Why Cardio Could Be Stopping You From Losing Weight | Ronan Oliveira

You can use cardio for fat loss, but the question should you? I'm Ronan. I am the head of the health and fitness department at mindvalley. And in working with a lot of people helping them burn fat, I realized that cardio is the best misused tool in the whole health and fitness area. Let me show you what I mean. So this, this is a tuna can, and this is a sharp knife. I can use a sharp knife to open a tuna can. It's something that is possible to do. But should I do this? There are so many other easier ways of doing so, and this is more or less what happens with cardio and fat loss. So to give in a perspective, let's first understand how much energy is a cardio activity really spending? And for that, we may refer to a exercise compendium that was published by Barbara Ainsworth and colleagues that estimates the amount of energy that a cardio activity spends based on the type of the exercise, the intensity that you do it, the duration of that exercise, and your own body weight. Because when you're doing cardio, you are carrying your own body weight. So from that exercise compendium, we know that 10 minutes of light cardio activity will burn more or less 0.2 calories per pound of body weight. Medium activity will spend more or less 0.45 calories per pound, and vigorous cardio activity burn 0.7 calories per pound. Now, let's suppose that we have a woman, and she is 145 pounds, and she wants to lose weight. And for her to lose weight, she decides to do a bunch of cardio. So she is using a sharp knife to open a tuna can. So she decides to do 30 minutes of a medium type of cardio activity so that based on this data will give us 196, almost 200 calories every time that she goes out on 30 minutes of cardio exercise. But then she does this three times a week. It's the average, right? So then in a week, she's burning more or less 588 calories per week because of her cardio exercises. But then how much cardio do you need to do, or how much energy do you need to spend to burn one pound of fat? On average, we need to burn more or less 3,500 calories to burn 1 pound of fat. So this woman would need to do this three times a week of 30 minutes of moderate cardio for whole six weeks for her to lose one pound of fat. Alternatively, she could have just removed the equivalent of one slice of bread per day, and everything would be at the same spot on the same time. It's a much easier strategy. If fat loss is a strategy that you have, the best strategies will be within the whole realm of nutrition. And if you used all strategies in nutrition already, then in terms of exercise, your main strategy should be strength training, because you are building muscle with that, and with more muscle, your metabolism goes higher, so you're burning more energy just to sit around the day. And then after that come all the other strategies to burn fat. But then this woman comes and says, you know, I really love my slice of bread. I won't let go. I can do more cardio. I can do seven days a week. I can do one hour per day. I can run vigorously every single day of my life. The point is that there is such a thing as too much cardio and even impacts your health. Not only is it detrimental to your fat loss, but it's also dangerous for you. So, for example, there is a study that was published in the Journal of American College of Cardiology. They looked at 5,000 healthy joggers and they plotted the amount of jogging that these people do per week and their risk of death. And they found that the relationship is a U curve, which means that for people who don't jog at all or exercise too little, their risk of death is higher. Then for the people who are jogging more or less 2.4 hours per week, they had the lowest risk of death. That means that they were in the best possible shape in terms of health and longevity. But after that, people who jogged more than this didn't get better in terms of their health and life expectancy. Actually, their risk of death start to increase. And that was a point point that jogging too much gave the same risk of death as people who didn't exercise at all. Because exercise is a stress to the body. So you can over stress it and under recover. And not only it increases your risk of death, which is a big major thing, but it's also counterproductive to your fat loss efforts. Because if you're exercising too much with cardio, then there's a great likelihood that you're losing your muscle mass. And the less muscle mass you have, the lower is your metabolism. And that means that you are burning less energy through the day. So that means that you either need to run even more or eat less and less week after week. And on top of that, we know that too much cardio may result in overeating because one, it may increase your levels of hunger, and second, there's this tricky thing that you do a session on the treadmill, and the treadmill overestimates the amount of calories that you burned. So it says that you burn just 650 calories. And then people put this in their mind and they eat those 650 calories. But that treadmill itself is overestimating. And so that leads to actually gaining weight by doing way too much cardio. Does that mean that you shouldn't do cardio at all? No, you still have a sharp knife. And a sharp knife is super useful for so many other things. It's just not your best strategy for fat loss. But for example, we know some of the most amazing benefits of cardio. Start with decreasing your risk of death. We just saw in the research that people who jog two and a half hours per week more or less had the lowest risk of death out of everyone who didn't exercise at all, exercised too much. But there is more. Exercise is amazing to the brain. There is a evolutionary perspective to this, that back in the day, 200,000 years ago, when we needed to hunt to survive, we used a technique called perseverance hunting that is more or less like this. We don't have a tool to hunt in distance, so we kill an animal by exhaustion. So that is you and me. We are in the African savannah and we see an antelope. What we do is that we approach the antelope, but the antelope is faster than us. He see us approaching and start to run super fast. We keep on moving slowly because we cannot catch the animal. At some point we lose sight of it. And then this is when we needed to stop moving and use our brains to guess where the entropy went. You know, look at the footprints, look at the bushes moving and try to figure out where it went. And so the brain developed this pattern of in between intervals of low intensity cardio to improve its cognitive abilities. So it can identify where the animal went. We can approach the antelope again. It runs away once more until the cycle repeats itself so many times that it exhausts the animal. And we can approach and kill the animal and eat. There is also shown in research. There's one paper that was published in the journal Neurology and they found that middle aged women who are physically fit were 88% less likely of having any type of dementia. And beyond the brain, we also know that cardioactivity is amazing for the heart and lungs. One paper in the journal circulation got 53 adults, divided them in two groups and for two years they put these people either on stretching every day or on a high intensity cardio every day. And the people who were on a high intensity cardio after two years reversed their cardiac aging. This is how powerful this kind of exercise is and also improves your mood. There is a study from BERLIN showing that 10 days people doing 30 minutes on a treadmill significantly decreased their depression symptoms and even go higher than this. You can control your blood sugar with cardio exercise. There's a Chinese study that found that either 20 minutes of light cardio per day or 5 minutes or very intense cuts by half your chances of having something like diabetes type 2. So the thing is, you have a powerful tool for so many other things in your life. How much should you do it? The center for Disease control and Prevention CDC recommends a minimum of 150 minutes of cardio, moderate cardio per week. So that would be more or less 30 minutes every five days in a week of something like jogging or walking fast, anything that includes increases your heart rate a little bit. And if you want to dive more into different types of cardio training, either you know, long distance stamina, high intensity interval training, then you can check one program that we developed called the Longevity Blueprint with Ben Greenfield and myself. And throughout eight weeks we teach you many techniques of cardio training that will develop your cardiovascular, respiratory fitness, that will develop your longevity, that will improve your mood and all the benefits that cardio can give you. Just don't use it to open a tuna can. If you have any comments or questions, please leave them in the in the comment below. And where's the next one? There'll be a link in the description to the Longevity Blueprint if you want to check out more. And if you have comments or questions, please leave them in the comment below. I would love to see, see and interact with you. Next week we are going back to intermittent fasting and give you the five secret tips to improve the practice. If you already started. If you like videos like this, subscribe and you know when the next one comes up and I see you in the next video. Sam.