0:02 Why endurance cardio is bad. Here's the setup. Bear with me. What is endurance cardio? Endurance cardio is operationally defined for this video as long-lasting exercise, say 30 minutes plus per session with multiple sessions per week. It involves rhythmic contraction of major muscle groups. Its goal is proposed to be improvement of cardiovascular fitness. Known effects include mitogenesis, new mitochondria, and enlargement of those mitochondria. Vascular control may be improved. Movement-specific and to a lesser degree general moderate intensity work endurance is increased.
0:48 Cool. But here's 10 reasons to think carefully about whether endurance training is right for you. These are ordered from least serious to most serious, including several near the end of the list that could end your life. So, stick around until the end. Don't forget to like and comment, all the good stuff. Or perhaps tell me whether you think I have the order of potential severity right. Or that you found some value in this video. Thanks. As usual, all of the following comments are directed at the middle of the bell-shaped curve, i.e., are generalized and are not to be taken as individual advice. Do your own due diligence, please. Right, let's crack on.
1:34 Number one reason why endurance cardio is bad. It's a time vampire. What would you do with all those extra hours if you didn't spend so many hours doing endurance cardio? God forbid spend some time with the family or have some other hobbies. Who knows? Hmm. Hey, one or two half-hour sessions of cardio a week is not a problem for most people. Let's be clear on this. This video is for people who do vastly more cardio than that. Uh so, let's move up the scale of potential problems for those people that do way too much endurance cardio. All right. Number two. Endurance work can be vastly overdone, i.e., it can become a psychological
2:21 issue leading to dependency when endurance time or distance become the focus at the expense of intensity work. Which is where the focus ought to be for the benefits such as improvements in VO2 max, improved VO2 on kinetics, improved cardiac performance in general domains, power, speed, and hypertrophy. Okay? So, high intensity is where it's at for all of that stuff. What is your training goal exactly geared towards? I.e., what event are you training for? Performance mimics training. So, does your training output
3:07 power output, speed output, does that match or exceed competitive output? If it doesn't, it's not training. It's just exercise. Endurance for the sake of it is not task-targeted by definition. This is an internal-external locus of control issue. Okay? So, what I'm saying is get your training focused on a specific event, of a specific distance or over a specific period of time. Okay? Number three. Muscle cells are trainable along a continuum in terms of fiber type and therefore fiber diameter.
3:55 I.e., muscles can get larger or smaller. Okay? How does that happen? It happens via myosin chain size decreases when you do a lot of endurance work uh because the cell becomes more oxidative and less glycolytic. So, that reduces the cell volume because the myosin chains are a lot less. There's reduced glycogen storage, so that reduces the mass as well in the cell compresses inwards and becomes less bulky. Um this whole idea that there are three discrete muscle fiber types that do not morph under training load is a fallacy. They do. Therefore, the muscle gets smaller when you do a
4:41 lot of aerobic endurance style training as opposed to a lot of higher intensity type work. Therefore, the next two problems are connected with this problem, problem number three. So, let's crack on with those. Number four. Which is connected with number three, as I said. Antagonistic effects occur when you do a lot of endurance work if you are trying to undergo hypertrophy training. If muscle mass is your goal, muscle size is your goal, then endurance work is going to be working against that. Okay? So, there's a lot of effort going in that's perhaps being wasted potentially. Hmm.
5:27 Problem number five. Over there. This is also connected with number three, as I said. While moderate intensity work capacity can improve, this can be at the cost of loss in strength and power. Why is that important? Well, strength and power associate inversely with mortality. Is that a cause-and-effect relationship? Who knows? Uh there's certainly a correlation though. Problem number six. Cumulative wear and tear on the body, especially the joints. Uh especially, you know, lower body joints if you're doing a lot of body carriage stuff, like running, jogging, that kind of stuff. Okay. Uh in terms of the metabolic adaptations shorter-lasting
6:13 but more intense work to a very good approximation will achieve exactly the same metabolic adaptations as the endurance work for the sake of endurance alone. Uh there's a great model called critical power, critical velocity that talks about all of this stuff. I've published uh quite a few very interesting papers on that in my time. Uh you might want to read those at some point in your own time if you're interested. Hmm. Problem number seven. Endurance work is associated with higher appetite, which can lead to overconsumption, especially in the form of carbohydrates, which are especially problematic in this respect. Many endurance athletes vastly overdo
7:00 the intake of carbohydrates, and they're encouraged to do so by their coaches, various exercise physiologists, etc. Many of these athletes later in their careers or even after their careers are finished, then present with type two diabetes mellitus and/or adiposity fatness issues. And it's down to the fact that they have trained themselves to eat vastly too much food and vastly too much carbohydrates, it seems. Okay? So, that was problem number seven. Here's number eight. The female athlete triad. That sounds scary, doesn't it? It Well, it is if you're a female athlete and that does too much training and eats wrong. Here it is.
7:47 Low body fat, amenorrhea, loss of periods, and osteoporosis, the softening and weakening of your bones, and all the various sequelae of of that. They're all very real problems for female athletes who do a vast amount of endurance training. It's basically caused by an insufficiency of estrogen, which is down to both the intake of insufficient uh estrogenic, I suppose, precursors, vastly too much energy being spent with no real gains in this uh vastly overdone endurance program that they're undertaking, and the problem develops. Okay, no good. Problem number nine. We're getting to the serious one now. There is a potential for a thing that called overtraining syndrome, which is a
8:35 chronic exhaustion dysfunction characterized by muscular, neural, and psychological as well as endocrine dysfunction. Basically, the body packs up. And um you get chronic fatigue, chronic low energy. It It It can be very, very serious psychologically, and it can end a person's career in uh athletics, and it can also end their life. It's a very, very serious condition, and there's often a very, very long road back or no way back at all depending on how severe the overtraining syndrome has become. So, that's very, very serious. That's That's a reason to get away from the psychology of more is better and even more is even better than that. It is not
9:21 in terms of endurance work. Did you know your body renews and repairs itself using adult stem cells? Sadly, every year we release fewer of these adult stem cells. Isn't that terrible? Luckily, StemEnhance Ultra reverses this trend by assisting stem cell release. Isn't that [music] awesome? Here's where you can get it. >> [music] >> Okay, number 10. Potentially the most serious. Cardiac hypertrophy and arrhythmia issues are very, very common after years and years of hours and hours and hours a week of endurance work. This obviously can be fatal very, very suddenly without warning.
10:07 Um this is a very real thing. People can go do their own due diligence and look into the peer-reviewed literature into this to find out whether I've just made this up or not. Spoiler, I haven't. So, there you go. 10 reasons why you might want to reconsider your desire to do hours and hours and hours of endurance work. I hope this has been useful. If it has, don't forget to like and subscribe. Don't forget to comment underneath. Tell me you found some value in it. Tell me you thought the order of uh the severity of these potential problems was right or whether it wasn't right in your in your estimation. That's it for today. Hope you enjoyed. Join me next time when I'll share something else with you that may or may not be of value to you. See you then.
