May 9, 2023

X3 FAQ: Why Isn’t Cardio Part of the X3 12-Week Program?

The great majority of people who engage in “cardio” exercise do so in order to lose weight. However, because cardiovascular exercise raises cortisol, this may be one of the worst ways to achieve that aim.

Full Transcript

Steady-state cardiovascular exercise is not part of the X3 program, and we get a lot of questions about that because cardio has been, the go-to type thing for weight loss for a long time and we’re gonna explain why that’s not true, and also those better ways to get cardiovascular health, meaning the health of your heart and your lungs.

Now, I am gonna also say that if you wanna be a great distance runner, you have to distance run, because the body’s gonna adapt to the environment that you put it in.

So you put the body in an environment that has extremely heavy loading, even heavier with Variable resistance and weight training, it’s gonna adapt to that and you can get bigger and stronger.

If you put the body in an environment where it has to go long distances, it’s going to make changes, based on optimizing you for going long distances.

And let me explain, why that’s not necessarily a good or bad thing. It’s just a thing. And that’s what the body does.

So, you got to think about what the central nervous system is gonna do, when you’re trying to show the body that you wanna go long distances, you know, with a limited amount of fuel, ‘cause you’re trying to lose body fat, right?

What happens, is the body sees an energy expenditure and a fuel availability that don’t necessarily match.

Let’s say you run 10 miles and you’re running for an extended period of time, the body says, okay, we want to shrink the engine, of the body because then we’ll burn less fuel as we go that same distance.

You lose muscle when you do cardio, and cortisol, attenuates this.

The cortisol goes up when you do steady-state cardio and you start to lose muscle. The other thing cardio does is it protects your body fat and helps you store more body fat.

So now, most people who do cardio are also at a caloric deficit, so they’re not necessarily in danger of getting fatter, but they have a hormonal situation that is protecting their body fat and sacrificing their muscle.

The weight you lose when you do cardio is muscle, not body fat. It’s the opposite of what almost everybody who does cardio wants.

This is why it’s not part of the program and there are studies that back this up, this has been very well understood. This has been in literature and academic literature for more than 40 years.

The fact that the fitness industry never picked it up is just a shame on the fitness industry. There are not a lot of people who can read a lot of research in the fitness industry.

I understand why, but you know, I go to scientific conferences on sports medicine, and they talk about this all the time, whereas you look at the industry and it’s like, cardio’s for weight loss and strength training is for building muscle and neither story is even close to being that simple and one of those stories is dead wrong.

Now there’s another great study, that’s a meta-analysis that looks at how strength training actually makes your heart and lungs, stronger than cardiovascular exercise.

The point is health. You’re getting everything you need from strength training and X3 is strength training, so you will get that cardiovascular health benefit from your X3 exercise as you would from strength training, probably even to a higher degree and more so than you would get from cardiovascular exercise.

We’ve got the health thing covered and you’re gonna be leaner and stronger and look better. Women will look, you know, in a more feminine shape with a little bit of muscle and less body fat, and men obviously have the hormones to build a lot more muscle.

That is why, we do not include cardiovascular exercise in our programming.

Lastly, I’d like to add, I know there’s gonna be some people who do cardio, steady-state cardio, maybe triathletes, maybe distance runners, they can check out, the book, " _Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time " where they can see the in-depth analysis and all of the references on this subject because we covered it, in the book, at length.

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