http://www.marksdailyapple.com/case-against-cardio/
BLUF: Burning up time doing cardio work is a bad deal for your strength, your health and likely also for your longevity. Why? it's well known that heavy duty cardio is muscle consuming, and makes you weaker. It also subjects you to oxidative stresses that you can live better without. There's not really an upside - weak core, flexibility challenges, and all you gain for all that time spent is the ability to work not very hard (maximum of 40% of your total output) for a long time.
THere's only one reason to do this to yourself - you just love it. Otherwise, go for high intensity and lower duration; 20 minutes max!
This seems to be a very narrow view of exercise.
ReplyDeleteHeart Disease is #1/ #2 most common cause of death in Americans. CV exercise is probably the SINGLE most EFECTIVE preventative action.
If someone wants to maiximize caloric expenditure, CV exercise is very effective.
Men over 45 OUGHT to do Resistance training also. But doing CV exercise is MUCH better than doing nothing, and may provide more health benefits for those under 40 than resistive exercise.
Exercise Phys Prof.
EPP - I appreciate your well thought out response. I can't tell from your post if you are taking issue with my intentionally incomplete summary, or Mark S's concept overall - I wonder if you read what Mark S wrote in the article? From my perspective (many posts on this complex topic) "Maximizing the caloric expenditure" with aerobic work is both not factually accurate and not worth doing. It makes no sense to eat too much and then try to burn it off - but if that's your choice, you get more return for time spent with anaerobic work. As for CV exercise being better than nothing - absolutely. However, I don't know of any evidence that there's any gain to be had from moderately high intensity running/cycling/rowing vice simply walking in terms of the demonstrated longevity benefit. Mark's post does a good job of elaborating on that point. The point is simply that devoting time to moderately high intensity aerobic CV exercise is not ideal for either fitness, performance or longevity. There's a much better way.
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