JJ Virgin explains why running often backfires for weight loss. Running eats muscle mass and lowers your resting metabolism. People also move less throughout the day when they add structured cardio, so total daily steps drop. Muscle loss plus less daily movement can outweigh the calories burned running.
Hey JJ, why is it that when some people get into running, they actually gain weight instead of lose it?
It's so crazy, isn't it? There's actually 3 reasons you could be gaining weight while you're doing more cardio. The first thing comes down to your metabolic rate. So our metabolic rate is 3 things. It's our resting metabolic rate, how many calories we burn at rest. The only way you can really impact that is to put more muscle on your body. And what do we know here? Well, when you're doing a lot of running, you likely are going to start to lose a little bit of muscle too, because it's a catabolic event. So that's the first part. The second part is another part of your metabolic rate is your activity. Now, one of the things that we know is that within activity, we've got your exercise activity and your non-exercise activity. It turns out that within that, More of our calories are burned each day, really, in our non-activity exercise. And what we see is people who do a lot of cardio tend to steal from their non-exercise. So if you were normally doing 15,000 steps a day, now you start doing cardio, it's not on top of it. You probably took some of those steps away. So you may be being the same or less active overall to compensate for the running.
