We need to be smart with cardio. Running your daily 10 kilometers and participating in exclusively endurance based high intensity cardio can be catabolic. This means your body wants to be as small as possible, so it can carry you for as long as possible. To do this your body breaks down muscle to make you lighter to carry in endurance based activities.  It starts to break down tissue and has no resources to rebuild. Please note, poorly programmed RT programs can do this too! 

When it comes to doctors orders, they are typically cardio based prescriptions urging patients to get 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous aerobic activity each week. That’s just 21 minutes of activity each day, and that’s great! We support that everyone should be moving each day whether you walk, run, crawl or sprint, we believe movement is health.

However, this neglects the importance of resistance training. Resistance training (RT) is moving external force for intentional muscle adaptations. We need to pick things up and put them down, just like our bodies are required to do every single day. Here’s the Jolt Fitness prescription:

When you walk into a “classic” style gym, the majority of the room is taken up with foreign looking resistance training machines like an ocean of plastic, iron, and someone else’s sweat as people rip through generic circuits day in and day out.