Total Health Breakthroughs: Free Natural Health Newsletter and Alternative Health Articles

Endurance exercise is a futile fitness disaster…

Endurance exercise – the universally touted “cardio” – is not the key to health and fitness. Quite the opposite. Cardio is a myth that is not only unhealthy and potentially dangerous, it is completely unnatural.

No doubt you’ve heard otherwise from countless health “experts” who urge you to pound the pavement or jump on the treadmill for hours at the gym. But your body wasn’t designed for long, repetitive exercise. Worse, it can make you more vulnerable to disease.

Many of us have come to think of cardio (short for cardiovascular endurance training) as a synonym for heart conditioning. Yet, according to Dr. Al Sears, author of P.A.C.E. – The 12-Minute Fitness Revolution, when you study the heart’s reaction to repeated sessions of cardio, the evidence refutes that theory.

This type of strenuous workout, without rest, mimics prolonged stress. And as you will learn in a moment, it also causes your body to adapt in a way that is counterproductive to your health and longevity.

For all your effort, you only reduce your ability to handle life’s demanding circumstances – and that’s the last thing you want. With less reserve heart capacity available on call, you invite trouble when a stressful situation arises.

But Everyone Says…

Magazines are full of articles on how to keep up with your cardio workouts. Doctors and trainers at the gym say you need to do aerobic endurance exercise to keep your heart in shape. Nothing could be further from the truth. And this is not how our bodies were designed to perform.

Dr Sears’ PACE® program is based on the idea of “native fitness” (how our ancestors survived in the natural environment for eons). It works with your body’s genetic design.

Our ancestors didn’t run marathons or jump around for an hour doing aerobics. And they didn’t sit in front of computers or the television the entire day. They moved around a lot at a low level of exertion. And then every once in a while they exerted themselves at nearly 100% of their capacity – hunting prey or escaping from it.

This pattern of brief intense movement, followed by rest, and lots of low level activity is hardwired in your genes. Your muscles, bones and organ systems are reflections of this genetic design. The way they work together is the formula for strength, vitality and long life.

Let’s look at some hard data.

Clinical Evidence Incriminates Cardio

Dr. Arthur Siegel, director of internal medicine at MacLean Hospital in Massachusetts and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard University, has led more than two dozen studies on runners of the Boston Marathon.

One of his recent reports, published in the medical journal Circulation, was conducted on 60 runners who were tested before and after the 2004 and 2005 Boston Marathon. Each runner had a cardiogram to look for abnormalities in heart rhythm.

They were also checked for evidence of cardiac problems in their blood. Researchers used troponin, a protein found in cardiac muscle cells, as a marker of cardiac damage. If the heart is traumatized, troponin shows up in the blood. (Its presence is also used to determine whether heart damage has been sustained during a heart attack.)

Before the marathon, all runners – 41 men and 19 women – had normal cardiac function with no signs of troponin in their blood. But twenty minutes after finishing the race, 60% of the group had elevated troponin levels and 40% had levels high enough to indicate the destruction of heart muscle cells. In addition, most had noticeable changes in their heart rhythms.

Dr. Seigel commented, “Their hearts appear to have been stunned.” He then concluded, “Your body doesn’t know whether you’ve run a marathon… or been hit by a truck.”

Exactly! During long-duration exercise, your heart is under constant stress with no time to rest and recover. When this goes on long enough, the heart is traumatized, as Dr. Seigel’s studies confirm.

Don’t Force Negative Adaption

Your body is not a machine – it’s an adaptive organism that has its own intelligence. Nature has designed your body to adapt to whatever environment it encounters. If you ask it to perform an activity repeatedly and routinely, it will gradually change the systems involved to meet the challenge more effectively.

Endurance exercise causes your heart and lungs to adapt for endurance. But these organs are already endurance machines. Your heart beats continuously and your lungs expand and contract with every breath you take. Forced, continuous, endurance exercise prompts your heart and lungs to “downsize.” Reducing to smaller capacity allows you to go further, more efficiently, and with less rest and less fuel.

But shrinking the output of your heart and lungs means you’ve traded reserve capacity – which you might need in an emergency – for overall efficiency. Heart attacks don’t occur because you lack endurance. They occur when there is a sudden increase in cardiac demand that exceeds your heart’s capacity. That’s why you need some output to spare.

You certainly don’t want to be operating at maximum capacity when you are challenged by a sudden stressful event. Without any reserve, something as simple as shoveling a snowy sidewalk, dancing at a wedding or having sex can trigger a heart attack.

That’s a serious price to pay for succumbing to the cardio myth.

Stay On Track with Positive Adaption

The real key to protecting and strengthening your heart is to activate the opposite adaptive response of that produced by continuous cardio. You want to increase your heart’s reserve capacity. Bigger, faster cardiac output – held in reserve and immediately available – is what you really need.

That’s why one of the key components of the PACE® Program is to exercise in short bursts of intense exertion, followed by rest and recovery. And when I use the word “intense,” I am using it as a relative term. Someone who hasn’t walked around the block in two years is going to start at a different level than a person who is much more fit.

But the principle is the same. What is “intense” for one individual will be completely different for someone else. Achieving that relative intensity is what matters.

The Harvard Health Professionals Study backs Dr. Sears up on this. After following over 7,000 people, researchers confirmed that the key to exercise is NOT length or endurance. It’s intensity. The more intense the exertion, the lower the risk of heart disease was in study participants.

So if you’re going to adapt to something, make sure it is giving you positive benefits – like a heart and lungs with energy to spare – not a downsized version that can’t come to your rescue.

Free Up Your Valuable Time

PACE® makes long, boring routines a thing of the past because it consists of short bursts of intensity followed by rest and recovery. Total exertion is never more than 20 minutes. It’s a natural rhythm, taken directly from nature, which bypasses all the dangers of traditional exercise.

In only ten to twenty minutes a day, you’ll see your muscles return, your body grow lean, and you’ll have more energy than you know what to do with.

The next time you see an article proclaiming the wonders of cardio – skip it. Because now you know: endurance exercise is not only a fitness disaster, it’s a waste of time.

To Your Health,

Jon Herring
Editorial Director
Total Health Breakthroughs