 cardio for weight loss look there is a way to do it and to do it right unfortunately everybody does it wrong if you use cardio for fat loss and you do it wrong here's what happens you slow down your metabolism you don't burn fat effectively and you hit plateaus that are impossible to overcome now if you do it right here's what happens you become more fit you get leaner you feel amazing today's episode we're gonna tell you how to use cardio the right way for fat loss and weight loss watch this so we had to do this episode because everybody thinks we're anti yeah I think yeah we're Tio sweat the irony though of this of this episode timing is that I literally was just on the phone with Grace Barga and she's getting her she's a we've shot her out before friend of ours she's in our maps anywhere program she's getting ready for a show and even though I didn't commit to coaching her I've been kind of checking in with her and just kind of overseeing what what she's doing with her coach and stuff and giving any sort of advice I can and one of the things I'm so first of all she's like I think three no she's like four weeks out still she could go I think she'll win tomorrow she hit stage like she's ready right now she looks so impressive and no cardio yeah all-string training and gangster yeah like she does like she on the weekends she goes for why like long walks she's active yeah she's yeah active but no intentional stair master elliptical for hours waking up at five o'clock in the morning do fasted hour card like you don't have to be on a hamster to make it work and the reason why I highlight that is because you know heart cardio has been touted as such a such a great tool for fat loss and I think it's an awful tool for fat loss and that same breath it's it's important and incredible for health and for performance and there's lots of incredible benefits to it but it's used the most popular way it's used is wrong yes 100% today's program giveaway is the super bundle that's a lot of programs we're gonna give away here's how you can win them leave a comment below this video the first 24 hours that we drop it subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications and if you win we'll let you know in the comment section also today's whole podcast is about doing cardio the right way for fat loss and for stamina we have a program that we wrote out specifically for this all planned out for you it's called maps cardio if you want stamina you want endurance you want the amazing side effect of fat loss of all of that maps cardio is written specifically with people in mind who also don't want to lose muscle and who also don't want to slow down their metabolism and because it's this episode this program is 50% off so if you're interested click on the link at the top of the description below and again on that link you'll get maps cardio for 50% off all right here comes a show so I think we need to break down first why cardio it would be a terrible method if it was your primary you know method or way we're gonna try and burn body or what shall we say the way that most people do it so in order to understand why this is an issue you have to understand exercise in general and what exercise does to the body exercise if done properly is a stressor and the body adapts to that stressor by trying to become better at the stress that you're throwing at it so that it no longer becomes a stress so this is why if you lift weights you get stronger you do cardio you get more stamina yada yada right so it's your body adapting to get better at what you're doing so that it no longer becomes a stress then of course what you do is you add weight to the bar or you push yourself harder or you change your programming to continue that progress by the way talk about how unbelievably amazing that is oh it's incredible like I think we take it for granted because this is just we've known this for so long this is how the body but how crazy is that we take it totally for granted our bodies have this ability to you know in encounter a stress repeatedly and then go oh I need to adapt and change like literally like your new environment your metabolism your your muscular system like your central nervous system your hormones yet they like that is wild when you think about every part of your body will adapt to stressors in some way this course is limitations but it is remarkable and we take it for granted the way we take it for granted is we don't fully understand it and when we don't fully understand it we end up working against it and in this particular case with cardio for fat loss which we'll get into people don't understand it and they end up working against their bodies adaptation when if you work with it cardio can be an effective tool for a lot of different things but let's talk about first the wrong way right so here's where it all started we understood a long time ago that if you burn more calories and you take in or you take in less calories and you burn that that results in weight loss it's called an energy imbalance so if you burn 2000 calories you only take in 15 or calories where does your body get that extra 500 calories it's going to take it from itself and hopefully from stored body fat which is the likely place to make up the difference and so you end up losing weight so that's and that's true okay that's 100% true it was way more complex than the simple you know way I just explained it but what I said is 100% true the problem is we looked at exercise and we said oh which one burns the most calories therefore that's the best form of exercise and we ignored everything else so we looked at cardio and we said well an hour on the treadmill burns more calories in an hour of any other form of exercise completely true an hour of running on the treadmill will burn two to four times more calories in an hour lifting weights okay that's a fact but that ignores the adaptations that you're inducing you're just looking at what you're doing basically is you're looking at the surface and you're not looking beneath the surface where all the real stuff is happening so what happens when that's your approach and you're just trying to burn calories is your body it views calorie burn manual calorie burn the kind of calorie burn you get when you're active as a threat and it says oh we're burning a lot of energy doing this activity we need to get better at this activity so we don't burn as much energy so it's really like and this is the example of use many times under the podcast it would be like having a super advanced AI car that adapted its fuel consumption to your driving habits so if I drove for 400 miles a day at 45 miles an hour every single day the way my AI car would modify itself would be to become a super efficient machine it would turn into one cylinder engine electric it would use solar it would do all these different things to minimize its calorie burn and to become more efficient at what it does it wouldn't turn itself into a dragster for example because why would it do that when now I would only last a mile and I'd run out of gas and it's not gonna work so what the body does when you approach cardio in this way is number one it literally learns how to become how to burn less calories while you do that activity okay so here's an interesting fact you take two athletes very fit conditioned endurance athletes you take a runner you take a cyclist both super high VO2 max incredible endurance you you watch the calories they burn doing their activity that they're trained at have them switch activities they're burn more calories doing the other activity the runner will all of a sudden burn more calories cycling and vice versa because their bodies have learned how to be extremely efficient at that activity the second thing the body does and this is just a very again it's a beautiful adaptation process is the body looks at itself and says where can we where can we shave off energy consumption and it looks at muscle muscle is very expensive tissue in comparison to other tissues in the body meaning it needs a lot of calories to stay on your body just to stay on your body very active it's just it's just expensive it would be like you have a streaming service that's a thousand dollars a month versus one that's five dollars a month and you save money you're gonna cut off the thousand dollar a month one to save money your body looks at muscle and it says can we get rid of some muscle can we now the answer if cardio is your button if that's all you do to lose weight then muscle is an easy place to pair things down because do you need to be strong to do lots of steady state cardio no you need very little strength you just need lots of stamina you don't need a lot strength at all so what the studies show and confirm which is what all of us who've been in gyms for years have seen is that when people cut their calories and just do cardio for fat loss or weight loss you start to see and this is again the data supports this muscle loss alongside the fat loss so you lose data shows us 10 pounds of weight on the scale about three to four pounds of it is muscle now you're in a bad position you lost some weight sure you lost six pounds of body fat you lost four pounds of muscle but now your metabolism is a lot slower and then what ends up happening is what everybody experiences is they lose some weight initially very quickly then they plateau and the only way to continue losing more weight cut my calories more or do more cardio what a terrible place to be in when your goal is fat loss so that's the wrong way that's the way everybody uses it that's what we rail against because you're going to screw yourself up however there's a right way to use cardio for fat loss for health for performance and it has nothing to do with the calories you burn while you exercise in fact i'm going to tell people and i've said this many times ignore the calorie burn of your workout for the most part it's the least miraculous part of the whole process yes it's the least like it's like back to my original point it's so amazing what our body can do in response to these stressors and the least amazing thing that it does is just it utilizes energy and so to focus on that aspect of it is so ridiculous to me and I think it's because it's the easiest thing for people to understand so they glom on to that as like oh this is how i'm just going to do that i'm just going to burn more calories burn more calories and then hopefully what i'll do is i'll lose all this body fat but the reality is when you're sitting that loud of a calorie burns signal you also are going to pare down as equal amount of muscle so what ends up happening and we've seen this so many times i remember as a as a trainer like when this this light bulb first went off because this is even how i would have approached you know rapid fat loss i remember we do these competitions at the gym with all of all of my peers and my staff and almost every young trainer did it the same way too where they were just like all right we got a four week or six week challenge like ramp up the the burn and then they'd all get their body fat tested and they yeah they lost 10 15 pounds on the scale on that month or whatever but then their body fat percentage stayed the same or in some cases went up yeah and they're all scratching their head like this doesn't make sense well what happened was you overdid the cardio so much underdid the eating and you told the body did what it needed to do which was survive which was get rid of that expensive tissue at the same rate it was getting rid of the body fat so they lost 10 pounds on the scale but five of it was muscle five it was and now you're gonna have a higher now the body fat you have is a higher or same percentage of your body and you have a slower metabolism terrible you're in a worse spot it's tough because it's your average person it's it's easy that feedback of like sweating and then moving a lot and getting hot and then you know you see the scales start to move in the right direction in terms of like your your overall body weight starts to go down and so that's a hard concept to really understand that you know your body's gonna adapt it's in you know through that process you probably lost a bit of strength you lost a bit of muscle in that process so that's that's a hard pill to swallow because your entire goal is to just lose you know this mass and you want to you want to feel you like your body is shrinking down and and you're losing that that overall mass when in fact like you can lose body fat and keep and preserve muscle which is a totally different operating system to go off. I was just gonna say if you lose 10 pounds of body fat and you gained 10 pounds of muscle okay not that this would be likely but let's just say you did it and you got you lost fat 10 pounds gained 10 pounds of muscle and the scale is the same you weigh the same you got lost 10 here gained 10 there you would lose about a quarter of the size of your body because body fat takes up that's a radical difference right a quarter almost the quarter it's body fat takes up almost a quarter more space not quite but almost a quarter more space with the same weight because it's more voluminous it's like 10 pounds of you know cotton versus 10 pounds of rocks or whatever not quite that dramatic but just give an example that you just take up less space so to put it differently if you lost 10 pounds on the scale about four pounds of muscle you lost some size if you lost 10 pounds of pure body fat you lost more size so even for people who just want to see themselves get smaller you're gonna look better if you just lose body fat but you know what this reminds me of because the first point that we're gonna make here which is the most important is the most effective way to use cardio is not for its aesthetic benefit it's for its performance benefit yeah use cardio to build stamina this reminds me of how people screw up strength training use strength training to get stronger and you'll build the muscle if all you're focused on is building the muscle at some point you'll start to sacrifice strength and lose muscle the muscle is the side effect of the strength the fat loss is the side effect of improved stamina and improved health cardio is the best way to improve general stamina that's a fact right you could build stamina doing lots of different things but if i wanted to build just stamina and endurance in a very quick period of time the tool to do that is cardio and if you look at cardio to do that then you're going to approach it in a better way now why because if i'm only approaching cardio from a weight loss perspective i'm actually going to start to find myself sacrificing stamina and endurance and you see people do this they drop their calories add more cardio drop their calories add more cardio they start to feel like dog crap and they're on the treadmill and you can look in their face you're like this person's looks like gonna fall down now someone is doing it for performance what you're aiming for is performance and so the diet tends to match it a little bit better you you have a more objective measurement like oh my stamina is better i'm doing better versus i think i did i burn more calories or i'm just adding more cardio so use cardio for stamina i would say is the most important part yeah well and that also feeds into your strength training because a lot of times if you're somebody who's like let's say the opposite end of the spectrum somebody who never does cardio and they strength train many times the limiting factor of you getting stronger or adding volume to your training is your lack of stamina yes you you get gassed out you know you could do five sets of you know high rep squats and you're gassed out before 15 20 minutes into the workout and so simply getting better stamina if from cardio training is going to carry over and benefit your strength training and building up muscle but that's such a it's such a fine line on how to do that because you can really go too far if you become so heavily focused on the cardio the cardiovascular aspect and you're also in a major calorie deficit the combination of the two of those is a recipe for disaster so understanding how to feed yourself appropriately and how to do just the right amount of cardio that you don't overdo it and send the wrong signal yeah and you know along those lines cardio done properly improves mitochondrial health which is very important for the whole body but including muscle it also improves the ability of your body to use satellite cells to repair and build more muscle in other words your lack of stamina and endurance could be a roadblock to building more strength and more muscle as well I learned this firsthand years ago I was at one point so extreme with the the whole you know calorie burning that we talked about because my insecurity was being too skinny and I wanted to build muscle my it was the opposite for me I was like don't burn any calories unless I absolutely need to even though again very stupid approach it no any better and so I avoided any activity that burned calories that I thought would be like not needed because I need to preserve those calories for muscle so not only did I now do cardio I tried not to do anything that burned calories aside from strength training and I remember I did this challenge this trainer one of my trainers was very him and I were friends and I remember him making fun of me and he's like I bet you can't do 20 minutes on a stationary bike and I got on it and I remember 10 minutes in I was gassed out and I say oh this is probably not good so I started doing a little bit of cardio not a lot but just enough because I was kind of like embarrassed like I can't even do the stationary bike and then I noticed my strength training got better and then I realized like oh my health my health was in my stamina we're getting in the way of me you know building muscle so yeah I mean that's that's the thing like I went through that same process just lifting weights and trying to get strong and avoiding cardio after like you know playing sports forever and doing like the highest volume of cardio I could possibly have done to see the benefit of strength training by itself but then you get to the point where in your workouts and you're just hitting that fatigue and it's affecting the way that you're lifting and your technique and for me it's always like I'm always trying to improve whatever I'm doing and be effective as possible at it I'm not as effective as I can if that fatigue sneaks in too early there and so to interrupt that and then focus more on cardio help to elevate you know my performance with just lifting weights in general and so in between that just getting up and down out of my chair and walking up the stairs and I'm strong but I'm also like huffing and puffing I shouldn't be doing that I should be energetic and and vibrant yeah I'm doing it right the next point here is to use strength training in your routine to support your metabolism now here's the interesting thing about this well first off let's talk about the metabolism strength training directly tells your body to to preserve or build muscle okay and muscle is a very important part to the calorie burn of your body at rest that if you want to burn more calories you probably you definitely want to have a good amount of muscle mass it just makes fat loss easier in a modern society having a faster metabolism is an asset now about a hundred thousand years ago you know the guy who had a super fast metabolism well he's probably gonna die because it's hard for him to find three thousand calories in nature unless he was like the most successful hunter of all time it was a bad thing well today if fast metabolism is not is an asset it's a total asset like if you burn it off the negative effects of even unhealthy food are largely negated not 100% but largely I mean they have studies where people go on a fast food diet but drop their calories below what they're burning and almost all of their you know objective measurements blood lipids and all stuff start to improve so a fast metabolism is this is this huge asset and you got to use strength training to support that here's the kicker if your goal is purely stamina and endurance some strength training will improve that as well so even when i trained triathletes and marathon runners one of the best ways i got them to get better at their sport was to have them build a little bit strength with some strength training and then of course uh you know that it helped with them being able to burn more calories and a lot of stuff so strength training should always be a party routine is the point here and especially if cardio is how you like to work out um you got to have it in there you absolutely have to have it in there well yeah no you don't want to be weak and frail and trying to run i also this also reminds me too on from just a fat loss perspective how much this has shifted from when i started as a trainer to now like so let's say somebody came in uh when i was a young trainer i just started and they wanted to lose 50 to 100 pounds you know and say the first month goes by we would be celebrating a 15 to 20 pound weight loss where the strength training to build your metabolism is so important that that same client if i were to get them today i wouldn't want to do that i would want a month to go by and actually not see the scale go down and that's really hard for the client and even coaches that are listening to this right now to wrap their brain around that that wait a second this person comes in they want to lose 50 to 100 pounds and you don't want to see the scale go down in the first month at all and it's like yeah no i don't want to see that because i'm so focused on the building the metabolism aspect of strength training because of how important it is that i'm going to focus in that direction that's something totally different i would do today than what i would have done when i made you far more successful i came to that same conclusion i know you did too jesson all right next is when you look at cardio if you're going to do it for you know and one of the side effects you'd like is fat loss cardio isn't all the same there are forms of cardio that are more like strength training and other forms of cardio that are less like strength training the forms of cardio that are more like strength training are more likely to preserve muscle in some cases may even build a little bit of muscle at the very least are the least likely to cause your body to lose muscle okay and one of those forms of cardio if it's appropriate i want to say that because it has to be appropriate is high intensity interval training type of cardio a good example would be sprints if you practice sprinting this is a short explosive form of cardiovascular training your body is less likely to want to pair muscle down because in order to produce power you need strength here's your evidence look at sprinters and then look at long distance runners do they look the same at all no they don't one of them is heavily muscled and the other one has very little they both technically run a lot they both run yeah they both run a lot yeah but one of them is more strength focus the other one is more purely endurance focus so i would look at high intensity interval training is a form of cardio so that if fat loss is definitely something you're interested in because it's not going to result at least like other forms of cardio and the same risks when it comes to slowing down the metabolism yeah this is such a powerful one do you remember do you guys remember when this like when it hit that study yeah oh i remember it changed everything i mean i think all of a sudden everybody yeah the bike right the stationary bike and doing those intervals yeah i just think that when that when that first came it was like in the was it was early 2000s yeah early 2000s or late 90 1990 something like it was definitely in that era and then from the net for the next decade i felt like that became the way that like all trainers trained and like anything else we take that bit of information or study and go too far and then we go too far yeah there's still uh there's still a balance to this that you don't want do you don't want to overdo it because you still want to get the benefits of you know utilizing weights in the form of building muscle you don't want to just circuit train where you're not resting you know so there's there's this fine line of learning how to utilize interval training for cardio how to use interval training for weight training and to not overdo it but this is by far my favorite way to to utilize any sort of cardio vascular training because i feel like you get the great benefits of stamina building and then you also get these perks of burning body fat and calories and then you also have a higher chance of maintaining and holding onto your muscle mass well i know it's like such a a simple and in a reductionist way to kind of look at this but like i i just really focused on a lot of that like the body types that you see with sprinters or you see with speed skaters or you see with like some of these guys like on those cycles that where they would sprint and do these cycle sprints super muscular you just look at their muscles and just look at their their physique and in comparison to anybody that's running any kind of distance in terms of like what what that uh the high performance athlete looks like you know in general and so you kind of like kind of reverse engineer that and look at their training habits and in the amount of volume of like uh you know aerobic versus anaerobic training and so yeah there's definitely a sweet spot in there where you can get all the benefits of stamina but also too you're not sacrificing that muscle mass yeah and i i do want to add this i said earlier appropriate application and you talked about adam how people go too far as we're talking anything we talk about needs to be applied appropriately with good programming uh we said hit great form of cardio least likely to cause muscle loss can you overdo hit or can it be done can it be done by someone where they shouldn't be doing it absolutely it is intense it is it does stress the body a little more there's people i would never do hit with um and then there's some people where it does where it does very well so the tool has to be appropriate regardless of what we talk about okay this next one for me is the most important okay and that is to simply use cardio for health this for me is how i like to use cardio vascular type training stamina as long as my stamina is good enough for me to do what i enjoy which is play with my kids go on the occasional hike and lift weights i'm not i don't really care too much about having tons of endurance and stamina just because it's not it doesn't improve the quality of of my life anymore i don't compete in anything that requires it if i did i would train specifically for it um but i do like to feel healthy so what kind of cardio do i do hiking walking um i'll do things like push the sled or do functional type of exercise in the gym this for me is where i get the most benefit this is how i used to apply it to most of my clients mainly because it requires the least amount of skill and it's the less stressful in the body and if you do it this way it also is recuperative in a sense so when i take the average person and all i do is simply increase the amount of walking that they do appropriately it it doesn't stress their recovery ability to where i have to really look at my workout with them and compensate or change or reduce volume if anything it tends to improve it this for most people i think is the way that they should look at cardio is what can i do just to make myself feel better and feel more healthy there's so many benefits that i know like non-exercise activity thermogenesis like so that's not like it's not cardio right and that's there's a there's a clear difference with that so it's not any activity that structure where you're rigorously kind of going through you know running patterns or jogging or anything but like keeping that relatively low intensity i mean it it builds up a lot of that potential activity that's that's restorative recuperative of to where you get a lot of blood flow and your heart you know gets gets adequate work so there's lots of health benefits to that and adding that into your routine but i again this is where it's like if it's for health like it's it's not necessarily the most intense bouts of cardio yeah i think that's why i like as a trainer positioning it this way because i think when you communicate it for health i don't know for me like words that i attached to health is balance yeah like health when you talk about performance and then there's health right and when you talk about fat loss and building muscle that sounds more performance and that and so people's brains go just naturally gravitate towards oh more is better harder but yeah you know like harder more of it is is better for me no matter how much you try and communicate otherwise they just do that versus when i tell someone like oh we're gonna do this for health they just seem to have a better attitude a better approach to it and it really is the way to do this like i mean it's the most important muscle in your body so we need to exercise it we need to train it that's a that's a given and i know that we've been i think you know pig does this these guys that are anti-cardio it's just that when we look at the sea of people that are that are utilizing cardio they're all using it the wrong way like nobody is using it the right i shouldn't say nobody very few people are using it the right way and so the reason why you keep hearing that message from us all the time is because we're trying to talk to the majority and a majority of people think of cardio as this great fat loss tool and it's a terrible fat loss tool it is way better served for building stamina and endurance and for overall health and if you do it for those reasons you'll get the fat line and that's the irony of it right interesting all right the next this next point i love because cardio is quite unique in this particular way right so if you look at strength training there's definitely a variety of ways you could strength training under the strength training umbrella there's olympic lifting power lifting there's bodybuilding you can use kettlebells you could do bodyweight type training bands that kind of stuff right so it's it is an umbrella that it does encompass different ways but cardio encompasses a lot more cardio is pretty much anything that gets you breathing a little hard and it could be anything that's fun i mean literally i could go play with my kids at the park for an hour and i did cardio i could go on a hike and i did cardio i could go do yard work and be productive and guess what it's cardio so this next point is very important which is pick what you enjoy if you enjoy doing any type of activity that is going to be one of the best forms of cardio for you because it's going to be the one you enjoy doing and what's going to be the one you do in fact anytime somebody asks me hey what's the best form of cardio my question was always well which one do you enjoy the most let's do that one so if you enjoy swimming then that should be your former cardio you're like hiking there's your former cardio you want to go play frisbee with your kids and run around there's your former cardio literally do what you enjoy then becoming consistent as a piece of cake that's a beautiful part of hobbies and sports it's like it's just something that you you fall into because you enjoy it you don't really you're not focused on turning that into a workout or some kind of work and it's something that you have to do it's it's just it's good because you're you're expressing movement you're you're getting blood flow you're you know you're you're working your body in a way that's beneficial but also too it's just fun and engaging and so it's something like you continuously want to to promote and do this type of activity so i'm always trying to find like some of those some of those things where it just gets me up off the couch and less sedentary so i can get out and do something productive yeah now to comment on that here's why that's so important besides the whole you're going to be consistent because you like it one of the biggest challenges that people have with exercise is creating a relationship with the exercise that's a positive one well if every time you get up to do something that's a workout or for your health and yet you hate it and it sucks the relationship you're developing is a terrible one it's one where you are getting up every day to meet somebody that you just don't like but i got to do it you know type at some point when stress gets a little high schedule gets a little tough or the first things to fall off is the thing you don't like that's just the fact that's human behavior well if you do something and you enjoy it um you're going to develop a relationship with it where it's something that you want to continue doing or in general it is a wonderful thing in general you develop a relationship with activity that is more positive you don't people realize this there's this conscious and unconscious effect from this relationship building you get with exercise the conscious one as you're aware like oh i like this this is fun there's an unconscious one too though which is you know when you're playing with your kid for example when i play with my kids and i'm outside i'm playing with my two and a half year old and we're running around we're playing and i'm breathing hard and whatever i'm not really paying attention to how much the breathing hard sucks i'm paying attention more to how much fun we're having subconsciously i'm building a relationship with breathing hard that is fun that's enjoyable and believe me this this spreads out and connects to a lot of different things in life and all of a sudden the challenge of cardio becomes something that you've now developed a positive relationship with so i can't understate this doing what you enjoy as a form of your cardio is so important for consistency lifelong that you know this this should have been number one in fact i'm glad you went the relationship direction because i actually think this is one of the biggest challenges even with people that say they love to do these activities it's like comparing somebody who does like a volunteer job versus somebody who punches in a clock and you have these people that say they love to play basketball they love to play football they love to to go for long runs or whatever but then they expect to get paid their their their expectations of what you get in return are where the relationship is off it's like if you love to do these things you should do those pursue those things just love of it just for the love of it because you enjoy it because you feel good when you do it you enjoy doing and those are the right reasons where people get mistaken is they think that they should get paid they think that they should lose body fat they should they think that they're they're supposed to get these returns that don't don't always align up with what everything else that they're doing so i think it's important that you understand your your true relationship with that because i don't know how many people have told me they love to do this form of cardio but they they say that but then they're frustrated because they're not getting paid because they're not seeing this huge body fat loss because of their approach at it and so it's important you understand that look look i said this a long time ago but it's the supplies right the the man who loves walking is going to walk further than the man who loves the destination you love what you do you're going to do it more than if you did it just because you were looking for fat loss just a fact yeah all right the next one let's talk about diet because we can't talk about weight loss and fat loss and avoiding muscle loss especially when cardio becomes one of the cornerstones of your workout we have to talk about diet because this plays such an important role so i would say the most important thing number one is to consume a high protein diet high protein is muscle preserving period end of story okay even if you're doing everything you can with your workouts to lose muscle if your protein intake is high you'll lose less muscle than if your protein intake wasn't high now what's high well it's around a gram of protein per pound of target body weight i say target body weight because you're trying to lose 50 pounds don't use your current body weight use the body weight you want to hit there's your protein targets that's number one number two don't consume calories that are way below what you're burning don't do the whole i'm going to be in a thousand calorie deficit or more too low of calories will send an emergency signal to your body that says ignore the muscle building signals that from strength or ignore everything else we're burning way more than we're taking in number one priority is to slow the metabolism down so a 500 calorie deficit for most people is right around where you want to be unless your calories are already so low in which case i'd say i wouldn't even have you in a deficit i would have you at maintenance or above and slowly reverse diet you before we can get to that point yeah i have a real hard time talking about this one while we're talking about cardio because it's so this is where it becomes really nuanced when you are when you're using something like cardio and if you are if approaching it with this idea of fat loss oh but i also want to have better performance oh and i want to be healthy you have all these different goals how you eat in relationship to how you utilize the cardio to me is is so so important and there's so many different ways that you could do that there'd be times where i actually would encourage somebody who is actually weight loss their goal is weight loss to feed themselves or have like a liquid drink before they go do their basketball for an hour because even though they want to do weight loss i don't think it's smart for that person to be in this like to your point large calorie deficit and then go do something like high intensity basketball for an hour because of what potentially could happen well if you're training for stamina that's exactly what you would do right because it's going to give you more stamina right right so i think that's i mean that that's why the diet part is probably the most nuanced part when you're also incorporating it's not as straightforward let's say to somebody who you're just speaking to about building muscle and strength training once you start adding the cardio element learning how to utilize a deficit and i think the biggest mistake you see people do is to add it in addition to also doing a massive deficit i'll add this if you're diet if you're in a calorie deficit and you're doing this and you start to notice uh significant reductions in performance you're eating too little yeah that'll that's a great sign right there like uh-oh strength is going way down oh my god my stamina is going down you're probably eating too little bump your calories up and uh and then start over at some point later when you're able to get your metabolism a little bit boosted the high protein part though is consistent oh that's across that's a no-brainer yeah you see this is like the dead man walking where you get the load uh calorie like in the deficit and uh high intensity cardio on top of that you gotta just think about like if that's what you're doing right now you want to be effective at what you're doing performance wise and be able to move effectively and if you're not giving yourself enough uh fuel to to really get through that you're not going to be effective i do want to add because we didn't touch on this and if we are training and doing you know cardio in our routine like this um this is also especially if you're a healthy person and you're eating well this is actually where the sodium thing is becomes really important to pay attention to that's something that i probably wouldn't have really highlighted or noticed as much great point if you're if you consider yourself a health person or you're trying to get healthy and so then you're eating healthy foods and making good choices and you're also doing cardiovascular type of training it's really important that your sodium intake is up and that you pay attention to that so along the lines of diet i would definitely say protein is the obvious the obvious focus not being in too much of a deficit probably even feeding yourself before you do these type of cardio bouts and then also making sure your sodium yeah in fact i would recommend anybody in this category unless otherwise told by a doctor have electrolytes before and during your cardio workouts we work with a company called element which is one of the best ones and it's it's calorie free so you're not adding anything other than sodium and if your sodium is too low your performance will drop you will get cravings and it'll make this much more much more difficult lastly okay we talk about this for strength training but it's also true for cardio depending on the form of cardio that you do you got to get good at the skill uh that you're performing so that the cardio becomes effective all right let me use an example let's talk about running the most common form of cardio that people attempt running is a specific skill now if you haven't run consistently since you were in high school or younger and then all of a sudden you decide i'm gonna go run and do cardio you better practice running and practice the skill of running before you try to attempt to test your stamina and endurance because when you get tired your technique goes out the window even more now what happens when you don't do this injury injury every single time in fact running is associated with more injuries almost any form of exercise and it's not because humans were not designed to run in fact running is one of the things yes and that's the things your body has natural shock absorbers if you're set up right and your your gait is in the right direction you you know you're you're striking with the pad of your foot like there's there's a whole process to this that you have to learn the mechanics of it to appropriately not take on too much of that blunt force into the joint so to be able to learn that is is going to be crucial if this is a long-term passion of yours yeah well cardio vaster activity is basically you could define it by repetitive movement right i would be one way to define this repetitive movement over and over again if that movement you're doing is sub optimal because it's constant and repetitive then wear and tear an injury becomes extremely common and it doesn't matter what you're doing cycling running swimming doesn't matter if you don't have the skill down properly and you do it repetitively and then you do it under fatigue which makes technique really go down you it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when you'll hurt yourself and then you've lost the ability now to perform this form of exercise and maybe other forms of exercise so the skill is very important by the way this is why the most commonly recommended form of cardio that i would give to people is walking because walking is the lowest skill form of cardio thankfully today as of the you know recording of this podcast people still walk who knows what that's gonna look like in the future but i could take the average person tell them to walk more and because they already walk daily to an extent they've got the skill of walking down so i don't have to like really make them like practice the skill but if you're gonna do anything other than something you already do then what you want to do is you want to treat it like a skill now don't worry you're still working out you're still active you're just not approaching it with this like i gotta go until i can't breathe anymore you're starting it and you're like i gotta get better at this as a skill and this also tends to make people train appropriately anyway but trust me on this if you run well you'll get way more out of it than if you run poorly even if you train just as hard both ways you know this reminds me of it was really common when i was getting ready for a show you'd see other competitors and it's like you're heading into the final weeks and everybody's doing their their bouts of cardio and so that and you'd see these these competitors just slouched over the stair master and just like you know going as fast as their legs one and sweats running off them and they're huddling and i and i go over next to them and i'd be like you know why don't you cut the speed in half and focus on standing up up tall with good posture activate your core and pay attention to every step that you take you'd have to move half as fast and you would get the exact same benefits and more minus the injury risk yes and and and just a bad pattern of like slouching behavioral yeah just bad behavioral to be holding like that and no no activation the core your slouch over there but they're so addicted to the sweat and the hard and the move but yet not realizing you can literally reduce the speed in half of what you're doing stand upright focus on every step that you strike focus on activating your core your shoulders back where you're doing and you're probably going to burn as many calories if not more plus work on your posture at the same time just was like so fun yeah totally and that's why i always love the like the incline feature versus like speed you know for a lot of people just because too to that fact like once you like increase the speed of movement like there's a lot more potential like bad patterns that kind of come out so yeah it exposes all that yeah totally look you know here's what we did okay because this is a question that we get asked often and because we've talked about it so many times a little while ago we said you know what we need to create a program that is cardio-based because the programming around cardio is so important so what we did is we created a program called maps cardio is a cardio endurance focused plan of course it includes strength training in there to support and build muscle but with this program the goal is stamina endurance with the side effect of some amazing fat loss and those of you meatheads out there who just love lifting weights going through a cycle of something like this will benefit your muscle building down the road and because this episode's all about cardio we took maps cardio and for the limited time because of this episode we're making it 50 off so if you're interested in stamina endurance and the fat loss side effects or if you want to improve your stamina endurance your meathead you're like i haven't done a bout of really improving my cardiovascular stamina but you want well done programming to minimize muscle loss or stop muscle loss to get the stamina benefits the fat loss benefits that's what we did we created the program maps cardio and again because this episode it's half off so if you're interested you go to mapscardio.com and then the code for 50 off is do cardio so do cardio use that code and you'll get half off