Cardiovascular Endurance Exercise and Metabolism

Women usually choose to increase their TDEE by increasing their physical activity through traditional cardiovascular endurance exercise activities such as running, using a stair machine, or doing aerobics. Although doing cardio activities is a scientifically proven method for acute weight loss, it may not be the best method for long-term weight loss-- keeping the weight off for months or years after starting an exercise program.

Once you start decreasing your FM with endurance exercise, you also decrease your LBM. Did you know that long, slow endurance exercise actually takes your hard-earned muscular tissue and uses it for energy? Since your LBM is directly associated with your RMR, when your LBM decreases, so does your RMR. This means that your body will use fewer calories at rest now that you weigh less than it did when you weighed more. Translated into gym lingo, this link means that to continue losing weight (or in some cases to keep off your lost weight) with the cardiovascular endurance exercise you do, you will either have to step on that stair climber longer or increase your intensity. As stated earlier, however, the physical activity component of your TDEE caps out at about 30 percent. Once you get to that high physical activity expenditure, your body starts to adapt and conserve. Therefore, a time will come when you hit a plateau and will not be able to lose one more pound without severe calorie restriction (probably our least favorite alternative).

Enter strength training. It is true that you expend more calories during a typical endurance-training session compared to a strength-training session. But it is also true that you use more calories throughout the day and even at rest if you have more muscle on your body. That's why it always seems as if guys can sit on the couch, eat anything they want, play a little football, and still maintain their weight, whereas you feel that you gain weight if you even look at a cupcake. Men typically have much more muscle mass than women and don't waste their time walking on the treadmill to nowhere. They play high-intensity sports or lift heavy weights and are simply born with more muscle, as we learned in the last chapter.

Gaining muscle mass increases a person's RMR, but merely by doing a strength-training workout you will elevate your metabolism throughout the day. A research study that compared a strenuous bout of weight training to a bout of steady-state stationary cycling showed that the strenuous weight training resulted in greater excess post exercise oxygen consumption compared to the steady-state endurance exercise of similar estimated energy cost. The increase in the RMR lasted for up to five hours after the weight training.

The old idea that if we do long, slow endurance exercise we will enter the fat-burning zone, and that high-intensity exercise doesn't burn fat, is somewhat misleading. The body works on a continuum-- just as you can't do any number of leg lifts to spot reduce the fat on your thighs, neither can you burn only fat when exercising. The truth is, you burn calories when exercising, and to the body a calorie is just a calorie. The harder you exercise, the more calories you burn. If your goal for doing cardiovascular endurance exercise (or any exercise for that matter) is to lose weight, then the total number of calories you burn with that exercise (versus the calories you take in each day) is the only thing that matters, not where they came from.

Adjusting Intensity

Using Interval Training

Measuring Interval Intensity