For your fitness

So, you’ve finally made up your mind to shed those flabby pounds and get into the best shape of your life. You’ve charted out a low-fat diet plan to keep those calories under control, and have also set up a daily jogging schedule to burn the fat faster and more effectively than ever before.

You’ve got it all figured out and there’s no stopping you from accomplishing those killer six pack-abs… or so you think.

Fast-forward to a few weeks later and you find yourself miserably pounding away at the asphalt – tired, frustrated, and FAT. You can’t figure out for the life of you why in spite of all your hard work and dedication, you still aren’t any closer to the lean, mean, ripped physique you’ve always dreamt of. In fact, all you’ve got to show by way of results is a weak, aching body, sore joints and a persistently high body fat ratio.

If any of this sounds familiar to you, it’s time to take that much-needed reality check – all those gimmicky gurus you’ve been reading, listening to and watching have been lying to you all along. What you’re actually doing is wasting your time, and ruining your health with your torturous cardiovascular exercise routine.

How can this be true?

A few years ago, a few self-proclaimed fitness experts came up with this novel theory that slow, steady-state cardio actually pushes your body to burn fat, instead of carbohydrates for energy. They also claimed that such low-intensity exercise would protect your joints from injury… thereby declaring that low-intensity cardio routines such as jogging and walking were the only foolproof way to burn away your stomach flab for good.

While this supposition sounds excellent in theory, the truth is that low-intensity cardio uses calories very sparingly for energy. Thus, in order to burn a significant amount of body fat, you would need to engage in a minimum of 45-60 minutes of low-intensity cardio, 5-6 days a week. The downside to the much-repeated pro-cardio argument is that extensive periods of low-intensity cardio eventually burn muscle instead of fat for energy, which in turn, negates the entire reason why you are exercising at all.

Confused?

Lean muscle mass is your best ally in your battle against the bulge. Lean muscle is metabolically active tissue, which means that your body burns more calories for every pound of lean muscle, without any change in your physical activity levels. By reducing the amount of lean muscle mass in your body, you are effectively cutting down on the total amount of fat your body burns throughout the day. Simply put, this translates into a lower amount of fat lost in the long run.

Secondly, any cardiovascular exercise – be it low or high intensity – when performed over a significantly long period of time, places pressure on your joints and weakens them.

Lastly and most importantly, regular cardio causes only a slight increase in your metabolism. Over a period of time, your body adapts to this increased activity and cheats by using less energy to accomplish your workout. At the end of the day, you’ll find that you have to work a lot harder than you signed up for, in order to see the same kind of results as you did, when you first took up your fat-burning routine.

So, does this mean that all cardio is bad for you?

Surprisingly, the answer is no. Cardio is an essential part of a six-pack abs routine for one basic reason – it helps your body to burn fat. However, what you need to remember is that all cardio routines are not created equal.

The effectiveness of a cardiovascular routine has a lot to do with the intensity of the exercise, or how hard your body works to accomplish the cardiovascular routine. Exercise intensity can be measured on a scale of one to 10, where 1 is the amount of exertion your body feels while standing still, 5 is a medium-paced jog and 10 represents your activity level when performing a vigorous sprint.

Slow, steady-state cardiovascular routines like jogging and walking typically fall into the 1-5, or low-moderate intensity category. At the other end of the spectrum are high intensity exercises like sprinting, which exert your body to a much larger extent, and require a lot more energy to accomplish. High intensity cardio helps your body in a number of ways:

• High intensity cardio routines are calorie intensive:

Each high intensity cardio workout burns many more calories than a low-intensity routine