Bodybuilders don’t run, and nor do obese people.  But I’m not a bodybuilder, or an obese person. I’m a fitness chick, a fit mom, and a fitness personality. My goals are obviously different from a bodybuilder’s goals, and definitely, I have a different lifestyle choice than a person whose main goals involve constant fulfillment of my taste-bud compulsions.

At this stage in my life, my goal is always to become truly fit and achieve prime longevity.  As one point in my career as a fitness competitor, I was running a lot and lifting weights with an extremely high carb, high protein diet, and only then I was starting to resemble a bodybuilder.  People who didn’t know better thought I was one.

But you know what kind of fit physique athletes have a lot of muscle, and are really lean, with Olympic level stamina and power?  Women’s Fitness competitors.

They run.  They run a lot.  They do weekly sprints, middle-distance, plyometrics anything that will get their heart to the bursting point.

And if these women can carry body-toned muscle around, while running and with the power and stamina to do our fitness routines—well they are worth at least probing into the minds of.  Where I learned about my own fitness interval training from was from my ex-husband, who was basically my trainer before I met my trainer of 13 years, Tim Sparkes, at Die Hard  Gym in Arizona.  My ex-husband was a former track and football star in high school and college.

What I learned from  my ex-husband is that I was doing my running all wrong.  First of all,  I jogged, and I did so very lazily.  I loathed the cardio work, so I dragged myself through it.  It didn’t matter that I was a fit mom, a fit chick, or a fitness athlete in training.  I was thinking about my cardio conditioning the wrong way, as most of us do for the first few years of our fitness quests.

Just about every fitness center has some serious runners as members.  These “fitness” people log 20 to 40 miles a week and are in great cardio vascular condition—but most of them look remarkably average.  They do not have much muscle and many of them are skinny fat. Sure they have strong hearts, but some of them store more body fat and subcutaneous water than the person who is walking into a gym for the first time.  These runners are not in poor health, but their shape is generally not of the optimal fitness aesthetic grade considering the fitness workload they are undergoing. I believe in running, I do.  I also like working out smarter, and distance running for fitness is definitely the harder path, if you’re trying to look better and even feel better.

The best explanation for this phenomena may be controversial, but the facts are right in front of us. Cardiovascular exercise DOES NOT WORK to lose body fat long term, period!!

Why is this? Let’s take a hypothetical individual: Female, 30 years old, 145 pounds, sedentary. She decides she wants to be fit and “get toned” (keep in mind, everyone has a different idea of this word, so it’s subjective). So she takes up running on the treadmill for an hour a day 5 days/week. Nothing else in her life changes, her diet and lifestyle remain the same. In the first week she loses 5 pounds. If she maintained her consistency 5 days a week, would she lose 250 pounds this year? Of course not, and why is this?

Firstly cardiovascular activity is very efficient at chewing up muscle tissue, the steps are as follows:

1. Conversion from fast twitch muscle fiber to slow twitch muscle fiber, by

acquiring mitochondria and relinquishing contractile protein. Smaller fiber, less

RMR.

2. Excessive Cortisol released in response to the damage to the fiber as a result of the exercise. Cortisol acts as a natural analgesic, but severely hampers protein synthesis and muscle repair. It also damages the immune system, and ultimately will contribute to all of our deaths – so I’m not sure why anyone would do anything that would accelerate this process.

 3. It has been shown that high volume cardiovascular exercise can completely deplete satellite cells in muscle fiber, which means no new fiber can grow or existing fiber be repaired, and as we age, we have a natural propensity to lose muscle as well as bone density.  Muscle helps our metabolism and enhances bone density.

 4. Growth Hormone levels decline with high volume cardiovascular exercise, which also hampers the repair process. Low growth hormone also accelerates aging.

5. To sum it up, you can’t train all day, and you can’t stop eating, but you can always build a bit more muscle, so quit the cardio and concentrate on the weight lifting.

Secondly, after all these details about how cardio fitness training eats up muscle, you must know that the first week of ANY fitness program, and likely the first month even, you will lose weight with rapid results.  That’s water weight dropping off because you are actually getting off of your butt.  That’s not the “weight” you are losing, it’s the water. You are not really getting more fit, but your body is filtering out a bit so that it can set a better foundation for you to start getting fit.

Your weight-loss will look more like 8-12 pounds monthly if you’re doing it right and if you expect it to stay off.  If you’re an athlete or you’re training for an athletic event, your body requires more training than average, and more extreme dieting than average, but that’s not average for a person who is just trying to lose weight and just starting to get fit.

That was a very strong argument for not doing cardio.  But I need to be able to keep up with kids, work, training clients, caring for my household, and still having stamina in the gym. Cardio conditioning is a must for me.  Plus, I need strength and power.

The solution was to train like a professional female fitness athlete—specifically, one that always wins the fitness routine portion of the contest.  And what does the fitness athlete woman do?  Sprints.

For women who run, but they want a great physique:

With high-intensity interval training you “sprint” on any cardio exercise for short bursts that go for less than two minutes, and then you slow to moderate, and sometimes even low-intensity pace for a short burst.  You want to go high intensity to kick your heart rate way up, and then you drop the intensity to less your body rest, while not giving your heart rate enough time to drop out beneath a fat-burning zone.  If you do this for short bursts of time, you don’t give your heart rate a chance to drop severely, and therein, you are able to keep your body burning fat, burning calories, and staying hard at work, even though you won’t feel like you’re working hard while your body recovers during your lower-paced durations.

Like cardio, this too can strengthen your heart, and keep you from feeling sluggish.  On the other hand, in comparison to cardio, interval training burns fat for longer periods of time.  You will burn fat for up to 13 hours post-workout with intervals, whereas with cardio at a constant moderate rate will only burn fat efficiently for up to 2 hours post workout.  So, why would you spend more time and burn less fat, much less want to gamble the possibility of kicking out cortisol?  This is why many fitness professionals who know what they are doing will not recommend long dull high, low or medium-intensity periods of cardio.

The best way to gain cardio conditioning and maintain muscle is to do what all fat-burning physique athletes does—sprints.

As sprinting becomes the core of your cardio conditioning program and distance running becomes the ‘functional’ training, so you do it for form, awareness, and monitoring.  It’s a means for measurement when needed, but it’s not necessary for the actual progress.

When I started doing sprints in the morning for my cardio, my strength gains in the gym accelerated a little bit and I started to get leaner without really trying, and my husband noticed an extreme difference in how my body was responsive to my diet and weight training.  My lines and cuts in my muscles showed up and they never had before I started sprinting.  My workouts were more exhilarating and I could produce more within them because my fitness level and stamina was increased through sprinting.

Now I was able to get more in my fitness routines, I could run with my daughter in her stroller for better bursts so I wasn’t gasping for air.  I was stronger than I would ever need to be on the fitness stage or in the gym. I had burst speed and explosiveness and I had the stamina and endurance to keep up with any of the guys at the gym.

So, I am not advising the novice to average fitness person to sprint, but I am encouraging those of you who run– just try this for 6 weeks and see how rapidly and extremely your fitness levels, your energy, your stamina, and your physique changes.  See how lean you get and watch a sculpted physique appear that you never knew you had.

As for the fitness enthusiast who is new to the world of fitness and fit physique training, try intervals, we have more blogs on the Fat Burning Workouts categories to your left here in the blog at nitasworld.com. Check it out. Be well, Be You, BE PHENOMENAL! You are worth the work!

-Nita Lee Marquez

America’s Hottest Fit Mom ™

Fitness Empowerment Author

Miss National Fitness

Proud Mother of Three

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