Long Runs, Extended Bike Rides and Steady Cardio Really Do Works?

Okay so I write that you need to do interval training and the days of long steady cardio are long gone in one blog or newsletter and then I tell you that it works. 

‘Bobby you must have lost your mind’ you say to yourself. Some of my clients really love to run marathons and if you have followed my newsletters for a while you know that there are a lot of bike riders and riding groups in AZ.

So my answer is that as a form of exercise long steady cardio works.  It isn’t the devil re-incarnated or he work of some sadistic trainer. Well for some people it is just not all of the time.  It’s not that it doesn’t work. 

 It’s just the least effective thing you can do.

 Let’s take a look at things I have spoken about recently regarding working out.  Long steady cardio takes a lot of your precious time. Strength training is the most important thing to do as your main source of fitness for fat loss. Therefore with an average personal training client I will not suggest running or biking for 45 minutes as the integral part of his/her training program.

Long slow cardio is less effective for fat loss than interval training and circuit training.   Simple truth.

However there are times I will let a client do that type of training.

Here are the times that I let my clients do long steady cardio:

If they simply hate high intensity intervals.  Look if I have a client and they are not going to do intervals then it does me no good to have them do nothing. 

Or maybe they used to love high intensity intervals, but they’ve been doing them for so long they are so ingrained with them that they need to break things up a bit.  Now I would change the intervals so they are more like 4-5 minutes at 7 on a scale of 1-10 first and then rest for 1-2 minutes before I let them go to “boresville” and have them run 3 miles at a slower pace than a turtle.

Finally I will often take a client who is so new to fitness and let them walk on a treadmill or ride a bike for 20-30 minutes because they simply cannot do intervals yet.  For this person doing long steady cardio is just what the doctor ordered.  They are making an effort to get moving and it is not wise for them to start with intervals just yet.  Sometimes I can do intervals 1x a week but then I cannot have them perform the interval workout again for another week.  I don’t want them to not workout at all.  I just want them to get some sort of exercise 3 more times that week.  In that case long steady workouts are just fine.  

If you totally love long steady cardio, do it!  It is so much better than nothing at all.

After a crazy and hectic day, sometimes nothing helps me de-stress like a nice setting my MP3 player on shuffle and hitting the road for a nice long run.

Knowing me I will still sprint from telephone pole to telephone pole at least a few times.