.

13:16Consistency around different forms of cardio. And you can see this in the data, in the surveys. Walking, when people adopt walking, they're far more likely to stay consistent than when they adopt other forms of cardiovascular activity. So when you're going to pick a form of cardio that's low intensity, steady state, make it walking. It's the best. Least friction. Now, I know there's a lot of controversy around the blue zones, but isn't this one of the few things that they all shared in common? That's right. was that they all were in these areas where a lot of - Yeah, were in these walking communities.

13:47In fact, when you look at the data on longevity and you look at cities that were designed before suburban towns were created, before the automobile became a big thing. So you go to old cities where owning a car or driving just isn't convenient. You walk to grocery stores, you walk to all, everything you need is within walking distance. People are leaner and healthier in all those places because they walk. What I find interesting about that stack, because I've heard you tout that before, is that that's also taking into consideration all the smog and bullshit you're ingesting. And it's still better for you.

14:22So imagine if you're somebody maybe that lives further out and you just make an effort to make - Yeah, you have clean air and you're not in the city. Yeah, you would think that the benefits would be even better than somebody who's living right in the heart of the city walking around like that. That's right. When it comes to having a little bit of time, but you want to make a big impact, this is where high-intensity interval training is amazing. High-intensity interval training doesn't need to be done for very long to reap a large benefit. I mean, you could do 12 minutes of it, burn the calories of a 30-minute low-intensity steady state form of cardio.

14:56It builds tremendous endurance in a short period of time. For athletic purposes, this is one of the best ways to do cardio. and it takes, it's a very short. So if you have like a short period of time, you're like, I have 12 minutes and I want to do some cardio to get the endurance benefits, get the fat loss benefits, hit, do hit cardio. And the heart benefits. And the heart benefits. By the way, a great, because you can do high intensity interval training. For people who aren't familiar what that is, that's essentially a sprint followed by a break where let's say if you were to do this with running, you would sprint as hard as you can.

15:2915 seconds. For 15 seconds. Then you'd walk until you post. Then you'd walk until you catch your breath and then you'd sprint again. Get your heart rate down. People always ask me, what's the best way to do HIIT? What machine? What piece of cardio equipment? I always pick the bike and here's why. It requires the least technique. Less joint impact. Less joint impact. When I tell people to sprint and then walk, people don't run very well. They hurt themselves. I tell them to swim. That requires a pool. A bike is easy. Get on a bike, sprint real hard, 10, 15 seconds, and then just cruise until you feel your heart rate come back down and then repeat it and do this for like 12 minutes.

16:00That's it. and you just did yourself an effective hit session. Yeah, this follows the do as little as possible to elicit the most amount of change theory for sure. This is the cardio version of that. I think that this is, anytime I was getting ready for a show, this was the first bit of traditional cardio, even though it's not considered traditional. It's like the first bit of like, okay, I'm doing cardio with the intent of burning fat. This is how - This is what you do. Yeah, this is my window I have. It's only 12 minutes. I just tack it onto the end of every workout. And then that was pretty much what got me ready for stage.

16:29Perfect. Which brings us to the next point, which is if your goal is fat loss and you do both strength training and cardio, it does make a difference in the order that you do them. Do your cardio after strength training. Now, if your goal is endurance and you would just want a lot of stamina endurance, then you would flip that and you do your cardio first. When it comes to fat loss, doing it at the end after you do strength training is more effective. Why? Strength training is muscle preserving. It's one of the challenges with losing body fat is keeping muscle, right? You don't want to lose muscle because your metabolic rate tends to slow down.

17:00and it makes subsequent fat loss more challenging. So you want that muscle, but then you want the additional benefit of the cardio. I got to do both today. What do I do first? Does it matter? It does. Do it after the strength training, and it makes a big difference. Isn't the theory behind that too that it's because you've depleted your glycogen stores and then you're now tapping over it? That's what bodybuilders say. Yeah, that was how we communicated. Yeah, I don't think that's not really the case. It's really about adaptation. The adaptation signal that you send first is the one that your body prioritizes.

17:28So the muscle building signal is the louder one. So you send that one first. And then at the end, you can do your cardio. Next up, now here's a consistency hack. This is one of my favorite consistency hacks that I've ever recommended. It's one that I do if I ever do any form of cardio. And that's to combine it with something like growth-minded. Like you will rarely see me just walk or do cardio without doing something growth-minded. like listen to a book or a podcast or something where I can almost get lost in. It makes the cardio enjoyable and I find myself learning something at the same time.

18:10Now, the other option of this is to do none of that, walk in nature and be present in nature. A lot of people don't necessarily have that available because they go outside just their neighborhood or whatever, which is fine too if you really want to be present. But in my experience, when I've had clients do this, they'll go through books and they'll learn different things and you can learn a lot while doing your cardio at the same time this is such a good hack right here and i wonder how many people listen to audiobooks but don't i mean i imagine probably the car is the most popular place so i'm just trying to think of like where you listen to the most podcasts and audiobooks and i think this would be kind of a great reverse tip like if you're somebody who already likes to listen to podcasts or audiobooks just walk make an effort to walk instead of just sitting still while you're listening to that.

18:55And I think that would take you pretty far too. Totally, 100%. All right, next tip. This is where everybody messes up with cardio for fat loss. Don't overdo it. Especially high. If you do tons and tons and tons of cardio, especially in combination with a low-calorie diet, this is a recipe for muscle loss. More is always better. Yeah, you will lose muscle doing this. As your body adapts and tries to become a more efficient calorie-burning machine, efficient meaning it learns how to burn less calories, it'll do this by causing you to lose muscle. And the studies on this are pretty clear. Lots of cardio in combination with calorie deficit with no strength training results in a nice 40 % of the weight you lose coming from muscle.

19:36Terrible, right? That sets you up for failure in the future. Not to mention if you have extra time and energy, instead of doing cardio, spend it on strength training. Strength training is going to offset those potential fat loss adaptations that you might get from a low calorie diet. Yeah, this is the place where I think most people go wrong. Yeah. I still think cardio is touted as the best way to lose fat, and one, it's not. And two, I think people think the more I do it, the more fat I'm going to lose. And this is probably the number one thing that I have to fix if I adopt somebody after they've already been trying to figure out their fat loss journey on their own, is getting them out of this really low calorie diet where they were doing excessive amount of cardio in order to lose body fat.

20:24Almost always they're in this predicament where they're doing tons of cardio all week, their body is stalled out and they're eating low calorie and we have to inevitably reverse diet them out because they've over applied the cardio. Yeah, I remember the first time that I started to become privy to this was when I first started managing gyms way back in 1998, I think it was. And I remember, you know, when you're managing gyms, you're in there all the time, especially for me. I was in there all the time. And you start to see the same members, right? And I'd see these members that were in there five days a week and they were busting their butts on cardio.

20:59They did nothing else but cardio, elliptical or treadmill or bike or whatever. And they all had 20, 30, 40 pounds of weight to lose. And I thought when I first got these gyms, I'd be like, oh, these are new members. And then I'd be there for a year and they come in every single day doing the same thing, lose no weight. Like what is happening? Their bodies adapted. They had great stamina and endurance, but they weren't losing any more body fat. Getting them to cut some of that out, strength train, up their protein, would cause the fat loss. But that was the first time I saw them. In fact, in the gym industry, we called those people cardio bunnies.

21:31They were just doing cardio, cardio, cardio over and over again and plateauing really, really hard. Next up, I think people forget that play is a great way to do cardio. This is the cardio you don't even count. Because you're having a good time. Parents, if you're watching this and you've got little kids and you want more activity, go take your kids to the park and have a good time with them. You will do more cardio that way because it's fun, plus your kids get this great experience with you. Tag will wear you out. I mean, play hide-and-seek, tag, throw a ball, a frisbee, chase them, climb, hike.

22:09If you don't have kids - Pick up game, basketball. Yeah, go play a pickup game. Swim. Take your friends on a long hike. When you turn it into something you enjoy, you do it. You end up doing it, and then the fat loss and the health effects are just this wonderful side effect. You can't overstate this one. My favorite version. Yeah, this is, I think, the best. This is how I get a majority of my cardio. This is probably the most sustainable for most people. Also, I just think about the generation coming up now with kids and tech and their desire to want to sit in front of a TV. And so not only is it probably really good for you as a parent or a potential parent, but to create that, like, I mean, I was just talking to Katrina yesterday about this.

22:50Like, we swam all day yesterday. And I just love the fact that. Imagine if you track those calories. Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine how many calories my son was burning all day long, not thinking that we're doing that. And he's just, he's not being sedentary. I'm not having to worry about him just sitting down in front of a TV or an iPad. And then I'm also getting all this activity, right? So it's super healthy. You're bonding with your kid. Yeah. It's a win all the way around. It doesn't feel like that. And this is, I think, how we typically advise most parents for their kids because people always ask, what kind of program should our kids run or what program is best for our kids?

23:25It's like, man, just go play. Keep them active. You'd be surprised. the eating part you get a lot of freedom and wiggle room on the diet part if they are just little kids for sure if they just move and stay active what we see right now with childhood obesity is the lack of activity paired with all these terrible foods and that just it just multiplies compounds when they're sitting there doing nothing in front of an ipad or tv what a great point because uh kids have been eating terrible diets for decades now okay when we were kids the dies were terrible yeah 80s and 90s we ate terrible food but we moved a lot we were outside playing all the time we were the bagel dog generation yeah yeah bagel dogs and uh hot pockets you know cereals and garbage it's terrible but we were playing all the time yeah uh next up is the more technical the cardio uh form that you're doing the more you need to treat it like practice and the less you need to treat it like this is the sport side yeah so this so i'll give the i'll tell a story i've told this story before i haven't told in a while but i remember years ago i was going on a hike in the foothills here in the bay area in silicon valley and i was i'm a trainer at this time so i'm going on a hike and i watched probably four or five people pass me up uh who were running now as a trainer uh i tend to look at people's biomechanics and movement okay it's just what i do because this is my this is my field and everybody's running by and i'm like oh my God, that person's feet are, you know, supinating.

24:55That person's feet are pronating. Oh my God. The way that they're striking the ground. Like I could see knee injury, back injuries happening. I'm like, this is all terrible. And then this guy ran by and he was like a gazelle. I mean, he just floated by me. He had perfect running biomechanics. And then it dawned on me, you know, running is something that humans, when we practice, we're actually better than any other animal at now, not for speed, but for endurance, we're phenomenal. We can actually outrun the top fit humans at running will out distance pretty much any other animal. In fact, I think, uh, uh, maybe a hundred years ago, these have this, this famous contest where they would have a human race, a horse for distance and 50 % of the time the human would win.

25:35So we can actually, if we practice, we're actually phenomenal runners. So we have a big knee joint. So we have big glutes where we're upright, but we just stopped running when we're kids. And then we decide when we're 30, I'm going to pick up running to get in shape. So what do we do? We buy running shoes and we run until we're tired. We don't pay attention to technique or form or flat feet. And the injury rates on running are through the roof. This is true for running. This could be true for cycling. This could be true for swimming, jumping. If you pick a form that the more technical the cardio is treat it like you're learning the skill, you'll get a, you'll get far better results than if you treat it like I need to get as tired as possible.

26:15So if you're picking up running and you haven't run in decades, go outside and run, but to practice that technique. And when you get tired, you stop because that's when your technique goes out the window. That'll give you way better results. Finally, this is a form of cardio, uh, or should I say this will build endurance and it's not cardio. It has to do with strength training, uh, do some high rep squats and do supersets in the gym and you'll get plenty of endurance. Yeah. I mean, your heart rate is going to be screaming. Yes. And that counts. If you're allergic to a treadmill or elliptical, you hate that stuff, and it's leg day, try this out.