I received the following question today via email:
Q: What’s up with being down on cardio? It seems like a relatively new position for trainers, and I’m wondering what’s behind it. I saw recently that someone was debunking the large metabolic burn rate previously quoted for muscle versus fat tissue, that the burn rate isn’t so high (but still higher than non-muscular tissue). Just wanting to understand.
I responded directly to the person who emailed me that question, but I figured I’d also post my answer here as well:
A: I’ve personally always hated cardio. I only learned in the past year or so that it’s completely unnecessary for fat loss, so since I already hated it to begin with, knowing how useless it is only makes me even more passionately against it.
The reason myself and plenty of other personal trainers believe that cardio is pointless has nothing to do with the metabolic rate of muscle vs. fat. The reason is that long slow cardio doesn’t burn as many calories as circuit training and high-intensity interval training (in half the time as you’d spend doing cardio). And there’s virtually no post workout calorie burn (EPOC) from doing long slow cardio, but circuit training and HIIT produce an elevated metabolism for up to 48 hours post workout. That’s the main reason that personal trainers who’ve stayed current in their training methodologies are against cardio.
