Body Weight Cardio – It Works Better

Cardio sucks. I hate long slow boring cardio. It’s long. It’s slow. And it’s boring. And it doesn’t work for to help you get lean or fit. So, unless you like long, slow boring cardio, there’s no reason to do it. EVER.

Fat loss is always a hot topic though and often times people will resort to the long, slow boring cardio for lack of a better option.

There’s good news for you. I’m all about being efficient when I’m training so I wanted to share this with you since it’s the stuff I like to do. It’s from my coach and mentor, Craig Ballantyne, or CB. It’s pretty enlightening.

By Craig Ballantyne

The truth about Bodyweight Cardio is that it has the worst name in Turbulence Training history. I’m not sure what I was thinking when I put that label on it, but I got 3 workouts deep and pretty much stuck with the name.

A better physiological description would be, “Bodyweight Interval Training” or “Bodyweight Metabolic Conditioning”.  I call bodyweight circuits a hybrid of strength and interval training. The bodyweight exercises used in these particular workouts are not so intense that they will cause you to gain muscle, but  neither would you be able to work as hard as you can during sprint training. You won’t burn as many calories in 30 minutes of bodyweight cardio
as you would in 30 minutes of running at a fast pace.

Think about this…each pushup you do must burn less than 1/3 of a calorie. After all, if you do 100 pushups in 3 minutes (that’s my score in the Martin Rooney 3-minute pushup test), there’s no way that I’m burning more than 15 calories per minute (not when running at a fast pace only burns 16-20 calories per minute).

So in terms of “within workout” calorie burning, bodyweight cardio does not beat regular cardio.

That said, because bodyweight cardio is a combination of resistance training and interval training, you should get greater post-workout calorie and fat burning benefits.

And knowing what we know today about metabolic resistance training, and based on Alwyn Cosgrove’s description of the two types of MRT, it is easy to place bodyweight cardio in the metabolic conditioning category (higher reps, less soreness from a session, sustained high heart rate).

As Alwyn says, “Your body doesn’t really know what it’s doing, all it knows is that it gets your heart rate up.”

So the key and challenge is to create bodyweight cardio workouts that put the greatest demand on our cardiovascular systems (to burn a lot of calories within the workout) while taking advantage of the depletion results from the interval-like and resistance properties of bodyweight training to increase the between-session calorie burn (like we get from regular weight training).

To do this, we should use the non-competing exercise rule we use in our TT workouts. If creating a circuit, going from a lower-body exercise to an upper-body exercise is most appropriate, as is focusing on as many single-leg exercises as possible.

The “Big 5″ circuit approach works well for this: Squat, Push, Pull, Single-Leg, Total Body Ab, as does the Big 6 (addition of a jump exercise at the start) and Big 7 (further addition of a sprint type exercise at the end of the circuit).

Bottom Line: Bodyweight cardio will help you get that lean, athletic look, even when you don’t have access to any equipment.

You won’t build a lot of muscle, but you can burn quite a few calories and lose body fat almost as fast as with any other TT workout (of course, there will always be people who respond to this workout at extreme levels – and that’s why you need to experiment and find out what works best for you).

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