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Welcome to another episode of busting the BS. In this episode EndurElite Chief Endurance Officer Matt Mosman busts the BS that doing endurance exercise or cardio will make you fat.
Video Transcription:
Good morning, family of fast, Matt Mosman the Chief Endurance Officer over at EndurElite coming at you today with another episode of "Busting the Bullshit." Now today's topic has me really fired up and this is one I've been waiting to sink my teeth in for a long time because it is the epitome of all bullshit and this is cardio and endurance exercise will make you fat.
Now where did this come from or where did this notion come from? The honest answer is I have no fucking clue, but somehow, somewhere, some idiot wrote an article about how cardio will make you fat and then people like the Food Babe or other fitness gurus just take this information without actually doing any research, oh my god, and they just present it as dogma to the general population and people just feed off of it.
Like literally, cardio has become like the carb of the fitness world lately, like people just think it's frickin' horrible so today we're going to totally bust this bullshit.
A few key points before we get started. Longitudinal studies done over lots of years have shown cardio/endurance exercises in adults does not lead to gains in fat mass. Oh wow, surprise. Also, longitudinal studies in obese people show that they don't get fatter by doing endurance or cardio. Oh my god, this is getting crazy. Let's go on, longitudinal studies in obese children who do aerobic exercise/cardio/endurance exercise do not gain fat.
Another point, studies have shown that people who participate in cardio or endurance exercise over like say a 15 to 20 year period have the leanest body frames or the least amount of body fat compared to other athletes who have participated in different sports over the years so like body building or some other popular fitness regimens or activities. Oh god, this is just making me feel stupider by the minute, I really need to just push through this whole thing.
So here's what we're going to do, we're going to actually look at the research and see what happens when people do cardio and we are going to bust the fuck out of this myth right now.
So the first study took a group of overweight sedentary and obese men and women and they split them up into three groups and had them do cardio or aerobic exercise. The first group was assigned to aerobic exercise that burned 400 calories a session. The next group was assigned to an aerobic exercise regimen where they burnt 600 calories a session and then you had a control group. So they had these participants do aerobic exercise 5 times a week for 10 months.
Now according to the theory that cardio is going to make you fat, you would expect to see the group who was burning 600 calories per cardio session would be fatter at the end of the study. But guess what? At the end of the study both the group who burned 400 calories a session and burned 600 calories a session lost body fat, approximately 2% and 4% and this wasn't even controlling for diet or how much they ate, they just said, "Keep on eating what you usually do, do this cardio and we're going to see what happens at the end." And they all lost body fat, oh my god, what a frickin' surprise, what a revelation.
This is just madness, like some of the stuff people come up with and try to run at and don't take the time to look at the god damn research to see if there's any...god...any truth to that.
Along the same lines, if cardio makes you fat, you would expect to see elite marathon runners be total tubs of lard running around out there running their marathon, but you don't see that. Guess why? Because aerobic exercise burns calories, you lose body fat. Oh, god. I know how to explain this, so, if cardio isn't the cause for making you fat, what is it?
Well, it's pretty simple actually, you are going to gain weight and fat if, one, you sit on your ass all day and do nothing and two, if you're eating more calories than you burn. It's really quite that simple, it has very little to do with like cardio's effect on your cortisol levels or appetite or hormones or anything like that. It's mostly just by creating a calorie surplus that you're going to gain weight or gain fat. So what's the moral of the story.
The moral of the story is, if you believe cardio and endurance exercise is going to make you fat I have some beachfront and oceanfront property in Iowa I want to sell you right now. But the moral is, cardio and endurance exercise is not going to make you fat and in fact if you're not doing it now and you just start running, walking or doing other aerobic exercise while eating what you usually do, more than likely you're going to lose body fat. Ooooh, surprise. So rant over, rant done.
If you have a friend who believes that cardio and endurance exercise is going to make you fat, please share this video with them, oh god, please share this video with them. If you want other videos like this on endurance training, nutrition and supplementation head on over to the EndurElite blog at www.endurelite.com or subscribe to the EndurElite YouTube channel. Get super social with us on Instaslam and that Facebook thing that you type in stuff and you friends with people, we have a page on there for our training and nutrition club, check it out and until next time my endurance friends, stay fueled, stay focused, stay fast and don't fall for the bullshit.
