This study looked at 10 strategies for reducing fat. And look, cardio came in last on the list. He only stood above the people who did nothing.
If you are doing aerobic exercise to lose fat, you are using a bad strategy. And you really need to watch this video, because you might just be wasting your time doing cardio. Before we even get into the whole aesthetic issue of cardio and fat loss, I want to tell you that cardio and aerobic exercises are undeniably very good for your health.
So when we talk about heart health, it's great. In fact, it is very good for your mental health. In a book titled Keep Sharp, the author is categorical in saying that people who do cardio have less cognitive decline and, consequently, will suffer less from Alzheimer's disease.
And here comes another question. There are two types of cardio. There is that cardio that we call continuous, where you go up on a treadmill, stairs, or any other type of equipment, and stay on it at a moderate speed for a long period of time.
and there is the other cardio, which is interval. Instead of staying at one speed, you would run as fast as you can and then rest. And it would alternate between these two cycles.
Continuous and interval, what we have in science saying is that both offer the same result. In the past, we believed that these intervals were more powerful and better for burning fat. From the moment the intensity of the two exercises is equalized, what we notice is that HIIT, due to the fact that it has high intensity and low intensity, you can do the same thing that you would be doing in continuous training, only in a shorter period of time.
If we think about response time, HIIT is better. Just because you do the same thing, in a different time. But even so, you can be doing cardio and not losing weight, because it won't actually help you.
Look, another study analyzed people who did cardio and burned around three hundred calories. So, we look at this and say, if you're burning more calories, this person will lose weight. No, what was observed in these people was that the fact that they did this exercise and burned this amount of calories, caused them to be less physically active the rest of the day.
To the point of saving exactly 300 calories in these daily activities. If you burned more calories in cardio, but in your daily life you saved those calories, it's as if you hadn't done that cardio. In order for you to lose weight specifically, to lose fat, it is necessary to have what we call a caloric deficit.
What you need to do is consume fewer calories than you are expending. Let's imagine that you are burning 2 thousand calories per day. If you consume 1500 calories, that 500 calorie deficit will come from somewhere.
And there are strategies to get them off the fat. Or, what you can also do is the following, you are burning 2000 calories, but you don't want to eat less. So, one way would be for you to increase your spending and eat the 2000, but spend 2500.
This way, you can easily understand what a calorie deficit is. Without a calorie deficit, you won't be able to lose fat. But calm down, because the problem is much deeper and I promise you that in this video you will leave knowing the best strategy to lose fat and have a defined body.
And this cardio issue is so interesting, watching what the world's greatest natural bodybuilder coach says. . .
It doesn't matter if you do cardio or not, it's the same. And he even mentions that he observed in his athletes, when he put these athletes on a more restrictive diet, doing cardio or not, he observed that these athletes became more disorganized. The athletes didn't clean their house.
I can even tell you that during my last preparations, the diet was so tight, I had little energy to do anything. I didn't want to get up to go to the kitchen to drink water, I preferred to stay on the couch thirsty. Your body will be constantly creating maneuvers to avoid losing weight.
If you burn 2,000 calories a day and you start eating 1,500 calories, you tend to burn fewer calories in your normal activities to keep your body the way it is, with this new calorie intake that you are doing. To give you an idea, this trainer says that doing cardio or not doing cardio doesn't change anything. So that you don't think that it's just one coach talking, I'm going to bring you a meta-analysis study.
What did this study take into account? What is the best strategy for losing fat? They had 10 interventions, that is, 10 ways to make people lose weight.
And look, all the interventions and the cardio, he's down here, just doing aerobic exercise to lose fat, was only better than people who didn't do anything. If you are basing your fat burning on cardio, I want to tell you that out of 10 interventions, cardio was the least effective. That's what this study says.
Laércio, so cardio is useless? You've seen me say in other videos that doing aerobic exercise will enhance, it will improve what we call mitochondrial density, which is basically these mitochondria, which are "little animals" that we have in our body, that are responsible for taking this fat and transforming it into energy. If you have more powerful mitochondria, you will make your body more powerful at burning fat.
Remember the calorie deficit? If you are not in a calorie deficit, your body will understand that it does not need to burn anything. If you are giving him more energy than he is using, he will understand exactly that he doesn't need to burn anything.
Quite the contrary, it will accumulate energy. Whether you have more or less powerful mitochondria will not influence anything. Therefore, doing your cardio ends up completely losing its function.
If we are talking about aesthetics, I will just reinforce this, because issues related to health are indisputable. Cardio is very good. And with all this you begin to realize that the big question is the amount of calories you consume.
And why does cardio end up not being so effective? And why, in fact, is any exercise not as effective? Because, think about it, how many calories do you lose by doing, I don't know.
. . 30 minutes of stairs.
It depends on the speed, etc. But I'm going to take a guess here, like. .
. 300 calories. What does it feel like for you to consume 300 calories?
It's like this, look. Depending on which protein bar you eat, it already has more than that. You don't even need to eat junk food.
If you eat two bananas, you'll be over it. Consuming calories is much easier than burning calories. If you eat fast food, for example, you're screwed, man.
Because there we have 1,000, 1,500, 2,000 calories, depending on the snack, many people need to live an entire day to be able to burn 2,000 calories. The big secret is not exercising to burn calories. And yes, about the consumption of these calories.
But of course we can enhance this issue, because otherwise we will go back to this study and see that simply going on a diet, consuming fewer calories, will lose much more weight than doing cardio. However, it is not the best strategy. And I'm not here to tell you that cardio doesn't work if you do it in isolation, but to show you the best way you can do to burn as much fat as possible.
So we come back to the whole calorie deficit issue. Your body will only lose fat if you are burning more calories than you are consuming. And this coach himself said in an interview that when he is talking to his patients and athletes, he asks them if they want to tighten their diet more, eat less or do cardio.
In the guy's head he's a mathematician. Either I take 300 calories out of my athlete's diet, or I keep those 300 calories and add a 300 calorie burn. And to even enhance this fat burning, he asks these athletes who want a more advanced result, not to do cardio specifically, but to do 7 thousand steps.
And this is actually becoming a big trend among great coaches. Guys aren't asking to do cardio anymore. And yes, they are asking people to be more active in their daily lives.
Depending on what your routine is like, you may not even need to do anything. When I was a bodybuilding instructor, when I was a personal trainer, I noticed that my appetite level, my hunger itself, increased a lot. Why?
I used to spend the whole day on my feet. walking from one side to the other, moving weights, helping the student. I was very active in my body.
Of course, I was burning a lot more calories. So, you must have seen several memes on the internet of bricklayers with completely dry shapes eating bread with mortadella. Why?
Have you ever stopped to think about what this guy's day is like? How far does he walk? How much weight does it carry?
How much does it move in general? In other words, its calorie burn is very high. We're not talking specifically about you doing an exercise, but about you having your body moving more throughout the day.
Instead of taking an escalator, you can use the normal stairs. Instead of going up all the floors of a building by elevator, you go up at least one or two floors there on the stairs. In other words, having your body more active.
7,000 steps is a starting recommendation from this trainer. I've seen other guys talking about between 9,000 and 10,000 steps a day, Staying more active throughout your day is what will provide improvements to your body as a whole. And what comes to mind at this moment is something I do a lot to feel more comfortable in all this movement of everyday life, which is Insider clothes.
In addition to having a fabric that fits well on the body and provides much more relaxed mobility, they also have heat dissipation technology that will help you even in this matter of not sweating. You can enjoy up to 40% off this month of November on the Insider website. If you use this link that I'll put below, you'll go to the Insider website with a 15% coupon here on the channel.
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But if you don't have a controlled diet, your body will consume more calories. Without you realizing it, you will be eating more and even eating more things with the quantity, we call it higher caloric density, which is more calories in a smaller quantity of food. Your body will be replacing the calories you are burning.
The best way is for you to do these steps, you do cardio. Oh, and by the way, you can use cardio exercise to make up for this space during your day. However, this needs to be associated with a controlled diet.
So at this point you might be thinking, well, just do cardio and follow a diet and things will be 100%, right? Look here, look. The idea of dieting and doing cardio actually ranked fourth as the most successful strategy when it comes to fat loss.
This is a good way already, but it is not the best. Even because the fact that you are doing cardio, you will enhance fat burning, right? Because you are burning more calories.
The fact that you are on a diet will enhance fat burning, even though you are eating less, your body is in deficit. But there is a problem in the middle of this path. Our body, when it sees itself needing to get energy from somewhere, takes it from the easiest place.
And thinking about burning fat is very difficult. Imagine your fat is there on your belly. For your body to be able to burn this fat, it needs to release some hormones that go to this fat and release it into the bloodstream.
After this fat is circulating in your bloodstream, it enters a muscle and in that muscle it finds the mitochondria, remember? So there in the mitochondria the process of burning this fat to produce energy happens. Now think about this, inside your muscle there is an energy reserve called muscle glycogen and look how interesting, it is ready for use.
And not only that, inside your muscle you also have the famous amino acids, proteins, which can also become energy in a process that is much easier for your body, which requires much less energy. If you create a calorie deficit, your body will most likely draw energy from your muscles and keep that damn fat stored. But damn, but why does this happen?
Fat is our energy store. It's better to draw energy from other places than to burn up that reserve you have. But then, what is the best way?
What can you do to effectively burn maximum fat and keep that muscle there? And then, at this point, we go to the second one on the list. Go on a diet and do strength training.
Do what studies call resistance exercise. When you do weight training, you use your muscle, your body identifies that having that muscle is important. So, it won't take energy away from something that's important, right?
He will find another way to get that energy and then he will fall into fat. If you have also done cardio with these enhanced mitochondria, this whole process happens even better and now you are starting to have the exact solution to this issue. First, you need to have a calorie deficit.
Diet is essential, otherwise nothing will happen. But if you only have a deficit, where can your body get energy from? Which is easier, from muscle.
So how do we protect this muscle? We use it, we use it intensely. It needs to be a strong workout for your body to understand that this muscle needs to be there, it needs to be strong.
This makes your body find another way to store energy. And to enhance this, it takes this energy from fat, we add the third piece to this equation, which is cardiorespiratory exercises. You discovered what we do with our students.
We fit in their diet because they all have a personalized diet, we include weight training, we include cardio and we do all this monitoring. I use all of these strategies to improve the body composition of all of them. I'm inviting you now to feel this on your skin.
As well as having our support for a whole year. Personal nutritionists and physiotherapists on your WhatsApp. So, if you want to be my student too and have all this happening, click on this link below.
But for those of you who are curious to know which strategy works best based on this study that I am bringing you, I will tell you that the only thing that changes from everything I have told you so far is this point here. It's a diet. .
. with a high amount of protein. And you've even seen me here on YouTube saying that diets with a higher amount, a higher protein load, are associated with losing fat and increasing muscle mass at the same time.
This is with a diet that has a calorie deficit. And look, for many years we always associated this in the following way. It is impossible to gain muscle in a calorie deficit.
But the fact that you have high protein makes this possible. First of all, this is exactly it. Do the exercises, have a calorie deficit diet, but have a high protein intake.
What does all this do? Directs all that calorie deficit into burning fat. And this high protein, along with the exercises, causes the muscle to be preserved and even grow due to this weight training.
And now I want you to click on this video here, and I'll teach you exactly how to calculate the calories you need to eat per day. Including the amount of carbohydrates, protein, fat. You will leave here with practically a diet in place.
Click there.