Cardio Vs Dieting for Fat Loss Which is Better? | Beginner's Guide to Cardio | Do I Need to Do C
Cardio Vs Dieting for fat loss, which is better??! It’s the one thing most gym goers can agree on.... We don’t like cardio! Nor do we like Dieting! Most people (bar a few crazy people) dislike doing cardio (myself included), mainly due to its monotonous and time consuming nature. So is it actually necessary when the goal is fat loss or should we concentrate on diet, and are there ways to break the boredom?!
Health Benefits:
First things first, cardio vascular exercise is one of the best things you can possible do for your general health, along with not smoking and having a healthy diet. On that basis alone, cardio should be included in your fitness regime. It’s good for the heart, increases blood flow to the brain and other organs, helps to clear the body of toxins so is excellent for general health.
Most people however don’t do cardio for this reason and they use it solely as a fat
loss solution. That is because as the name suggests, cardio vascular exercising, increases your heart rate, depletes glycogen stores in the body thus it increases your metabolism and burns more calories. This can mean that you end up actually burning more calories in the day than you consume from your diet, and so the body makes up that deficit in calories by using energy from its fat stores. This is how you ‘burn’ body fat. So then cardio is effective at creating the caloric deficit required to lose fat, there’s no doubting that.
However most people for that reason see it as the Holy Grail of fat loss, that in order to lose fat you must spend hours sweating on a treadmill in order to lose fat/weight, when in reality this simply isn’t true. In fact you can easily accomplish your fat loss goals without doing any cardio at all....
Is It Best Thing to Do For Fat Loss?
That is because the more effective way to lose fat is to control your caloric intake by having a balanced but deficit inducing diet plan. Let’s put it this way, why bother slaving tirelessly during cardio sessions, wasting time and effort on what could otherwise be put towards weight training or just some more free time in the day, burning off calories that you have eaten, when if you had eaten fewer in the first place there is simply no need to do the cardio to burn them off.
So dieting to create a caloric deficit is a much better approach. It’s as
simple as that really. The difficult part comes with actually sticking to a calorie restricted diet! This is where cardio can help out by adding to that deficit giving you some room to manoeuvre. To enjoy your diet, you need to include flexible dieting in my opinion, this is where you eat what you want as long as it fits in with your target calories or macros for the day! Check out my YouTube video on enjoying your fat loss diet here, or check out my blog on the same topic.
I believe then that a fat loss regime should always start with your diet and then cardio can be used as a tool on top of that diet, say to speed up fat loss or when excess calories have been consumed in a day. But I would never advise using cardio solely as a weight loss tool. To me it makes no logical sense.
Different Forms of Cardio
Now that we've established how cardio should be used in a fat loss regime, here now are the benefits and disadvantages of different forms of cardio...
Steady State Vs. HIIT
When I do use cardio though I tend to stay clear from steady state cardio, such as
jogging on a treadmill or the cross trainer, in favour of High-Intensity-Interval-Training (HIIT). Taking treadmill work as an example, you sprint for a short period of time (30-60 seconds) followed by the same interval at walking pace. You then repeat this cycle for a period of 10-20 mins. This method has been shown to be much more effective at burning calories than the traditional steady state method, whilst also putting the kind of strain on the muscles that causes muscular growth.
In this debate of steady state vs HIIT you always hear the same phrase but it is very true, 'would you rather have the physique of a long distance runner (steady state) or like a sprinter (HIIT)'. The answer is simple to most people as they want the shredded muscular look of a sprinter and that is one of the reasons I prefer HIIT, as I believe it helps preserves muscle mass during my cutting phase, far better than steady state would, due to the explosive, high intense nature of the exercise. In my own personal experience as well, HIIT is much less boring than steady state, as I would much rather do intervals of sprints for 10 minutes, than jog for 10 minutes.
Fasted Cardio... Is it worth it?
I’m pretty sure that anybody reading this whether they themselves go to the gym or not, will know of somebody who swears by fasted cardio. They will say they ‘get up early and workout on an empty stomach, because it burns loads of fat’. While there is
some truth to this, that isn’t the full story.
So the idea being fasted cardio makes perfect logical sense, if you train on an empty stomach then your body has no food to use as its energy source and therefore has to burn fat to use as energy. This is true and as I said makes perfect logical sense.
It's not really that beneficial though...
This is because your body isn’t stupid. It can’t be fooled by this, and so if you then eat the same as you would normally but just save it all until after you’ve worked out then your calorie balance will still be exactly the same. If by the end of the day you’ve still consumed more calories then you have used up then your body will store that excess as fat, regardless of whether you did cardio in a fasted state or not. The same the other way as long as you consume fewer calories than you have burnt in a day, you will lose fat.
So the only actual benefit I think that you can get from doing fasted cardio is for those people looking to really dig deep and drop to really low body fat percentages, as it can help in really forcing your body into take fat from cells really deep down that it would otherwise never reach. That however is for a very, very small minority of fitness enthusiasts who want to reach insanely low levels of body fat. I used it as a method to get into the shape in the picture below for example, but that was just at the very end of my cutting period to really shock the body into pulling out those final fat reserves.
And then this is why I would advise against doing fasted cardio in general. It is because when you are hungry and low on energy you are going to struggle to give 100% into your training and your cardio. No doubt about it you will be limited in some way by your lack of energy, whether physically or psychologically. So if you were to do that same workout but with a decent meal inside of you, your energy levels will be so much higher that you’ll work harder, be able to push heavier weight, you will get a better pump in the body and all in all you will actually end up burning many more calories during your workout, as opposed to if you were in a fasted state. That’s why I personally never advise fasted cardio.
Cardio then is something great that you can do for your health, but isn’t the be all and end all of fat loss. But it does have its place. The best way to achieve your fitness goals is by creating a caloric deficit within your diet, and combining this with weight training and then you can add in some cardio in on top of that!
If you’d like to ask a more specific question to you, or purchase a personalised meal plan, email us at evolvemusclefitness@gmail.com and move one step closer towards Achieving Greatness...
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