Cardio make you fat???

This thread has really degraded into a lot of name calling and pseudoscience. Aren't we all old enough to have a reasonable discussion about this? I think we all agree that cardio is good for you and won't MAKE you fat, though if you're doing a lot of cardio and eating horribly you still might be. Fast-twitch, resistance training people love their workouts and aerobic based, cardio, slow twitch people love their workouts. I feel like we've already proven EVERYBODY's point, now we're just arguing to try and see who is better, when the answer is, it depends. If you're trying to run a marathon, obviously lots of cardio makes since. Running burns energy, your body has to get the energy from some where. To do that, it will either use muscle or fat as a source. Obviously, muscle may be prioritized, but that doesn't mean that it will burn just the muscle and only the muscle first. So if you train for a marathon you might see some loss in muscle's you don't use (upper body) but you're not going to turn into a Kenyan look-a-like necessarily, especially if some resistance training is included.

Resistance training guys, yes, building muscle is good, and muscle burns calories all the time, but it takes time to build muscles and there's still a question about HOW MANY calories muscles burn, most likely it depends on how much you use the muscles.

http://exercise.about.com/od/exerciseworkouts/f/muscle.htm

Above is a link which explores this concept, it has several links to scientific articles that you can feel free to peruse. It does go on to explore the strengths of resistance training. This isn't to imply that resistance training isn't important, but making claims and not being willing to back up your claims with some sort of cited source just means that you have faith in your method, not knowledge in it. Probably the best way to think about this is the quote "everything works, just some things work better than others" - no I don't know who said it. Which means maybe resistance training is better or maybe cardio, but maybe we don't know for sure and they both will get the job done. So, yes if you want to get stronger then resistance training will make you stronger and explosive, power movements will activate FAST twitch muscles, and higher-repetition resistance training, enough to enter hypertrophy will make muscles bigger AND stronger and you will look better.

This is a site where the majority of the advice we give people is to focus on their diet and to make sure that they maintain a healthy, balanced diet to improve their health while trying to meet there goals. I feel maybe we should take the same approach with exercise, a balanced program incorporating both resistance training and cardio training is probably for the best. As for the ORIGINAL question and providing at least SOME research, I did a quick search using the my university's database and found a couple of articles which do not mention any muscle loss as a result of aerobic training, all articles are available via scholar.google.com, however, I only did a cursory search and therefore maybe didn't find all the relevant article and would be open to other people finding and citing sources that either agree with me or contradict me, because I'm an adult.

Effects of strength and endurance training on thigh and leg muscle mass and composition in elderly women
S Sipila… - Journal of Applied Physiology, 1995 - Am Physiological Soc

Lower extremity muscle size and strength and aerobic capacity decrease with caloric restriction but not with exercise-induced weight loss
EP Weiss, SB Racette, DT Villareal… - Journal of applied …, 2007 - jappl.org

Before all the naysayers read the abstract and yell, neither of these studies set out to prove our exact question, if someone has access to an article that does, please post it. But both articles involved some aerobic exercise, and one found the effects to be negligible but neither found the effects to be NEGATIVE.

Finally, as just some words on courtesy and logic. Just because you compete in marathons and don't care about how you look does not mean that the rest of us are speaking a "different language". Yes, some people on this site care more about looks than performance, but there are plenty of people who are interested in both, and that doesn't mean one group has a better biological argument than the other, plenty of us are improving our athletic performance WHILE looking better, and in many (maybe most?) cases the two go hand-in-hand. To the resistance guys that are doing the whole sprinter/marathoner comparison at the Olympics, that's like me saying let's compare world-class power lifters to marathoners. I could say, muscle obviously doesn't burn fat, many of these guys are huge and they can squat and bench press HUGE amounts of weight. Whenever you point to elite athlete of course they represent an exception to the rule, as well as population that has gone through extreme measures to arrive at where they are. They are POOR examples to use for regular people, by the fact that they ARE elite athletes. So let's all please just try and get along, and when as I suspect people challenge this post, try and challenge it with facts in a respectful, adult way.

I agree with most of the posts. Cardio doesn't make you fat, but as for myself, I lose more weight when I lift weights before doing my cardio.

You see, the problem with introducing "glycogen" into the discussion is that it is a polysyllabic word....

I think I've heard it all now.

bump for later

You see, the problem with introducing "glycogen" into the discussion is that it is a polysyllabic word....

Did you just swear? Someone report her!

No, it's not going to make you fat. If you are eating at a calorie deficit where is this fat going to come from? And unless you were lifting weights a lot and then stop, it's not going to make you lose muscle either unless you are starving yourself.

Your body will preserve the muscle it needs to meet its demands, given proper diet. If all else remains the same, why would it suddenly start shedding muscle? And why would it suddenly start burning through muscle when the body is specifically designed to store fat and then to use that fat as an energy source when in a calorie deficit?

Common misconception. The body actually generally prefers getting rid of muscle to fat in the context of cardiovascular exercise (unless you are someone who won the genetic lotto, or are taking performance enhancing drugs, in which case what are you doing on this site?!). Think about it... a pound of muscle yields at most 600 calories of usable energy. A pound of fat yields 3500. The body say "OMG I have to run to survive, and I have to lose a pound of something"... guess which one it's going to pick? Lean muscle mass that is not related to the task at hand. This is why cyclists/marathoners who don't resistance train are so scrawny in the upper body (I have a friend who can cycle over 100 miles in one go, and rides several hundred miles/week, but can't do 1 body-weight push-up). The muscle:fat ratio is going to be determined heavily by genetics and current body composition (someone who is morbidly obese and insulin resistant will probably not lose a significant amount of muscle mass, someone who is at 'athletic' body fat levels will lose almost exclusively muscle). Once you add resistance training in, muscle preservation is greatly improved, as it causes the body to prioritize muscle sparing over fat sparing.

Totally agree

Even though the body is designed to burn glycogen and fat for energy this process is halted whenever anyone does an activity with the word CARDIO in it. A new process then begins where the body ignores the energy sources that that the muscle cells are designed to use and immediately begins to cannibilize itself.

This is true because I read it on the internet.

It's like being down on the ground with a magnifying glass and focusing so much on an anthill that you miss the herd of elephants going past behind you.

That's BS- cardio will never make you fat! It's always good to work on building and toning muscle as well, but time on a cardio machine is never a bad thing.

A trainer at the gym told me that doing lots of cardio without any weights can make you put weight on around the middle. Something to do with endorphins that your body releases when doing cardio and stress on the body....

is this true?? I am all about cardio (running, zumba, cross trainer, dvds) but now I am wondering if I am going about it all wrong?

That isn't true as long as you're not overdoing cardio & eating adequate protein intake. Of course when you're in a deficit, you'll lose both fat & muscle, something that we cannot avoid. What actually happens when you overdo cardio in a calorie deficit is that your body thinks that there is a "famine" going on since its not getting enough food to support your workouts & all it wants is to make you survive. For us to "survive", our bodies need all the fat since it is the most calorie dense & is the main source of energy. Because of this, it will put your body in catabolic state (muscle burning) & it will let go of anything that isn't being used such as muscle since it uses up calories just to maintain itself. The result will be having a skinny fat body. So for you to minimize muscle loss while in deficit, you have to incorporate strength training to use those muscles. As the saying goes, use it or lose it.

However to say that cardio will make you fat is definitely wrong. Now if you're wondering how can one say they are overdoing it, it depends on the person's fitness level & the type of training. Endurance athletes train for hours everyday, however they compensate it by eating lots of calories. At the same time, an hour of cardio can be considered too much for some people who are simply trying to lose weight.

trainers usually try to quietly figure out what your favorite exercises are, then sell you a different plan (e.g. make you feel like you're missing out on something). if you're still getting results from whatever you're doing, keep going!

Thank you!!!!

So based on what I learned, cardio will not make you fat. It will also prevent you from gaining muscle unless you eat back those calories and then more for the muscle growth.

That makes sense to me. In your experience, do you feel like you lost muscle/strength in your upper body while doing all of that endurance training, or did you just not gain?

So based on what I learned, cardio will not make you fat. It will also prevent you from gaining muscle unless you eat back those calories and then more for the muscle growth.

That makes sense to me. In your experience, do you feel like you lost muscle/strength in your upper body while doing all of that endurance training, or did you just not gain?

There's a difference between "muscle strength" and "muscle mass". You can significantly increase muscle strength without large increases in mass. So someone who is doing a lot of cardio training -- for a specific purpose-- may find the ability to increase mass is compromised --which may or may not be relevant for them-- but should be able to see steady increases in strength.

Have you ever seen an addicted runner with a FAT midsection? Pfffft.. Soooo not true!

Yes, all the time. Go watch a marathon sometime. You'll see quite a few that have no muscle tone, but have a little pooch around the midsection. You could also go frequent some running forums, and you'll see posts all the time about how hard they work, but never can lose the gut. The problem is that as your body becomes more efficient at running, you really don't work that hard. The calorie burn can actually be a lot less than you might think. So you can run long distances, but if that's all you do, it's not that hard to have a gut too.

Have you ever seen an addicted runner with a FAT midsection? Pfffft.. Soooo not true!

Yes, all the time. Go watch a marathon sometime. You'll see quite a few that have no muscle tone, but have a little pooch around the midsection. You could also go frequent some running forums, and you'll see posts all the time about how hard they work, but never can lose the gut. The problem is that as your body becomes more efficient at running, you really don't work that hard. The calorie burn can actually be a lot less than you might think. So you can run long distances, but if that's all you do, it's not that hard to have a gut too.

You don't become THAT efficient. Not even close. And for every tiny bit of efficiency you gain, the result is..........you run faster, which then burns more calories.

Since anecdotal evidence is less than useless, I am not going into the whole "gut" question--except to say that genetic patterns of body fat distribution are as likely to be responsible as anything else.