Look at "Cardio" from Your Heart's Perspective
All these years, you thought you were doing something good for your heart. Look at any rack of fitness magazines, and you'll see covers loaded with the advice that you need Cardio. Go to any gym, and the trainer will devote some of your time to Cardio. You probably don't like it, yet you feel compelled to comply. After all, who doesn't want a healthy heart?
Common parlance has even accepted the term Cardio (short for cardiovascular endurance training) as synonymous with exercise for your heart.
But shouldn't exercise make that body part stronger? When you study the heart's changes from Cardiovascular Endurance Training, you find it getting weaker in some critical capacities that simulate the changes caused by stress and aging.
Routinely forcing your body to perform the same continuous cardiovascular challenge by repeating the same movement, at the same rate, thousands of times over, without variation, without rest, is unnatural. By that I mean our ancestors didn't regularly stress their cardiovascular systems in this manner. Sure, this type of demand could have occurred rarely, but not in the daily environment of a native society in balance with its surroundings.
Yet nature has designed your body to adapt to whatever environment it encounters. If you ask it to perform an activity repeatedly and routinely, it will gradually change the systems involved to meet the challenge more effectively. But what adaptive changes does continuous cardiovascular activity cause?
Continuous duration taxing your endurance produces some unique challenges your body must overcome. It must not run out of fuel, overheat, or be overwhelmed with metabolic wastes. Its primary adaptation will be to become more efficient at light, long, continuous, low output. One of the ways that your body adapts is by gradually rebuilding your heart, lungs, blood vessels, and muscles into the smallest possible form while still maintaining the minimum "horsepower" required to perform the activity.
You waste fuel and raw material with a Ferrari sized engine going 20 miles per hour. Forced, continuous endurance exercise induces your heart and lungs to "downsize" because smaller allows you to go further… more efficiently…and with less rest… and less fuel.
The Danger of "Downsizing" Your Heart's Capacity
So what's wrong with increasing durational capacity through downsizing? Instead of building Heart Strength, your body robs your heart of vital reserve capacity.
Your heart's reserve capacity is that portion of its maximal output that you don't use during usual activity. Let's go back to the car analogy. Say you normally drive at a speed of 40 miles per hour, but your car has the ability to speed up to a top speed of 140 miles per hour. If you think of your heart as the engine, your reserve capacity is the difference between your normal cruising speed and that top speed.
So if you downsize your heart and lungs, you have traded reserve capacity for efficiency at continuous duration. This then forces these vital organs to operate dangerously close to their maximal output when circumstances challenge them. For your heart, this is a problem you don't need.
Heart attacks don't occur because of a lack of endurance. They occur when there is a sudden increase in cardiac demand that exceeds your heart's capacity. Giving up your heart's reserve capacity to adapt to unnatural bouts of continuous prolonged duration only increases your risk of sudden cardiac death.
A ground-breaking study of long-distance runners showed that, after a workout, the blood levels and oxidation of LDL (bad) Cholesterol and Triglycerides increased. Researchers also found that prolonged running disrupted the balance of blood thinners and thickeners, elevating inflammatory factors and clotting levels – both signs of Heart Distress.
Long-Duration Exercisers
- Showed Signs of Heart Distress
- Increased LDL Cholesterol & Triglycerides
- Increased Oxidation of Cholesterol
- Elevated Clotting & Inflammation Factors
These changes do not reflect a heart that's becoming stronger after exercise! Exercising for long periods makes your heart adept at handling a 60-minute jog, but it accomplishes this feat by trading in its ability to rapidly provide you with big bursts when circumstances might demand. The real key to preventing Heart Disease and protecting and strengthening your heart is to induce the opposite adaptive response produced by continuous cardio and increase your heart's reserve capacity. Bigger, faster cardiac output that's readily available is what you really need.
Recent clinical studies show us the benefit of avoiding long-duration routines and exercising in shorter bursts. Researchers from the University of Missouri found that short bouts of exercise were more effective for lowering fat and triglyceride levels in the blood. High Triglycerides dramatically increase your risk of Heart Disease.
Another study revealed that the duration of exercise routines predicts the risk of Heart Disease in men. They found that several shorter sessions of physical activity were more effective for lowering the risk of heart disease.
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