Hi! I'm your SANE concierge. What can I help you find today?

Ep.31 – Smarter Cardio 101 – How Get More Out of Less Cardio


Jonathan: Welcome to the Smarter Science of Slim, the scientifically-proven program where you eat more and exercise less to burn fat and boost health.

Carrie: Eat smarter, exercise smarter, live better. I am so ready for that!

Jonathan: Hey, everyone! Jonathan Bailor and Carrie Brown here, living the Smarter Science of Slim. This week, we’re going to pick up where we left off with last week. Last week, we talked about how to actually do eccentric exercise as best as we could because explaining how to do exercises with just our words is very difficult, but this week we are going to talk about how we can make what most people would consider traditional cardiovascular exercises smarter or how we can do less of them and get more results. We’ll also redefine what we call cardiovascular exercises and we’ll show how doing less of them, but more intelligently, or smarter – as I like to call it – actually gives us, not only from a fat loss perspective, but also from a health perspective, just superior benefits and we’ll talk about some cool science supporting that. Before we get into that, Carrie has expressed to me that she is disappointed.

Carrie: I am.

Jonathan: Why are you disappointed?

Carrie: You are not wearing anything that I can poke fun at.

Jonathan: I’ve learned my lesson, folks. No, I’m just kidding.

Carrie: That’s no fun!

Jonathan: No, it’s just a regular….

Carrie: Oh, wait it says Bora Bora.

Jonathan: It does.

Carrie: Bora Bora’s fun.

Jonathon: I’ve never been to Bora Bora.

Carrie: I’ve been to Bora Bora, It’s fun. It’s awesome.

Jonathon: Really? I had not, no I just bought this shirt because it quite comfortable. So anyway…

Carrie: I’d like to put in a request for fun clothing next week.

Jonathon: Fun clothing. Well I come here immediately following work so, it’s only [crosstalk 01:43]. Alright, good point, good point. So…

Carrie: I still…we promised weeks and weeks ago, we promised someone that we’d take a picture of you in a bright pink t-shirt and you have not worn it again since [crosstalk 01:56].

Jonathon: We put no time frame on…so it will happen however I’ll listeners are just going to have to stay tuned to see when it actually happens. Maybe it’ll be a Christmas present for everyone. We’ll see.

Alright so, Carrie, how do we exercise less and get better results when it comes to cardiovascular exercises?

Carrie: This blew my mind!

Jonathan: It blew her mind, but before we get into this – I’ll give the short answer just to wet people’s whistles. We take cardiovascular exercise and we make it higher quality, we make it more hormonal, we make it work more muscle fibers and just overall give us better metabolic benefits the same way we did that with resistance training. We do it with more force very safely, but how we do that requires just the kind of update the way we think about cardiovascular exercise in the first place because cardiovascular exercise, for a lot of us, is defined as doing a lot of very weak movements for a long period of time. For a lot of us, what’s the difference between weight training and ‘cardio’? Weight training uses a lot of resistance and cardio – you just kind of move around for a long period of time and you don’t use much resistance and you don’t use a lot of resistance because you want to do it for two hours or one hour.

Carrie: I never wanted to do it for two hours or one hour or even five minutes!

Jonathan: You get my point! You get my point!

Carrie: I do but it was time I said something, so I did.

Jonathan: I know, I know. Let’s do a little thought experiment here, Carrie. The point I’m going to make with this thought experiment – or try to make or hope to make – is that cardiovascular exercise and resistance training are not completely different. Rather, cardiovascular exercise – traditional cardiovascular exercise – is just resistance training with very, very little resistance that therefore works very few of our muscle fibers and are least metabolically beneficial muscle fibers. So, here’s the example. Say we get on a leg press machine. For people who aren’t familiar with it, this is when you stand up and sit back down – this is a machine that sort of approximates that movement. It works all the muscles in your legs. Let’s say we got on that machine and didn’t add any resistance and move our legs up and down for 30 minutes. It’ll be just resistance training or cardio?

Carrie: Cardio.

Jonathan: Why?

Carrie: Because you didn’t take a lot of effort but you did a lot of it.

Jonathan: Okay, so there you go. Carrie is giving the traditional understanding of what cardio is, but hold on!

Carrie: But it doesn’t necessarily make my heart beat faster!

Jonathan: Second question.

Carrie: Maybe we should start planning these.

Jonathan: Let’s say, we got on a stationary bike and we crank the resistance up so high that we had to stand up on the bike and we push the pedal down with our right leg and then push the pedal down with our left leg and push the pedal down with our right leg, and after doing that maybe 20 times, our legs are burning and we’ve got to sit down and stop. Did we just do cardio or resistance training?

Carrie: Resistance.

Jonathan: But we did it on a bike.

Carrie: Right. We were only on it for 20 seconds.

Jonathan: Well, there you go! Carrie has proven the point! The point is, is that it doesn’t matter what machine you use; what matters is the amount of force you’re asking your muscles to generate – that’s what determines whether or not you will achieve long-term success or whether you’re just working up a sweat and kind of burning some time. So if you get on a ‘resistance training machine’ and you don’t add any resistance and you just move around weakly, who cares what that is? It’s not effective. If you pick up a 2-lb. dumbbell and just do 50 curls while you talk to your friend, what is that? It doesn’t matter what that is; your muscles don’t care. All they care about…

Carrie: I’ll tell you what it is.

Jonathan: What is it, Carrie?

Carrie: It makes you feel better emotionally.

Jonathan: Sure, and that’s fair. But that’s not what we were talking about. This isn’t the Smarter Science of Emotional Feeling.

Carrie: And it means you can brag on Facebook, “I ran for two hours!”

Jonathan: Sure. Yes. To be fair, folks – of course there are points going to aerobics classes with friends and things like that, but we’re being very specific here and talking about if our goal is to make the hormonal change in our body that we are after to improve our health and fitness, how do we best do that? Whether or not we’re on this machine, that machine, some other machine, no machine – if we can do whatever we’re doing for a longer period of time and we can do it frequently, call that whatever you want, it’s not going to give us the results we’re after. You see what I’m saying.

So, when we talk about resistance training versus cardiovascular exercise, I would like to redefine that. When we talk about cardio at the Smarter Science of Slim, we’re really just saying “using machines that are typically used for cardio and when we say ‘resistance training’, we’re saying using machines or exercises which are traditionally used for resistance training”, but the way we perform ‘cardio’ and the way we perform ‘resistance training’ are actually incredibly similar. We use as much resistance as we possibly can and that causes us to only be able to do very little of it, but it causes us to use all of our muscle fibers and trigger a dramatic and super healthful hormonal response in less time, which is cool.

Carrie: It’s very cool.

Jonathan: So when it comes to cardio, again, the way we make cardio smarter is by doing it in ways that require more force, but this is a really key point – there’s two ways to do that. There’s three ways, but two mostly for cardiovascular exercise. One, and this is the most common, is to move our body faster. This is when you traditionally hear about interval training or sprint training. This is what people are talking about. You’ll see someone on the news, they talk about this new interval training, and you see someone peddling on a bike incredibly fast and then stopping or running up stadium steps because that is… When you run, what you’re doing is you’re hitting the ground with more force than when you walk. Basically, the harder your legs hit the ground, the more force they exert, the more it’s going to propel you forward.

So when we move faster, we are causing our muscles to generate more force, but we’re exposing ourselves to injury. So we could increase force by moving faster or we could increase force just by increasing resistance and continuing to move at a slower, controlled rate – just like we do with resistance training. So we do the same thing here for cardio. Things like running are very difficult to add resistance to safely. I mean, there are ways. You see this with professional athletes. You have one athlete who straps a belt around the other athlete and the first athlete tries to sprint forward while the second athlete holds them back. Most of us are not interested in doing that. Or you strap a parachute on your back and try to run.

So, what we often need is we need to get a machine like an upright stationary bike or an elliptical machine or a VersaClimber – a VersaClimber is kind of like you’re going down a ladder – and you need to crank the resistance up so that we can really only do it if we use all of our strength to move on the machine for about 30 seconds and then in 31 seconds, we have to stop because we’re completely exhausted and we’re completely out of breath! It’s like we just sprinted, but we did that very slowly and very controlled and because we had to because it’s so heavy so we don’t risk injury – which is great!

Carrie: It is great! If I’m going to do this wretched exercise, I don’t want to get injured while I’m doing it!

Jonathan: You just called it ‘wretched’. I think you should speak to your experience doing smarter cardiovascular exercise.

Carrie: It was an amazing experience! The first time I did it, I was completely unprepared. Well, I didn’t think I was. I thought I was completely prepared because of course, by osmosis, I’ve got this stuff from Jonathan and I’d read the book and I’d also read about it online, this kind of stuff, and so I’m like…. It was pretty unbelievable to me that you could actually cycle for 2.5 minutes and it hurt so bad you couldn’t walk. It was kind of like, “So you cycle for 30 seconds and then you have a 2.5 minute break and then you cycle for 30 seconds. Whatever. And then, 10 minutes of that – most of which is resting, doing nothing – and that’s going to make me skinny. Yeah, right!” So I thought I was prepared for this and I thought it was going to be easy and it was the most amazing experience!

Probably by the time I got to the third rep – whatever you want to call it – I could barely move my legs! I mean, I was screaming. The cats were all hiding under the bed. I couldn’t believe how hard it was! I actually managed to get through the whole – is it five sets that you do? – and it was as much as I could do not to toss my cookies. I seriously was on the verge of throwing up when I got off because that’s how intense a workout I got in that 2.5 minutes of activity and 7.5 minutes of rest. It was incredible!

Jonathan: Yeah, the thing that I think is just great… Sometimes I get asked, “Why would I ever do ‘smarter cardio’ when I could just do ‘smarter resistance training’?” Again, it’s sort of not an ‘either/or’ proposition. Some people like to do both, but the thing that’s really great about the smarter cardiovascular exercises – it’s much easier to grasp it right from the get-go. Like, when you’re turning to the smarter resistance training – and to be very clear – if we had to pick one, we should do smarter resistance training, but smarter cardio – most people already know how to ride a bike, for example, and if I tell you to just crank up the resistance, people get it and they can do it and after the first workout, they understand how this in 2.5 minutes causes these results; whereas the eccentric exercise takes a while to get used to, so it’s a useful 1-2 punch.

Carrie: I think, for all the time we tried to carefully describe it on last week’s podcast, I’m not sure anyone really got how to do it, but they already know how to cycle!

Jonathan: Let’s just quickly step through the technique you want to do, Carrie. I’m going to describe, you do five sets, yada, yada, yada. What you want to do is – I always recommend upright stationary bike simply because they are very common, they’re also very inexpensive. You don’t want to join a gym, you can get a good upright stationary bike for about $150. In fact, we want the less expensive ones. We don’t want a computerized one, we want a mechanized one because those have no limit to the amount of resistance you can add because it’s just metal on metal versus some pre-set computer program that only goes up to 30 units of resistance – whatever that is.

Carrie: However, the one I already had was the opposite of what you described. It was computerized and it was the reclining one and I make it work because I can’t bring myself to get rid of it and get another one. The fact that it’s reclining makes it harder because you can’t stand upright; you are having to do it at an angle. But also, I found the top resistance was way plenty enough resistance for me.

Jonathan: Absolutely. And it’s not…

Carrie: I don’t want people to think they have to go out and replace what they’ve got.

Jonathan: Correct. Any ‘cardiovascular’ exercise machine that allows you to add a lot of resistance, like an Elliptical machine, like a VersaClimber, not like a treadmill because with a treadmill, you can add incline, but it’s not as if the incline is so steep that just taking a step is so hard that after 30 seconds, you can’t continue to walk on it. You just can’t do that. So, let’s use an upright stationary bike for our example, though. These are often called spin bikes. So an upright stationary bike, you get warmed up and then once you’re completely warmed up, you increase the resistance on the bike so high that you can only pedal by standing up on the pedals and pushing them down as hard as you can. Like, if you were riding a bike outside, this is generally if you approached a very steep hill. Again, you want the resistance to be so high that you’re not pedaling fast, you’re like ‘left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot’.

Carrie: You cannot go fast.

Jonathan: Because it’s so heavy. In fact, you’re starting up, your seconds 1 through 10, you’re like ‘left foot, right foot, left foot’; in seconds 25 through 30, you’re like ‘left foot, right… foot, Oh God!’ And then you get to the second 31 and you’re just like ‘le….Uh! I can’t do anymore.’

Carrie: It is true! It really is true! I know we’re making it sound dramatic, but I had three girlfriends over at my house and I said, “I’m going to show you how to do this.” They were all like, “Yeah, whatever, Carrie.” “I’m going to sit on the bed and I’m going to be your stop clock for your 30 seconds and your rest breaks.” They’re like, “So we only have to do this for 30 seconds and then I stop for two minutes?” I’m like, “Yup.” Of course, they all get on, all kind of cocky, and they’re like, at 20 seconds on the first rep, they’re just like, “Uhh….” And I made them do it – the whole thing – and they all laid on the floor for two hours afterwards.

Jonathan: Yeah. So, you would do that for 30 seconds, then you’d rest for about two minutes and then you repeat that up to five times, so five 30-second repetitions – if you would like to call them something. Then, you’re done. Like Carrie’s already said, for anyone who’s like, “What? That’s 2.5 minutes of work!”….

Carrie: Try it.

Jonathan: Yeah. Anyone who says that just hasn’t tried it yet – and it’s not to be condescending – but people say, “Exercise less, smart, what?” Anyone who asks that question has not done this because as soon as you do it, you will understand how you have to. This isn’t the Smarter Science of How to be Lazy; it’s how to get the most bang for your bucks. This isn’t too good to be true. As Carrie has mentioned, this is not fun! A whole segment of the exercise industry is about, “Look at this fun new exercise you can do with your friends!” That’s fine. You can continue to do that, but if you want to change the way your body works – that’s not easy to do. You have to force your body to change and the amount of effort it takes to do that is such that you can’t do a lot of it, but for people like Carrie and myself who don’t like exercising, I’ll take 10-20 minutes a week of extremely high-quality exercise, giving me better results than any quantity of low-quality traditional exercise would give me every weekend, twice on Sunday.

Carrie: When I was cycling 7 miles a day, I never got 5% of the workout that I got doing 2.5 minutes of this eccentric cycling.

Jonathan: Well, it’s not technically eccentric cycling, but I know what you’re saying, yeah. Carrie, let’s go back to maybe two podcasts ago and just quickly recap the biology of why that’s true. Again, your intuition is spot-on with the biology. When we do traditional cardiovascular exercise, we only work one type of muscle fiber – our type I muscle fibers – and those muscle fibers really don’t…they’re what allow us to talk all day and walk and type, but they don’t really make us feel anything. As we start to increase the force of our exercise, we recruit our type IIa muscle fibers and our type IIx muscle fibers and finally our type IIb muscle fibers and when you say, I, in two hours of working… I mean, let me translate it into geek terms what you said. In two hours of working your type Ia muscle fibers is a walk in the park compared to two minutes of working all of your muscle fibers. Does that make sense? There’s no way no quantity of low-quality exercise will ever work those muscle fibers just like no quantity of bicep curls will ever work your leg muscles.

Carrie: I’m convinced that despite all the traditional exercise I’ve done… I started ballet when I was 2½ and I now know that a lot of ballet movements are actually eccentric – I know that because of what I know – and I did ballet for about 15 years, but when I stopped that, I did traditional exercise when I did exercise. I have never worked….! I know that since I’ve been doing this cycling. I’ve never worked those muscles since I was young doing ballet. I know that now. I didn’t know it all the years I was doing it. I’m merrily thinking that I’m doing some good, but one, two minutes on the bike the first time I did this was like, “Wow! Those muscles have never been used!” You can feel it. If you don’t believe us, just do it once and if what we’re saying isn’t true, never do it again.

Jonathan: There are two things that I think are exceptionally cool about it. The first is that anyone can do this. Like traditional interval training some people say, “Isn’t this just interval training?” Well, kind of, but traditional interval training requires you to move quickly. You sprint on a bike or like you go on the grass and you sprint. A lot of people can’t do that and it’s just not safe for a lot of people to do that. Everyone can do this because it’s zero impact. There’s no impact on your body, which is great! The other thing that’s really cool about it is we talk a lot about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results as Einstein’s definition of insanity.

This type of exercise – this smarter type of exercise – we’re talking about here is literally working aspects of your musculature that you have probably never worked in your entire life. If we want different results, we have to do something different. You will activate not only muscle fibers that you’ve never used, but the muscle fibers which are the muscle fibers that influence the hormones we’re after changing. So we have so much to be hopeful about. We can all do it and we’re doing something completely different and completely supported by science to give us a completely different result.

Carrie: It’s radical, but that’s what we need because we know what we’ve done for the last 40 years has not worked.

Jonathan: It hasn’t worked. In fact, just in case there’s anyone who is still like, “Where’s the science to back this up?” Fortunately, there is absolutely no shortage of science around this type of burst-based training. For example, University of Virginia researchers took two groups of women and had them do traditional cardiovascular exercise or this form of smarter cardiovascular exercise we’re talking about here and while the two groups burned the exact same number of calories exercising, the smarter exercise group spent significantly less time exercising while losing significantly more body fat, which is pretty cool.

Carrie: That is very cool.

Jonathan: A famous study done at McMaster University basically showed, again, one group doing a smarter form of cardiovascular exercise which totaled about 2.5 hours over the course of the study and another group that did more traditional cardiovascular exercise, they exercised for 10.5 hours over the course of the study. Both groups actually achieved the same results in all measurements taken during the study even though the smarter exercise group spent 320% less time exercising. The researchers actually remarked about the findings like this, “We thought there would be benefits, but we did not expect them to be this obvious. This study shows how effective short intense exercise can be.”

Another thing to keep in mind is that this isn’t limited to athletic performance. Even day-to-day cardiovascular, benefits like not being out of breath while we walk up a few flights of stairs, are achieved more effectively this way. Even with strengthening our heart, people say, “Don’t I need to do traditional cardiovascular exercise to strengthen my heart?” The answer is no. This form of exercise has been proven to do everything that traditional cardiovascular exercise does with one exception, which I’ll get to in a second, and then more in less time. The one exception is – if your goal is to run a marathon, the most effective way to train for that is to run marathons. However, if your goal is just about having a healthy cardiovascular system and healthy metabolic system and slimming down, there’s no question this is going to be preferable for you. So, along those ends, let us consult the experts and provide some studies here. We’re going to have Carrie start with Dr. Sesso at Harvard University.

Carrie: “Vigorous activities are associated with a reduced risk of coronary heart disease whereas moderate or light activities have no clear association with the risk of coronary heart disease.”

Jonathan: Quick translation – Smarter exercise is associated with reduced risk of coronary heart disease whereas traditional activities have no clear association with that risk. Another quote here, this is from Stanford University – “The intensity of effort was more important than the quantity of energy output in deterring hypertension and preventing premature mortality.” Again, translating – The quality of the work we’re doing or the force we’re generating, that’s what determines the health benefits; not how long we do the exercise for. Carrie, why don’t you go back to the Harvard University here with Dr. Lee?

Carrie: “There is an inverse association between relative intensity, physical activity, and risk of coronary heart disease.”

Jonathan: Do we need to exercise more to reduce our risk of coronary heart disease? Maybe, but what this researcher is telling us is that if we increase the quality or the intensity or the force of our exercise, that’s when we drop our risk. Similarly, the American Heart Association which ironically is a big proponent of traditional aerobic exercise has stated, “Vigorous intensity activities may have a greater benefit for reducing cardiovascular disease and premature mortality than moderate-intensity physical activities.” Yes, and that’s the end of the quote, I thought there was more there. Carrie, why don’t you wrap it up here with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology?

Carrie: This is somebody called P.M. Harim, who said, “Exercise training reduces the impact of the metabolic syndrome and the magnitude of the effort depends on exercise intensity.”

Jonathan: If you thought that was good, I just want to throw in two more here which have to do with aerobic capacity. This is kind of mend-bending because what many studies have actually shown is if your goal is just increased aerobic capacity, meaning the ability to run a 5K or the ability to do long-distance exercise – in fact, many cyclists are experiencing this already – doing this form of short but more intense exercise can potentially even be more beneficial. For example, Dr. Edward Coyle at the University of Texas found that high quality, excuse me I’m going to quote him directly here, “Interval training and untrained people can markedly increase aerobic endurance. This serves as a dramatic reminder of the potency of exercise intensity. Interval training is very time-efficient with much bang for the buck.” Then, Dr. Swain over at Old Dominion University has a similar quote, telling us that “Vigorous intensity exercise has been shown to increase aerobic fitness more effectively than moderate-intensity exercise, suggesting that the former (a.k.a. smarter exercise) may confirm greater cardio-protective benefits.”

Carrie: That’s amazing!

Jonathan: It saves us time, it gives us better aesthetic results, and the research is clear that it gives us better athletic results and better cardio-protective results. Sometimes we hear the phrase, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” Generally, that’s true, but this is an area of life where it’s….well I guess kind is. Like because [crosstalk 24:40]. It hurts like it’s not…there is a catch. The catch is it’s not fun. Yes, yes.

So, just to wrap up this week, one thing to keep in mind is that even if we forget about all that we’ve talked about in our previous podcasts and we’re like, “You know what? I just want to burn calories.” If your goal is to burn calories, you might say, “Well, I’ve got to exercise for longer because that’s the only way I’m going to burn calories.” Well, I want to mention just a little bit of science here because even if our goal is just to burn calories, traditional cardiovascular exercise is a terrible way to do even that. Even that misdirected goal traditional exercise that we’re told to do isn’t good. Let me give you an example. Thirty minutes of jogging burns about 170 more calories than we would’ve burned if we just sat down to listen to this podcast. That’s a key thing to keep in mind.

When you see the machines in the gym that supposedly tell you how many calories you’ve burned, they’re not telling you how many more calories you’ve burned than you would have if you weren’t on the machine. They’re approximating, they’re guessing at the total quantity of calories your body has burned during that time. That’s an important distinction because a huge percentage of that are calories that you would have burned, anyway. So, the question is not ‘how many calories did I burn during this hour of walking on the treadmill?’; the question is ‘how many more calories did I burn because I was walking on this treadmill?’

Two important points – one, a study was recently done with modern-day hunter-gatherers, the Hadza tribe, and what they found is that these hunter-gatherers were more active than traditional Westerners and that they did exercise more and they burned more calories exercising; not exercising at a gym, but foraging and hunting. What they then found is that the total daily energy expenditure of these modern-day hunter-gatherers was statistically the same as modern-day Westerners or domesticated people, which is in some ways baffling because you say, “Well, if these people were exercising more, how was their total daily caloric expenditure the same as people who weren’t exercising more?” Well, here’s why – our body tries to balance us out. So if we burn more calories during exercise, our body is just going to burn less calories when we’re not exercising. You want an example of this? You want to make yourself sleep better at night? You want to make yourself tired? Go for a 5-mile jog. You’ll be tired as hell afterwards and your body will actually run slower to compensate for the calories you burned. So, not only are you not burning a lot of calories, but even if you did, it doesn’t matter because your body is just going to run slower afterwards and this has been proven to make up for the calories you burn.

When it comes to burning calories – again, folks, we’re not going to meaningfully influence that equation, but put this into perspective – a 30-minute jog, 170 calories. Our livers every single day burn about 550 calories. So if we wanted to burn as many calories through jogging as our liver does just keeping us alive, we would have to jog for about an hour and a half every single day. Just to burn as many calories as our livers burn. That’s just our livers, which is shocking!

Carrie: Well [indiscernible 27:54]…yeah.

Jonathan: I think it’s interesting. Oh glazed over in terms of boring.

Carrie: Wow! In terms of Good Lord, I mean, really!!!

Jonathan: Again, let me caveat this with – What I’m not saying is, “Wow. All exercise is dumb. Let’s just sit around all day.” Clearly, that’s not the point. Being active is wonderful for our health. It’s good for us, but it’s not good at burning calories, it’s not good at changing our hormonal balance, and if that’s what we’re after, let’s do things that are good at that.

Cathy: Right. I think it’s easy for people to maybe listen to us and think we are bashing, but we just have one goal, which is not necessarily the same as everybody else, of course, and what we’re talking about here is specifically related to our goal, which is switching on the fat-burning hormones and burning fat.

Jonathan: And what’s really good news – I’m really glad you brought up that point of goals, Carrie – because it’s not just unique to us right? If you were listening to a football performance podcast, they would tell you how to become a better football player. That might make you better at basketball, maybe, but probably not. This is a podcast about how to change the way your body works so that your body operates more like a naturally thin person, a.k.a. you naturally achieve calorie balance around a slimmer point and that you have dramatic energy and that you’re very healthy and that you do that while eating an abundance of food and doing as little exercise as possible. There are certainly ways to be slim while eating little food and doing a lot of exercise; it’s just not very fun for most people.

Carrie: It’s often not healthy.

Jonathan: And it’s often not healthy. So again, we’re not here to say we’re better than anyone else; just like someone on a football podcast saying football is better than basketball. That’s not really an accurate thing to say, but what we can say is that the science definitely supports that if you don’t like starving yourself and if you don’t like stair-steppers, that doesn’t mean you have to live a life of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. It does mean that once you get access to what the actual experts have proven about these things, you can actually live a pretty incredible life once you’ve got the science on your side, which is what we’re trying to do here.

Carrie: But if people actually like going for an evening jog or they like swimming or whatever, that’s great! Just add this to that – it’s ten minutes a week. Add this to that and you’ll be getting a lot greater benefit. We’re not saying you don’t get to do the things you enjoy. We’re just saying that if you’re doing those things to burn fat, you’re going to be frustrated.

Jonathan: Exactly! I couldn’t say it any better myself. Well, Carrie, I think next week we’re going to talk about kind of putting all this exercise stuff together and we’ll talk about a smarter exercise program we can start to do, so we’ll kind of summarize a bit. Then we’ll actually talk about a controversial topic, which is part of the smarter exercise program is not involved doing any arm exercises or direct arm exercises. It also doesn’t involve doing any ab exercises and a lot of people asked what they want more than anything, it’s a flat toned tummy. We’re going to talk about how in fact the quickest way to get a flat toned tummy has nothing to do with exercising your ab muscles.

Carrie: That’s awesome!

Jonathan: Pretty awesome! Well, folks, hopefully this has been helpful. It’s been a blast for us as it always is.

Carrie: It always is. Even though you do not have an exciting shirt on for me today.

Jonathan: I do. I can solve that by having no shirt on.

Carrie: No. [crosstalk 31:41].

Jonathon: We better cut off the podcast now! It’s going into one of those after hours podcast.

Thanks for joining us, folks. Remember to eat more and exercise less, but smarter. Have a good week.

Jonathan: Wait, wait! Don’t stop listening yet.

Carrie: You can get fabulous free SANE recipes over at CarrieBrown.com.

Jonathan: And don’t forget, your 100% free ‘Eating and Exercise Quick Start Program’ as well as free, fun daily tips delivered right into your inbox at BailorGroup.com.

– How we increase the quality of cardio the same way we increase the quality of resistance training
– The actual difference between cardio and resistance training
– How it doesn’t matter what you do, it just matters how much resistance you use
– How to increase the quality of cardio without having to move any faster
– How to increase intensity while also increasing safety
– How smarter cardio is easier to get started with than smarter resistance training
– How less expensive mechanized stationary bikes are ideal for smarter cardio
– How the more fun an exercise is the less effective it is at fat burning
– Why traditional cardio is useless from a long-term fat loss perspective
– How smarter interval training can be done by everyone
– How smarter exercise will work muscle fibers you have never worked in your whole life
– How smarter exercise will work muscle fibers that control your fat-burning hormones
– How smarter exercise does everything traditional cardio does and much more