A lot of people are still under the impression that spending hours on the treadmill will help lose body fat, despite plenty of research stating the opposite.
A study published by Williams and Woods (2006) using almost 13,000 habitual runners observed they all tended to get fatter every year, even those who ran more than 68 km a week!
One of the many problems with long distance cardio is the body adapts too quickly to the stimulus placed upon it and is regarded useless after 6-8 weeks.
If you're looking at improving your body composition my advice would be, ditch the treadmill and start lifting some weight.
Firstly, Hello Mr Hall
ReplyDeleteThe other Mr Hall here.
The study does show that long distance cardio exercise will need to be changed over time to combat the gain in weight. However, this study doesn't directly say that long distance cardio per se is the result of this fat loss. It a static routine of any kind is surely going to have a similar result against age no matter if thats cardio or resistance training.
It's good to hear from you, and to an extent you're right but show me a similar study for resistance training?
ReplyDeleteAlso check out the research on cardio on my website: http://www.halltrainingsystems.com/research/training/cardio_aerobic_work/
as well as Tember and Boucher they've done some research on long distance vs interval for weight loss.
Damn it! I just wrote an essay and it didn't post. Long and short of it is:
ReplyDeleteInterval too short to burn cals and long distance doesn't cause much epoc. Both are unrealistic to do all the time.
A study i read is 45mins at 80-85% MRH resulted in the best EPOC.
I've also read that x amount of muscle means x amount of muscle gain.
Lastle i do like a bit of strength training esp to give better 'tone'