The Life Plan (50 page)

This individual needs to train at a heart rate somewhere between 126 bpm and 153 bpm to be in a training zone that will enable his heart and lungs to receive the most benefit. Ideally, you should wear a heart rate monitor during the cardio portion of your exercise, to ensure that you are at an efficient and safe heart rate zone.

If you are fit and in good shape, your heart rate should recover quickly to pre-exercise level within two minutes after exercise. A healthy heart-rate recovery is a decrease in your pulse of 50 to 65 beats per minute at two minutes after you exercise. An abnormal heart-rate recovery is a failure to decrease your heart rate by more than 20 beats per minute two minutes after you exercise. If your recovery heart rate falls in the abnormal category, it could simply mean that you are out of shape and deconditioned, or it could be a sign of a more serious heart condition. While a general recovery heart-rate test can be done on your own or in a gym, you should have a formal stress test administered by a cardiologist if you are over 45, have a family history of heart disease, experience shortness of breath, chest pain, discomfort, or dizziness during exercise, or have an abnormal heart-rate recovery similar to that described above.

The last piece to the cardio workout puzzle is: Just how much cardio exercise do we need? I have found that men need to burn 1,000 to 2,000 calories (kilocalories) per week doing cardio to lose weight and maintain great health. Just a clarification note here, calories are really kilocalories, but we Americans have simplified the term over the years to just calories. Whenever I mention kilocalories, you need to think calories.

You can easily calculate the amount of cardio exercise you need to achieve this goal. Let’s use the same 50-year-old guy as the example. All you have to do is replace his exercise and his numbers with your exercise and numbers and you will have the answer that has taken scientists and exercise physiologists decades to come up with.

First, let’s assume he is a runner and can run at the speed of 8.5 mph, which is 9.0 METs. Next, we need to know his weight, which is 180 pounds or 81.8 kilograms (180 lbs/2.2 lbs per kg = 81.8 kg). To calculate kilocalories per minute we multiply the METs times 3.5 times his body weight in kilograms (kg) and divide by 200 (i.e., kcal/min = [METs x 3.5 x kg body weight] ÷ 200):

Our 50-year-old burns 12.88 kcal per minute when he runs on the treadmill at 8.5 mph. Now we need to know how much he must train to burn 2,000 calories (kilocalories) a week. Let’s say he wants to do cardio 5 times a week, so he must burn 400 calories (2,000 ÷ 5 = 400) each time he gets on the treadmill. We know he burns 12.88 kcal per minute, so he must stay on the treadmill for 31 minutes (400 kcal ÷ 12.88 kcal per minute = 31 minutes).

There you have it. It’s that simple to figure out just how much cardio you need to do each week to max out the health of your heart and lungs, and achieve a lean, fit, sexy body.

Once you know which exercise you will choose, and the rate at which you can perform it safely and effectively, you need to choose the intensity at which you will train. The following are various types of exercise training that can be followed during your cardio workout. I believe the best of these is high-intensity interval training, which I have discussed last. You can choose the type that you like and will consistently perform. The absolute key to cardio training is to
just do it
, as Nike says. And keep doing it. If you get tired of a particular type of exercise, don’t stop exercising entirely. Just change to another exercise or another form of training.

Continuous training is cardio training that involves no rest intervals. It can be high intensity, moderate intensity, long slow distance, or fartlek training. Continuous training usually means working at 60 to 80 percent of maximum energy for at least 20 minutes, three to four times a week.

This is continuous training at 85 to 95 percent of your maximum energy. This is a great way to develop your cardiovascular endurance. However, you need to mix this with some slower-paced training, such as LSD or fartlek (see definition below) at least once or twice a week to avoid overtraining and exercise burnout. You also need to have a good aerobic base and medical clearance before you start high-intensity continuous training.

This form of aerobic endurance training is used in running and cycling, when you train at a talking pace. If you can’t talk, you are going too fast. I do not believe this form of cardio is a good way to improve your cardiovascular conditioning and get rid of body fat.

Fartlek means “speed play” in Swedish. This is a form of conditioning in which the intensity or speed of the exercise varies. This type of training stresses both the aerobic and anaerobic energy systems. It consists of a 5- to 10-minute warmup, followed by a steady, hard speed for a mile or two, followed by fast walking for about 5 minutes, then sprint work until tired, followed by easy running, then full speed uphill for 100 yards, followed by fast walking for 1 minute, and so on. Fartlek training is a great way to get into tip-top shape and burn off lots of body fat. You must make sure your aerobic conditioning is great and you have passed your stress test with flying colors before you start this kind of training.

Interval training or high-intensity interval training (HIIT) is a form of training that is getting a lot of publicity lately. It is an exercise strategy that is very attractive to busy men because it improves performance with short training sessions lasting from 4 to 35 minutes. This is training that involves major muscle groups like your legs, back, and arms for people who are serious about dropping body fat and improving the functional capacity of their cardiovascular and pulmonary systems.

Dr. Izumi Tabata has proposed a four-minute form of HIIT that he claims is excellent for dropping body fat and increasing muscular endurance. I am concerned that cardio training of such short duration will not result in the production of cardio-protective stress proteins, which were discovered by Dr. Starnes and discussed earlier, and may not maximally improve heart and lung function and health. In addition, it doesn’t begin to reach the 1,000 to 2,000 calories per week goal I discussed earlier. Until proven otherwise, I am promoting HIIT sessions lasting 20 to 25 minutes with a 5-minute warmup and a 5-minute cool-down period as the best way to achieve heart and lung protection and burn body fat. This is what I have been doing for the past year, and I can assure you it works.

HIIT is very physically demanding and isn’t for everybody. If you have existing cardiovascular problems or other health concerns that limit your ability to exercise intensely, or if you are new to aerobic training, HIIT may not be right for you now, but you will be able to work up to it. It is not advised for the deconditioned until a stress test has been performed and adequate cardio efficiency has been developed.

This type of training is more effective for inducing fat loss than the longer-duration or steady-state cardio training methods described above. HIIT allows you to take advantage of excess postexercise oxygen consumption (EPOC), which occurs when your body continues to take in more oxygen after you finish exercising to replace the anaerobic work done (O
₂
debt) during the high-intensity bouts of exercise you just performed. This is why after a sprint you breathe (or pant) until you have completely replaced the oxygen debt you created. By replenishing this debt of oxygen your body will slowly return to a resting state, keeping your metabolism high as it returns.

When you do HIIT exercise, you clearly get an extra bang for your buck, because EPOC also has a positive effect on resting metabolism. One experiment found EPOC increased resting metabolism by 13 percent three hours after exercise, and 4 percent after 16 hours. Another study demonstrated an increase in resting metabolism that lasted for 24 hours.

The definition of HIIT is high-intensity work alternated with rest or periods of low-intensity work. These bursts of high-intensity training are at the anaerobic zone (80 to 90 percent of max heart rate). During the periods of low intensity, your heart rate comes back down to around 50 percent of your max heart rate.

I believe that another great approach to cardio for many men is a mixture of both moderate-intensity and HIIT. You can do two or three 35-minute HIIT sessions and two or three 50-minute moderate sessions a week. Mixing them up can make cardio training more interesting.