Introduction to High Intensity Cardiovascular Training

There are a number of benefits to incorporating a regular cardiovascular exercise to your weight training program. The most common reason cardio is performed by individuals is to help burn fat and to achieve a lean appearance. In fact, you are doing your body a lot more favours by performing cardio than simply getting a lean physique.

Benefits from doing cardio include:

   -Raising your Metabolic Rate: regular cardio can raise your metabolic rate which in turn helps your body burn fat even   while resting.

   -Burning Calories: also very important when wanting to cut down your body fat levels.

   -Improving Cardiovascular Health: a number of researches have shown cardio to be beneficial in reducing the risk of heart disease and other cardiovascular diseases.

   -Enhancing Endurance.

When performing cardio, the main energy source your body uses is glycogen. Your body actually uses very little fat stores during exercise for energy. The first thing you will need to get your head around when performing cardio is that you are not burning fat while doing it.

From a fat-burning perspective, cardiovascular training helps elevate your resting metabolic rate, which is the amount of energy your body expends when you are basically doing nothing. Elevating your resting metabolic rate causes your body to be much more efficient at burning body fat around the clock.

In recent years there has been a lot of research on the most effective way of burning fat through cardio and preserving muscle. The research has shown that short and high intensive cardio sessions [3]: such as sprints or intense sessions on exercise equipment have the best impact on fat burning through increased resting metabolic rate. Compared to long sessions of slow-paced exercise, high-intensity cardio exercises elevate your heart rate for a much longer period after finishing exercising.

You may, in fact, burn more calories doing a walk at a steady pace for an hour as compared to a short and intense 15–20 minute bike ride or sprint session. Your heart rate, however, remains elevated for a longer period of time after you have finish your short, high-intensity exercise, hence you will end up burning more calories over the course of the day.

Low-intensity cardio can also be detrimental to muscle tissue and your muscle-building efforts. Your body utilises its glycogen stores as you exercise, and once these stores have been depleted it will then tap into your lean muscle tissue for the energy needed. This will cause breakdown of muscle tissue. With short, intense cardio sessions, your body will not tap into your muscle tissue and instead, will only use glycogen stores for energy.

As an example, let’s compare the difference in the physique of two athletes, a long-distance runner and a sprinter. The build of long-distance runners is usually very lean and their body composition is not as good as that of a sprinter’s. The long-distance runner tends to have a ‘skinny-fat’ look with excess skin and not much muscle composition. Sprinters, on the other hand, generally tend to have powerful physiques with lower levels of body fat and a lot more muscle mass.

As we may guess, training of sprinter athletes would involve short bursts of energy with maximum exertion, and the opposite training would be employed by long-distance runners – longer, slower-paced exertion.

I don’t know about you, but I would much prefer to have the physique of a sprinter than a long-distance runner.