Imagine a bird's eye view over a green expanse of meadows. Imagine two armies coming from the two opposite sides of your field of vision. You see them moving against each other: they are loading. See the clash between the first rows. You hear the screams, the roar of artillery explosions. Clouds of dust, splashes of earth and mud, blood everywhere.
Here it is. I just showed you a conversation between keyboard lions about weight loss, nutrition and the role of cardio.
One of the most peaceful, however.
Index
The slimming process
Meanwhile, I state that this article does not claim to be either exhaustive or to give any kind of "absolute truth".
As for words, the slimming process is easily dashed - a kilo of fat corresponds to 9000 calories, you put yourself in a good calorie deficit, increase your energy consumption with exercise, and voila - the equation is much more complex than that.
The factors that contribute to this equation are myriad.
First of all, the metabolism.
What a big word.
As he explains for years Lyle McDonald, one of the most influential nerds of nutrition e defender of the ketogenic diet, treating the metabolism can take hundreds of pages.
What interests us is the adaptation that i metabolic processes they perform when we begin to intervene on nutrition and, to a lesser extent, on physical activity.
When in fact we "put ourselves on a diet", our body increases the stimulus of appetite, modifies its hormonal structure (generally for the worse) and slows down the metabolism. In practice, it tells us to move to find more food.
Cursed.
And exercise?
Broadly speaking there are three macro-types of physical exercise:
- Resistance training (weights)
- High intensity training (HIIT)
- Cardio (low intensity)
They have different impacts both on the composition of the body and on the body energy consumption and on metabolic responses.
Cardio and weight loss process: we are no longer in the 80s
Sweat band, improbable color leggings, aerobics VHS and on: a few months and the excess fat we sweated away.
But deep down we know, that life in the 80s was simpler.
The most current studies - and for "current" I mean "for some years now" - agree in saying that, of the three types mentioned above, the cardio is NOT the most suitable for activate a slimming sensitive.
Actually.
(When you say "indeed" in general the defenders of a hypothesis tremble)
On the one hand, the number of calories burned with cardio steady state they are smaller than those burned during HIIT and weight sessions, especially in the long term (post exercise consumption).
Then cardio - if used as a weight loss aid - seems to cause more problems than it solves, because:
- Cause a fort metabolic adaptation: that is, it burns less as you get used to the activity
- It tends to catabolize muscles, that is, to consume them protein of the muscles
Again: the actual impact of cardio on fat loss (or weight) also depend on the percentage of fat mass of the athlete, on the metabolic individuality, from the power supply...
In short, there is no precise, unique and definite answer.
And then? Cardio yes or cardio no?
Reading forums and discussion groups, most nutrition and sports scholars agree that the ideal solution to sustain a weight loss - it being understood that we work first of all with food - is one combination of weights and cardio.
The © CrossFit?
It is also undeniable that cardio training has many other advantages, such as those in terms of cardiovascular health and the promotion of greater adherence to the diet practiced.
This however is a point of view, towards which there is to say that much scientific literature is straining.
If you want to talk about it, I'm with the army on the left, and I'm the one with the beard coming out of the helmet.