Okay, so why do we do cardio? Obviously to a) burn calories and b) to boost our metabolism to again, burn more calories.

Well, we all say that it's NOT good to take in too few calories daily. It's better to take in X amount for your goals and do cardio to try and lose the fat.

So what I'm wondering is, if you are just in essence, burning off the calories you are taking in, while doing cardio as well as with the boosted metablolism, how is that different than say just not eating those extra 500 calories?

Like I said, it may be a stupid question, I was just pondering this and thought perhaps someone could offer some useful insight here. My only guess is the actual nutrients you receive with eating calories (i.e. protein, carbs, fats, etc), but I thought those too are burned off in a cardio workout. Of course I could be mistaken.

Hi karatetricker,

Remember what cardio is short for. Cardiovascular.

When you are sweating off the calories, getting your heart rate up, the most important muscle you own is getting better. It doesn't matter how good you look, if you have a poor heart.

Andrew.

So my non-technical answer would be that you have to trick your body into losing fat. As it does not usually want to do this. If you eat less, your body thinks you are starving and will hold onto the fat as long as possible and you burn muscle to stay alive.

If you eat a normal amount of good calories, then your body never thinks you are starving, but during those brief moments of the day when you are doing cardio, your body is tricked into using both lean mass and fat mass as fuel, so that you keep going.

You weight train to replace any muscle lost from the cardio (and then some hopefully). And this is the way you successfully lose fat and keep or gain muscle. Good diet with sufficient calories, cardio and weight training. But this is my non-technical answer. Can people please respond with more of the biological processes?

A good question dude. I would say that the calories are not necessarily the thing in and of itself but by consuming that required amount you are giving yourself 2000 cals [or whatever you eat] worth of food to intake the right amount of protein etc. So if you only ate 500 cals a day obviously you would not have enough cals to divide up and come up with the proper grams of protein carbs and fat. Sorta makes sense heh.

:confused:

Cardio shouldn't only be for burning calories. Your heart is a muscle and it needs to be worked too. It would be a different story if we lived like animals in the wild. Cavemen did not need to do cardio because their lives were active. In today's world, all of our luxuries are allowing people to lead sedentary lives.