What is cardio?

Many people do not understand or simply do not want to understand the benefits of cardio training, they do not know the difference between low and high intensity cardio training. Cardio doesn’t have to be boring. It shouldn’t be a stereotypical workout: cycling in the gym or running. Cardio includes many activities such as basketball, swimming, football, boxing and many other sports.

Cardio training

Cardio training is very important for every athlete. Main benefits of cardio training:

• Lower blood pressure
• Increased muscular endurance
• Better blood circulation
• Burn fat
• Reduced stress
• More energy and perseverance in daily activities

Differences in cardio training

Low intensity cardio is very different from high intensity cardio.

High-intensity cardio is for people who don’t want to go on stage worrying about the details of every muscle. This is a workout for people who don’t have time to “walk” on a treadmill for hours.

Low intensity: ideal for people preparing for competitions. This allows them to burn fat without worrying about further “destruction” of the muscles. Burning 200 calories in a low-intensity workout is much more beneficial than the same amount in a high-intensity cardio workout if you’re determined to get into competitive shape and burn calories.

Let’s start with the fact that fat is converted into energy during exercise. They are converted into three essential fatty acids (FFA) and one glycerol molecule. This is enough to understand what happens when you burn fat during warrior training.

Our goal is to convert the breakdown of fats into FFA and glycerol and use them for energy. In general, we convert fat into usable energy. Oxidation is exactly where fatty acids are burned. Unused energy is easily returned to triglyceric acid.

There is no way to tell which type of training is better, high or low intensity. Both have their advantages. The main benefit of high-intensity cardio training is that it burns more calories and fat than low-intensity training in the same amount of time. The advantage of low-intensity training is that more calories come from fat than from other sources.

Higher cardio intensity = lower FFA

Studies have shown that the more intense the cardio training, the lower the amount of FFA (mobilized fat) in the blood. Probably many now think that the more intense the training, the less fat is mobilized and that low intensity training burns more fat? This is not entirely true. Although fat mobilization decreases as intensity increases, overall fat oxidation is greater because more calories but less fat are burned.

During low-intensity cardio training, the level of FFA oxidation is significantly higher than during high-intensity training. Of course, now there are questions about the need for high-intensity training if you burn more with low-intensity training. The answer is simple: FFA usage is lower, but the total amount of fat burned is significantly higher.

For example: You burn 200 calories doing low-intensity exercise, and 90% of those calories come from fat, which means you’ve burned 180 calories from fat and 20 calories from other sources. If it had been a high-intensity workout, you would have burned about 300 calories, 75 percent of which were fat—that’s 225 calories from fat and 75 calories from other sources.

Over the same amount of time, high-intensity cardio burns more fat and calories than low-intensity cardio. However, this is just an example and does not reflect the actual amount of calories you will burn during your workout.