Is this true?

Astrogeek

" Everyone has always told you (and believed) that cardio is how you lose weight, because it is the best way to burn calories. Unfortunately burning calories is not how you lose weight. You are only exercising one hour a day at the most, so how can that determine your body shape when you are spending 23 hours a day doing something else? When you do anything physical, your body tries to adapt to improve it's efficiency. By doing cardio, your body thinks that it now needs to be able to handle long periods of prolonged aerobic activity and do it more easily. To this end it both increases your fitness slowly, and it asks itself "How can we use less energy?".
The answer to this is to decrease your muscle mass. Muscle is very expensive in terms of energy demands, and so by reducing your body's muscle mass, you will now need less energy to perform that 1 hour treadmill run. Your body will also conserve energy the moment you step off the treadmill, which it does by lowering your metabolism. If you are going to use 1000 calories for a run, your body needs to keep the energy demands for the other 23 hours of the day as low as possible to compensate. So in essence, the more months you do cardio for, the lower your metabolism gets AND the lower your muscle mass gets. And as we've already discussed, the way to a good body is NOT to lose fat, but to have a combination of losing fat and gaining muscle. If all you are doing is destroying every pound of muscle you have, how is cardio ever going to give you the body you want? "

I've always had quite a good metabolism and I don't understand why doing exercise of any sort should lower it?

Oryx

What is the source of that?

Khannie

In short, that's mostly pants, though there are elements of truth to it.

Distance runners (for example) will tend to have a low muscle mass, but you will note that they're not fat either.

Astrogeek

What bits are true?

It's from cosmo... lol

Oryx

As has been said, anyone who runs seriously is not fat. They tend to be rangy and thin. Bloody cosmo. I can see this being used by exercise phobics as yet another excuse not to do any exercise!

The way I see it, all else being equal, if you move more, youll expend more energy and ergo, either lose weight, or not gain it at least. Im no dietician or physical therapist, but I can tell you I took up running and my legs became more muscular. So there.

Fremen

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. If what you posted is true, I would guess you'd only see those effects coming into play at marathon runner or professional athelete levels, at which point you're already in pretty good shape.

Anyone who thinks cycling to work will make you tubbier than driving is unqualified to write about fitness.

Astrogeek

thanks guys. Was worried for a bit that I'd destroy my metabolism haha.

RacoonQueen

Oryx wrote: »

As has been said, anyone who runs seriously is not fat. They tend to be rangy and thin. Bloody cosmo. I can see this being used by exercise phobics as yet another excuse not to do any exercise!

The way I see it, all else being equal, if you move more, youll expend more energy and ergo, either lose weight, or not gain it at least. Im no dietician or physical therapist, but I can tell you I took up running and my legs became more muscular. So there.

Same...and I would actually quite like it to be true as I wouldn't mind losing some muscle mass to help my running.