The Most Underrated Exercise for Fat Loss & Health

Foreign. What's going on, everybody? And welcome to the Built With Science podcast. You're here with your host, as always, of course, me, myself and I, that is Max Coleman, AKA Coleman at all. And sitting in front of me as is Tradish D. Pity Plotkin, AKA Daniel Plotkin, AKA Danny Boy. And today we're going to be talking about something that. Oh, goodness, I almost can't say it without almost throwing up a little bit in my mouth. But today we're going to be talking about cardio. We're going to talk about a bunch of different things. We're going to talk mostly about walking and why Danny Boy and I love walking is our preferred form of cardio. But we're also going to talk about the benefits of cardio for weight loss as well as the benefits of cardio for health. And if maybe there's a difference between different forms of cardio for both. All right, but first, let's talk about is cardio necessary for weight loss in general? Danny Boy, you want to take this?

Yeah. So I think it's pretty clear for our listeners and pretty much anyone that's embarked on a weight loss journey that it's definitely not necessary. So we know that calories in, calories out. So making sure that you burn more calories than you intake is the reason why you lose weight. So you can very easily manipulate your nutrition and. And don't have to necessarily manipulate your energy expenditure in order to create fat loss. So definitely do not need it. But whether it's helpful is something that we'll definitely get into.

Yeah, I mean, I think that like, like this is the Built With Science podcast. And if you're listening to this, you probably have some appreciation for and probably some rudimentary understanding of how weight loss actually occurs. Right. The carbohydrate insulin model is really good, and if you're not eating carbs, you're definitely gonna lose weight. That's a joke. Yeah, you can absolutely create a caloric deficit without ever doing a single ounce of cardio. However, for a lot of people, for most people, I would imagine it's difficult to create a meaningful degree of weight loss from reducing your calories entirely and not doing pulling the lever of cardio at all right now, given that we at least understand that cardio can be beneficial for weight loss, especially in conjunction with a dietary intervention, do you think it matters if we do a more high intense versus low intense form of cardio when it comes to weight loss? I hear there's a meta with a relatively catchy Name on the subject.

Yeah. So funny enough, me and my colleagues ran a meta analysis on this exact topic, and we essentially looked at every single study that compared moderate intensity exercise and high intensity exercise. So if you want to check it out, Slow and Steady or Hard and Fast is the title, which is, you know, provocative.

And is it Hard and Fast or Fast and Hard? Imagine not knowing the name of. I think you're an author on this thing.

The problem is, guys, I'm on a lot of papers. I'm a, you know, busy guy. I can't be bothered with remembering.

Okay. It is hard. It's hard.

Oh, I was right. Never mind. I remembered every single thing. We're done, so don't ever question.

Sorry. My fault, my fault.

Perfect. So now that we're done. Embarrassing.

Max.

Yeah. We looked at the differences in a bunch of different parameters between moderate intensity steady state exercise and high intensity exercise, where the intervention was anywhere from 6 to. I believe the high end was about 24 weeks long.

52 was the longest. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think the average was around nine weeks or so.

12.

Oh, 12. Okay.

12 was the average, which is crazy because it was like, the shortest was like four. You had one that was 52 and, like, the rest were basically 12. And. And I only know this just because I just made a reel about this exact thing. So. Sorry, go ahead.

Yeah, so I'm glad you actually recently read it because I would have butchered the numbers by a decent amount. Although three weeks here, three weeks, they are all good. But if anything, that makes my point even greater. So I was going to say that the differences were basically meaningless when it came to the amount of fat loss. So it was. I want to say. And now that I know you read it recently, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but compared to control, both groups lost less than a pound.

It was like 0.5123 pounds of fat over, like, an average of 12 weeks. Crazy to think about. Yeah.

So very, very, very little. So one thing to.

And that was regardless of if you were doing high intensity or low intensity cardio in general.

Exactly. So it didn't matter. And not only did it not matter which form of exercise that you did, but it also created very little fat loss in general over the intervention. So one might be inclined to say, what the heck is the point at all of doing cardio? And I think one thing to point out here is that the studies were specifically trying to isolate whether cardio had a benefit as opposed to an individual going about using it as a tool while also considering diet. So in those studies they don't control for nutrition, they just say, okay, if we apply cardio as an intervention, is it going to cause weight loss in an individual if we just add it on top of what they're already doing? So the problem with that is that people can compensate either by moving less or eating more. And it seems like especially at the lower end of things where a lot of these interventions were a few times a week and not very long in terms of the actual session times, I believe it was about 40 minutes or so in a moderate intensity group and maybe 15 to 20 minutes or so in the high intensity group per session and then a few times a week, two or three. So not a ton of cardio being done by these individuals. So wouldn't be hard to compensate. And as you were mentioning off air, you can pretty much compensate for any amount of cardio if you are not cognizant of what you're inputting, which I.

Would say like a lot of people aren't like the average per, like I, like I talk to my, my parents about this. Like my dad will be like, oh, I just went on a run, I've earned this Domino's large pizza. Like and it's when in reality you're not even, you're not only compensating for it, you are like far over compensating for the amount of energy that you burned while running by eating the unbelievably delicious and hyper palatable food that we have access to today for so cheap. Right?

Yeah. And there's even so I've had clients that were not my recommendation but training for marathons and things like that which didn't lose any weight at all just because they were not, not trying to lose weight. So they were very easily, without even trying, compensating for the amount of calories.

Yeah, I'm glad you, I'm so glad you brought that up. I've never thought about this. I didn't think to bring this up, but I actually did a half marathon when I was in high school, my freshman year of high school. And now that I'm thinking about it, I did not lose an ounce of weight in training. I did zero, basically zero cardio prior to that. And then my dad one day was just like, let's run a half marathon. I was like, okay, cool. And so I trained for like six months and did it. And I don't think I lost a pound in those six months of training for a half marathon because again, it's just so easy to, especially if you're not cognizant of this stuff, over consume calories and your body. I mean keep in mind, ladies and gentlemen, like our bodies are built for survival. And if you don't, your body does not realize that there's a Walmart around the corner that you can go get Pop Tarts from of any flavor. And if that you want. And you, you basically, you're preparing for the fact that. Or maybe we may be in feast times now, but famine times are just around the corner. And so we want to preserve as much energy as we possibly can. So when we go run, our body's like, okay, we did that. Now it's time to. Because we don't know when we're going to get food again, reduce our energy in other ways or consume more just to make sure that we're not running ourselves into starvation mode essentially. Right, sorry, I keep, I don't mean to keep interrupting you, please God ahead with whatever you were about to say.

So I think, I think we covered that section pretty well. Unless you want me to get something else.

So yeah, so we basically were just saying like just to wrap this up. Cause I basically rambled for 30 minutes here. Which form of cardio you choose when we're talking about for weight loss, specifically according to the meta analysis that Danny Boy was a part of, which had like 54 studies on it total, it didn't seem to matter. So not only was there a really small effect with respect to like three months, about half a pound of fat loss over three months. That, that's nothing regardless of which form you were doing. And then if you actually compared the two together, it was like, I think the, the standardized mean difference was like.02. And to keep, for those of you who don't know, I think 02 is considered like a small effect. So 0.02 is basically no difference whatsoever. That 02 by the way, was ever so slightly in favor of low intensity. So so more low intense forms of cardio. But again, it doesn't really matter what you choose. That being said, like Danny Boy was saying in that meta there, they were doing relatively low volumes of Cardio in general, two to three times a week, 15 to 20 minutes here, 20 to 30 minutes there, depending on which form of cardio you were doing. And it didn't see it kind of washed out. Now, if you wanted to do more meaningful amounts of cardio for the purposes of weight loss, do you still think it doesn't matter which form you choose?

Yeah. So I Think this is an interesting one because if you were to look at some of the thoughts and commentary on the old Twitter and now X, you'd have a lot of people that are citing this one study looking at the Hadza and the energy expenditure that they burned throughout the day and how it was very similar to a sedentary American. And a lot of people are sort of using this evidence to say that the amount of activity that you do is basically completely meaningless and you're gonna account for it through basically expending less energy later on throughout the day, even if you do bouts of exercise. I don't think that that's what's the.

Hotza for people that don't know.

Yeah, they're all referring to hunter gatherer tribe. So you would expect hunter gatherers to, they're a modern day hunter gatherer tribe. So we can actually study what they do, how much energy they expend, what their habits are and so on. So it's a really cool model to sort of look at. The problem is, is that you have to account for a lot of things. They're very, very small in stature, so you have to correct for their fat free mass and all these kinds of things. So it makes it harder to draw some inferences about expenditure. But I think that there's definitely some utility in using that data along with other data showing that you're going to account for activity that you do by just moving less and eating more, but in this case specifically moving less. But I think there's enough data on the very high end of things where you're doing a lot of. So this is more specific data to what we're referring to. We, we have people living in the US or other countries that are relatively sedentary but then forced to do a very high amount of activity. So this was five days a week, an hour to an hour and a half per day of cardiovascular exercise. And they did lose a meaningful amount of weight over longer periods of time. So six month periods where they lost, you know, anywhere from 5 to 8 kilograms, like 10 to 15 pounds. So meaningful weight loss for sure. So I think that dismissing any forms of cardio and saying they're not effective at all would probably be doing people a disservice if they were the very few people that are inclined to really push that lever. But for the vast majority of people, they're just not going to do that much on the cardio and for it to be the main lever that they pull for from a fat loss, for fat loss.

And given that if given that you tend to burn more calories per minute from doing higher intensity forms of cardio. If you're going to use cardio as the main lever for weight loss and you're not going to, you're going to try to do it without manipulating diet, the amount of walking you would have to do would be like hours and hours and hours of your day, which is just not feasible for the average person. So if you're trying to use cardio for weight loss and you don't want to think too much about the dietary lever that you should be pulling, you probably want to stick to a higher end of intensity, which you still have to do a substantial amount of higher intensity cardio to get those meaningful weight loss. To get that meaningful weight loss without manipulating diet in general. Right.

Probably moderate intensity makes the most sense.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry.

Yeah. So higher intensity than walking. So if you were to try to walk and burn as many calories as would be necessary and it would be an absurd amount of walking. But if you tried to do really high intensity cardio in order to get those same amount of calories, you might run into a situation where you're not very happy for prolonged periods because most people don't love to do that much high intensity. I feel like when you make comparisons about moderate amounts of cardio, it's very easy to compare high intensity to moderate intensity. But if you're making people do an inordinate amount of sprints and interval type training, you're going to get to a point of diminishing returns where one, especially if you're doing something like a sprint, the ground contact and joint forces are probably not going to be super helpful to people. But two, you're going to get, especially.

People trying to lose weight.

Yeah, exactly. But even then, like, let's say you're doing like cycling or elliptical or something like that, doing an absurd amount of high intensity cardio would probably still not be a good idea. But don't forget that obviously you can do a mixture of things. So my recommendation to somebody that was trying to pull that lever would probably be to skew toward doing the most of your work at moderate intensities, with some at the higher intensities and figure out what you enjoy most with that sort of combination. But our overarching recommendation is going to be, obviously don't use cardio as your main lever.

Yeah. And you definitely want to use, you should be doing cardio as a, as an important takeaway. Like cardio is definitely beneficial for things outside of weight loss, which we'll get to in a second. But we talked about enjoyment, talked about finding something you enjoy. Let's talk about something you and I both enjoy.

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Walking. Walking is far and away my favorite form of cardio, both for weight loss as well as health. And let's talk a little bit about why walking can be beneficial for weight loss specifically, right? So for one, Danny Boy was just kind of saying this. If you have, if you compare people's responses to higher intensity cardio versus lower intensity or cardio and even moderate intensity cardio, the RPEs, like the you're rating of perceived exertion from doing higher intensity cardiovascular, even when calories are matched, is way higher. It's just, it requires substantially, substantially more effort from a mental and physical standpoint to do very high intensity cardio as opposed to just going on a nice long walk on the beach with your friend Danny Boy. You know, so the low barrier to entry and the fact that it's not nearly as intimidating as, as intense cardio, and the fact that your grandmother can do it just as well as your, your elite NFL athlete can do it, there's a lot of reasons why walking is a really, really good choice for a lot of people, right? And it's important to note that even though walking is simple, right? Walking is about as simple a form of cardio as it gets and probably the easiest from a, an effort standpoint, right? It's important to note that there is a big difference between simple and easy, right? Just because it's easier to go on a walk does not mean just because it's simpler to go on a walk and easier to go on a walk than to go on a run. To not mean that it's easy to do so consistently for days and weeks and months and years on time, right? And I think walking is like one of those examples of consistency is better than perfection. Going for a walk and being consistent with that is incredibly beneficial. And it just, it really highlights the, the benefits of staying consistent as opposed to trying to be perfect with the form of cardio. That you choose. Right. Another really great thing about walking in general is that it's super easy to make part of your just daily routine. And I made a post about this recently, but as cliche and like, kind of like overexposed. This advice is like simply parking further away from an entrance or taking the stairs over the elevator, or just making short walks like, like taking your dog on more common or more our walks more commonly or more often. Like these things can add up pretty substantially over time to make it so that walking anywhere from 7 to 10,000 steps a day is just not something that's like non feasible for most people. Like the average person probably doesn't have much difficulty going on walks at all. Right. But again, doing so consistently is what's actually difficult here. Another great thing about walking in general, I think is that it does seem to interfere less with other with gains, so to speak, than other forms of cardio. Now to be very clear, I think if you do more moderate intensity cardio or even really high intensity cardio, the likelihood of it interfering with gains in muscle while you're trying to build as much muscle as possible. The built with Science podcast, of course is, is very low. The interference effects, which is what that's called, the notion that doing cardio kills your gains, essentially more colloquially referred to is pretty debunked, I guess would be the best way of saying it. Like you have to do relatively intense, pretty high intensities and pretty high volumes of cardio if you wanted to interfere with especially muscle and strength gains. Now, power, there does seem to be a, a somewhat more of an interference between power increases in power production when you're doing higher form or more volumes of cardio. But again, even those you'd have to be doing relatively substantial amounts. Anything that I'm missing with respect to the benefits of walking for weight loss specifically and like why I choose walking is like my preferred way of going about it.

Yeah, I think it's an easy thing that people can track that can sort of combat the typical reductions in non exercise activity thermogenesis. So when you talk about total daily energy expenditure, there's four buckets, there's exercise activity, there's non exercise activity, there's the thermic effect of food and then there's basal metabolic rate. So basal metabolic rate is just the energy that you would expend just doing absolutely nothing like laying in bed.

I think of it as if you're in a coma. You're using basically only basal metabolic rate.

Yep. And so then you have thermic effect of food, which is the energy necessary in order to break down the nutrients that come with eating. Then you have non exercise activity thermogenesis, which is just daily activity, energy expenditure, so fidgeting, moving around, things like that. And then obviously exercise activity which is, you know, the energy you burn during exercise.

So what's the difference between exercise and neat?

So we just, we just went over that.

We did. But the, the point here is that they're very similar. Intention is really the only thing that distinguishes between exercise and neat. I just think that's like, that's like one of the most interesting philosophical conversations around this that I, that I think is so if I'm walking to the bus to, to the bus stop, that's neat. But then if I'm, if I start running because the bus is like moving, it's still neat. Even though it can be seen as exercise to be exercise, you have to be doing it for the purposes of improving some sort of physical characteristic or maintenance.

I think some of it is. Yeah, I think some of it is semantic.

It exclusively semantic, bro. Of course it is. I just think it's really interesting.

For sure. But I just think the non semantic part to me is the completely subconscious part. So you're making a conscious decision to run for the bus as opposed to being like. Yeah. Although even this category kind of. So let's say you were dieting and you were just completely depleted. The chances that you would actually try to run to the next stop to get on that bus is lower. Right. So I think the reason why you sort of differentiate those two, at least from a non semantic standpoint, is that it's a lot of unconscious decisions that you're making for NEAT while exercise. At least if you have a program which you kind of should. In terms of sort of the definition of exercise that we're using, that's something that I will do this as opposed to with need.

So is there a difference between conscious and intention? Oh God, we're getting way too deep in getting that.

Most of the stuff that we do is unconscious, maybe even in the gym. So you know, when you get semantic enough we're, we're definitely into some weird territories. But getting back to how walking would affect energy expenditure, I think the, the main two. So you're not really going to change exercise activity, energy expenditure through any walking. Like obviously that's a separate category and you're not going to change thermic effect of feeding. So the energy expenditure from which is.

Very low anyway with respect to DDA. Is like 5 to 10%. Yeah.

But the two things that are affected during a weight loss, during weight loss is BMR and non exercise activity thermogenesis. So you're not really going to do anything to basal metabolic rate by walking. But you do see some decreases in basal metabolic rate, one, because you're a smaller body, but two, also because of some compensations. And, and then neat is the thing that you can consciously try to make an effort to keep high. So when you are dieting you're probably going to fidget a little less. The likelihood that you're going to walk across the room to get the remote is a little less. You're just daily going to try to sort of conserve calories as you get further and further into your diet. So having something like walking or a step count is pretty easy to do. You just look at your phone or look at your watch or whatever. You're like, oh crap, I only hit 3,000 steps today. Let me sure, let me make sure that it's at least 7 or 10 or whatever your goal is. So it's something that can sort of combat that tendency to move less, which is easily trackable and doesn't necessarily take a super high concerted amount of effort.

Very small from like a mental bandwidth too. Like it's not like oh, I have to go do cardio today. It's like, oh, I just need to make sure I probably, I should probably walk to the grocery store today or something like that. Which is impossible where you live and very easy where I live. But the good news is that when we're talking about when you're dieting, you do tend to see drops in your total daily energy expenditure and those almost exclusively come from neat. Now your BMR will drop very slightly as you diet, but it's almost always to do with literal just the amount of weight that you're losing because it takes less energy to keep 160 pound person alive as opposed to 170 pound person alive. And you really only see big drops in bmr, I think when you're doing pretty high, pretty large caloric deficit. But even then it's like not that crazy. So there was this one study that was done in the 80s or 90s. I'm embarrassed that I don't remember the name of it off the top of my head, but they basically took these individuals and put them on a 500 calorie like allotment. So they were, I think the average person. Their, their like bmr, their basic, their the amount of calories they needed to maintain their body weight was around 3,000 and they put them down to 500 and they saw like 10 to 15% reductions in basal metabolic rate itself. So you'll see tho that's a pretty small reduction in BMR given that they're eating at a 2500 calorie deficit. Right. But those largest interference that you'll see does come from neat. And the really wonderful thing about walking is that it basically counteracts that to a very large degree. Now, going on walks and stuff isn't going to help you fidget more when you're sitting on your couch later at night, but it still is like, it's one of those things that's really easy to track. Your phone's going to do it for you anyway, assuming you carry your phone on. There it goes. Assuming you carry your phone on you. And it's just again, just something that doesn't require a great deal of effort. So those reductions in TDE are much easier when you're tracking the amount of steps that you're taking in a day. All right, kind of talked about the benefits of walking for weight loss. Kind of why I choose it as my preferred form of cardio, just because it's like easier for me mentally and because it's just one of those easiest things to track as opposed to cardio. But let's talk about the health benefits of cardio or of steps in general. And then we can also talk about cardio more specifically to different forms of cardio. I know that this is the Built with Science podcast. I don't care about health at all. I just want to. I want to live fast and leave a big jacked coffin. But some of our listeners probably do. So let's talk about the health benefits of walking. What's correct?

Yeah, so tons of health benefits, probably. I want to say with pretty good confidence. Any body system would benefit from making sure that you keep a high amount of activity. So your venous return requires walking or some sort of skeletal muscle, you know, hump action, lymphatic system requires it. Your brain enjoys, you know, when you keep your activity high. Your vessel compliance is blood sugar, blood.

Pressure, all of it.

Diabetes, blood pressure. Pretty much any metric that you look at is improved by increasing your activity, whether it's through walking or through formal exercise and so on. So you would be, I would be shocked if I saw, like there's very few things that. And I'm sure you could probably think of something like, you know, the likelihood that you stub your toe is. Is higher. But it's almost all positives and very, very little negatives when it comes to walking for pretty much every single system. And there's even studies in diabetics that looked at walking right after meals, controlling blood sugar compared to insulin, and they do pretty dang good job to type one diabetics. No, no. Type two. Type two? Yeah. No. Type one. That would be a little bit more of a.

That'd be shocking.

Yeah, yeah. Uphill battle there. So, yeah, I mean, there's not any system that I think wouldn't benefit from doing more walking specifically.

But we can get, you say more, though. Like, we talk about walking in general and it being really good for your health. There seems to be. There's a meta regression that came out, a meta analysis that came out, I believe it was last year that had people like, I thought this was the weirdest response in the fitness industry I've seen yet. This, this meta analysis came out last year that said 10,000 steps reduces the cause, the likelihood of all cause mortality. Right. Basically just says if you get a certain number of steps, it's inversely correlated with living longer. Right. And people were like, whoa, this is great. Like, dude, we. What. We've known this for, like, a long time. And then this meta analysis came out and people were just breaking up out of something we already knew. I don't know. It was kind of. I think it was.

It was 7,000, right?

It was 10,000 was like. I think it was.

Oh, yeah. That was where, like, there was still. So basically up to 7,000 was where the most benefit was, and then there was still a continued benefit all the way up to 10. And then that was, like, where there was a point of diminishing returns and maybe even like a flattening. Got you.

It's important to think. I think a good way thinking about steps is the same as volume. I was thinking about this in preparation for the podcast. Like, doing five to nine sets, you're going to get like 80% of the growth that you want. And then if you want to push that from somewhere to 10 to 20, just know that you probably will get more from it. But each additional step or each additional set that you do is going to bring you much less benefits than the ones previously. Right. Which doesn't mean that you shouldn't do them. But basically the takeaway from this meta analysis is that you probably want to be getting somewhere between seven and 10,000 steps a day. You're getting seven, you're probably in the clear you don't need to worry about much, but there's probably an additional benefit to getting a little bit more. But don't like harp on yourself because before this the majority of the data suggested that 7,000 was plenty to give you all the health benefits that you needed from it. However, I know Danny Boy specifically has some gripes with maybe the over proselytizing about walking and why it's the only necessary form of cardio you need. You want to talk about those?

Yeah. So I think particularly in our space where most of them are meatheads and they really don't love cardio, they'll say that walking is absolutely all you need. And once you hit even that 7,000 or maybe 10,000, but mostly they say 7,000 mark, you're not going to get any extra health benefits. And I just find that extremely unlikely to be true for a few reasons. One, there's just a bunch of physiological mechanisms that are different at different intensities for different body systems. So the brain are so on. So the fact that that would do nothing just would be surprising to me. But I think the strongest forms of evidence are looking at the correlation between Cardiovascular Fitness, mostly VO2 max. So the amount of oxygen that you can shuttle within a given time for your specific body weight. And seeing that as your cardio fat, as your cardiovascular fitness goes up, so does reductions in pretty much everything all cause mortality, different diseases, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and so on. So it's hard to square those two, where walking is only going to get you up to a certain point in terms of cardiovascular fitness. And it's pretty obvious some concerted cardio is going to move that number upward. And if that number looks better and that correlates with good outcomes, you probably want to spend some time trying to get your cardiovascular fitness to a place where it's at least in the good category for your age range. So my practical recommendation for this is that if you're doing a lot of activity and I actually fall into this category, I can do a lot of activity and not be in the best or even good category for my VO2 max. But when I give a concerted effort to actually getting aerobic exercise in, I climb up to those, you know, good and even excellent categories. And I would hedge my bets on trying to be in a better range for cardiovascular fitness and not only bank on my higher levels of activity. If I'm really trying to make sure I'm covering all my bases. Would most people benefit a ton and Maybe even like 8? Like you were saying? Point of dimensions or maybe even 80% of the benefits that they would ever get from mostly just keeping their physical activity high. I think that that's barely safe to say, but especially for people that tend to have lower cardiovascular fitness, I think they'd get even more benefit from trying to make a concerted effort to make sure their VO2 max and other cardiovascular parameters are looking good.

Yeah. So just to kind of like bow that up real quick and make sure that I understand it like, we do see a pretty clear relationship between step count and longevity, but we also see a, a clear relationship between VO2 Max, which is just our best gauge of cardiorespiratory fitness, basically how much oxygen that you can take in from the air and use for energy production while doing stuff. There seems to be a very clear relationship between that number getting higher and the number of years that you live getting higher as well. And we know that walking and doing very low intensity forms of cardio is never going to get your VO2 max as high as doing higher intensity forms of cardio. And in fact, I could be wrong about this, but I think that like basically the highest form of intensity you can do seems to correlate the best with improvements in VO2 max. Like you want to be doing very high intensity forms of cardio if you want to make the best improvements to your VO2 max. I could be wrong about that very much not my area of expertise. But point being, you, if you are truly trying to maximize your years on planet Earth doing some form of higher intensity cardio, and probably your best bet is to doing a combination of lower, moderate and higher intensity cardio if you want to live as many years as you possibly can. Correct. Yeah.

And I think also just in terms of health within those years, maybe even more important. So, yeah, I don't want to sort of over emphasize amount of years versus the actual health within those years. I don't know. I doubt it's that much of a needle mover when it comes to the exact amount of years. You know, might be, you know, three to five years, but if you can have those quality years as well, much higher quality. And I think even there's even some direct evidence on this with surveys or whatever, looking at what people would prefer. And people, not surprisingly, would strongly prefer a little bit less time, but have health throughout that and then, you know, maximize time, even if you're miserable and stuff like that. So yeah, I think making sure that you're covering your basis is probably a really good idea in terms of key keeping your cardiovascular fitness high and also keeping your activity high. But if you're going to obviously if.

You'Re going to choose one.

I'd actually choose cardiovascular fitness if I'm being honest. Because obviously the things that are necessary in order to get there's they're overlapping. Right. So the things that are necessary in order to get your cardiovascular fitness high are going to be higher intensity and maybe even more work than walking. But obviously walking as we talked about is a low barrier to entry. So get you. We can probably get way more people to do more activity before we get.

Those people to much easier sell to say hey, go, go take a walk after you're done with dinner as opposed to hey, we're going to go to the, the football field and do some 100 meter sprints.

And one thing, one benefit that sort of goes, goes under the radar is that walking is a part of a lot of cultures and it's how you connect with other people. Like you know, going for a run together, you're not really talking, you're not connecting things like that. So walking can be done in conjunction with a lot of other things that.

Are very social thing that can be done, which is really nice. Holding hands with Daniel while we walk through the Lower east side is some of my most fondest memories. Yeah. So I, that's Danny boy's advice with respect to cardio. Mine is life is a series of quality and quantity decisions and I would rather live for a shorter period of time and not be miserable, miserable doing sprints and running. But you know, that's just my opinion. That's not the, the, the, the patent, whatever the official stance of Bill was science or anything, but you know, take that with the grain of salt that you will live fast and leave a big coffin. All right. Anything else you want to say with respect to health or weight loss or anything with respect to that cardio and walking in general?

Yeah. One thing to touch on, I think that we mentioned before the podcast is weight maintenance. So losing weight and then maintaining that weight loss tends to be accomplished better with walking cardio in general. So the data on, we were making the data on exercise look really stark and it doesn't look that great, especially at moderate amounts for weight loss specifically. But people who do more exercise and more activity tend to maintain weight loss a bit better than those that don't, which, you know, makes some sense. So I think using that in conjunction with all of the health benefits can be a greater sell a lot of the time to people who are on the fence About I like to sort of create a case any time I sort of. Especially because, you know, we give a lot of advice to a lot of people. So making a case that's true, you don't want to make a case that's, you know, based on a bunch of things that are false. But making it a good true case can help a lot of people in sort of like rationalizing why they do things. So if you add on to the fact that a lot of times you mentioned all the health stuff and people are like, yeah, whatever, I don't give a crap, I just want to look good in a bathing suit. So mentioning that on top of, on top of all the health benefits, you're probably likely to maintain more weight loss. And one thing that we didn't mention is that especially as you get to the lower end of things, having more room for food means more room for one just enjoying life, but also nutrients and things like that. So when you get fairly low in calories, you could end up running into issues with nutrients and even like enjoying quality time with, you know, family members and things like that. So having enough activity and, and, or cardio can allow for enough room and not, not a one to one relationship as we were talking about, but a bit more room for those extra calories that may actually just make your life more and more enjoyable. There's actually some research on this that where if you go low enough in a deficit, then adding on some physical activity or reaching a threshold of physical activity actually allows for people to consume enough food where they feel satiated and fine as opposed to when you go to really low amounts and you're not getting that activity in, then the amount of misery that's going to accumulate is not going to allow you to stay the course, if that makes sense. So whether that's true and how much that's true for specific individuals is obviously going to be individual. And actually, and that's one thing, I think you touched upon this, I thought that's what you were going to say actually with the massive deficits. But there's a lot of variability between people and I think, yeah, this is a super important point, experiment with these things because there's a lot of variability in both directions actually when people go into certain houses and people go into deficits, the amount that their body accounts for things through neat and other mechanisms is really. So I, I have clients and even I think you on the upper end of things like can really push it where it gets harder to eat enough for bulking. But on the Lower end of things. Actually, I think you're. You. You get kind of lucky in both directions. But basically there are some people that can push things up higher and not have to push things lower when it comes to their deficit, while others are sort of constrained on both sides where they start getting compensations in either direction. So definitely try to experiment with each one and see how physical activity and modulating calories sort of creates different outcomes.

Yeah, you're going to have to. As much as I hate, I hated this in school and I hate this now, but like, basically trial and error is your best friend here, where you're gonna have to find that right balance of levers to pull. Like for me, the hunger is pretty bad on a diet. So I would rather kind of push the physical activity a little bit more until a certain point and then I get to a certain body fat and certain like, body weight where hunger is less of an issue than the fatigue, like the, the like lethargy that I get from being in a diet and stage. So then I autocorrect where I pull the diet lever a little harder and kind of correct for the physical activity lever where I'm just kind of like, don't have to do as much and I get to just kind of like sit in hunger a little bit. But it's better than being like literally feeling like a zombie. Right. And then for some people, like, they don't get hungry at all during a diet, but the lethargy that they feel, the fatigue that they feel from dieting is so high for those people, I'm going to pull calories as low as I can without affecting physical activity. And then for some people, and this seems to be somewhat true on average, kind of goes somewhat against what you were saying, is that like hunger is, is mostly associated with just energy expenditure throughout the day. So regardless of, of where you are, like calories high, calories low, activity high, activity low, like you're going to be hungry in a diet because your energy expenditure is so high, major calories are so low, and there's no balance there. Right.

To be clear, I'm not actually talking about differences in basal energy expenditure. I think that's what you're talking about. So this is actually super interesting sort of side note. But a lot of people claim that because they need to eat less, that that's why it's harder for them to diet. But that doesn't seem to be beared out on the research to your point. So people who have a lower energy expenditure and therefore can eat less Food still have, uh, so people who can eat more food still have as hard of a time as people who need to eat less food. What I was referring to is the compensations. Once people go about getting into a deficit or doing a surplus wherever they start, seems to matter a bit less than how the body compensates as you go in either direction. So, yeah, that's just.

My roommate is one of those dudes where the more he eats, the more neat he expends to the point where, like, he's just vibrating in his seat. Like he'll just be sitting there and if you give him enough calories, he just turns into like a series of motors. Like, like just he finds a way to burn that energy off as quickly as he possibly can. Okay, good. Can I put a little bow on this bad boy?

Yeah. A long tangent, but hopefully beautiful tangent.

So hopefully someone learned something from it. Exactly. All right, so as we talked about, cardio, certainly not necessary for weight loss, but can definitely help.

Right?

And it's certainly a lever that you want to pull with respect to losing weight. And if you're someone who wants to pull that lever harder than you want to reduce calories, like you want to rely a little bit more on increases in physical activity as opposed to decreases in energy intake, you probably want to choose somewhat more moderate intensities to higher intensity forms of cardio, just so that you're not spending hours upon hours a week walking or doing some form of low intensity ellipticaling or whatever. Right. However, walking is a super beneficial lever to pull in conjunction especially with dietary interventions, because there's a super low barrier to entry. It really helps counteract reductions in meat, and it may even help you, like, maintain that weight that you're losing during a diet. And it's just not nearly as intimidating. It's going to interfere a lot less with gains while trying to lose weight. And basically anyone can do it. It's just as easy for your grandma to go for a walk as it is for an NFL athlete. Right. There's also some benefits to health or some health benefits to walking. A lot of health benefits to walking in general, with somewhere between 7 and 10,000 being the sweet spot, hopefully getting at least 7,000 with some additional but depreciating benefits from going closer to 10. And if you're looking to maximize both quality and quantity of life, you're probably going to want to do some variation of cardio, meaning you're going to want to do some low intensity cardio. A lot of low intensity cardio. You're Going to want to do some moderate intensity and maybe even a little bit of high intensity cardio to improve your VO2 max for the purposes of increasing your years on this. On this earth. Right. Anything else you want to add? Anything?

I didn't cover in your outro, but I always think of something while you're speaking.

No, please. Yeah.

Made it seem like walking is sort of always low intensity, but this is an unlock and I mentioned it to some people and they're like, oh, I never thought of that. Incline walking is freaking awesome. So if you just put the grade up on the treadmill, hard to do outside, obviously you're not going to find like a super long hill with, you.

Know, the tidy little incline.

Well, yeah, so using incline walking to get that moderate intensity cardio is something that you can do to essentially get that moderate intensity cardio in while also be being able to do something while you do it. So watching a show and so on. I hate doing that. If, like, I'm not going to run and like watch Netflix, but some people.

Run and read, bro, that blows my mind. Yeah, you can also another. If we're just talking about this, like another really good one and really good one. I don't know. I don't know how I feel about this one, but wearing a weighted vest while walking is something that a lot of people do. I don't think that's like, completely silly, but I don't know the degree to the benefit that you're going to get from that. I think it's. It's cool and it's smart in theory, but I think that the, the counteraction that you'll get from reductions in need later in the day. You seem like you have something to say with respect to this.

No, this should just. Just some cool studies where they added, you know, the amount of weight that they were losing.

The case study. Are you referring to a case study right now? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That is a really cool study. Basically, he saw. He saw like almost no reductions in TDE throughout the entire cut. Right? Yeah, yeah. Super interesting finding. But if you're someone. If you're like a normal person who doesn't want to wear a weighted vest everywhere you go. I understand that. Anyway, anything else you want to add? Anything else? Any more interruptions you'd like to throw in?

All good. Cool. All right.

Well, as always, everyone, thank you so much listening to the Built With Science podcast. If you have something that you. We want, that you want us to cover that we haven't covered yet, please feel free to reach out to us on Instagram at Built with Science. And as always, we will see you next time. And thank you for listening. Peace.