This is an excerpt from last week’s Elite Body interview with Turbulence Training creator Craig Ballantyne about the “dark side” of cardio.

Jim:  I think something that may be new information for some people, is that you’re not a huge fan of cardio, are you?

Craig: I’m not a huge fan of it in terms of people looking to lose body fat obviously in short time periods.  I mean if somebody likes doing it; if somebody wants to be the triathlete, you know what, go ahead and do it and love what you do. But, I’m not a big fan of it for those people I see who are running on the sidewalk and look like they despise every single minute they are doing it.  That is probably a greater percentage of the people who do it when they are looking to lose weight.  I’ve got farmed with enough to studies to say that it’s not what it’s all cracked up to be in some of the articles that you’ll see out there.  I’m just not a fan of it in terms of that.  I’m not a fan of having somebody do stuff they don’t like to achieve a goal when there’s other ways to do it.

I’m not a big fan of certain machines in the gym for cardio.  It may not be the machine itself, but it may be the excuses.  Its human nature that some of these machines allow us to slide by and do stuff that we think is helping us, but subconsciously we’re taking the easy way out.  I have what I call the human nature test; because I always make fun of elliptical machines and I really think that they are not again what people make them out to be.

If you took . . . let’s say you take 100 people.  You go to a mega gym – you’ve got 100 treadmills, you’ve got 100 elliptical machines – you take 100 people into that room and you say, “Okay, you have to work out for 30 minutes at a pretty good pace.  You choose your machine.”  You know darn well that 70-80 of those people are going to be on the elliptical machines rather than the treadmill.  To me, that says something.  I’m intuitive about that, and I just think that we’re taking the easy way out.

You can extend it even further and say, “Okay, you’ve got 100 people; you’ve got 100 treadmills or you’ve got a track.  Go do your training.  You can either do the treadmill or the track.”  You know 80% of those people are probably going to use the treadmill too.  Choices like that I think; humans take the easy way out.  It’s not always a bad thing to do, but when it comes to interval training it’s at least as good if not better than cardio training and at a shorter time amount.

The other thing that I’m against in terms of cardio is – I refer to it as one of the dark sides of cardio – is that people can get injured doing a high volume of cardio work.  Now that’s not to say you can’t get injured doing a high volume of body building work.  I personally when I was young and reading the magazines, I was doing too much upper body work and had a little bit of shoulder problems; not anything I haven’t been able to get over.

Again, that comes down to volume of work.  Too much volume in lifting, too much volume in cardio and you’re going to end up in the doctor’s office or the physiotherapy office.  I know plenty of physiotherapists; they tend to be . . . as you know, health experts tend to be people who like to do exercise and those physios who know better are often getting treated themselves.  There’s one physio that I worked in a gym where she worked, and she literally could not walk properly because she did so many spinning classes.

Spinning classes are another thing I’m not a huge fan of.  There’s great benefit to the group mentality because social support is huge.  But, why do something for 45 minutes when you can get the same results in 20 minutes or better results.  Also, I’m not a big fan of the high RPM spinning because I think that’s where a lot of hip problems have been developed in people that I’ve trained personally and also in some of the classes I’ve watched.  I mean I just don’t think that it’s great for your hips, especially in women who have hip problems already from childbirth.  To just be going at 140-160 RPM or whatever they are doing and you just watch their bodies, and without to use a broad and encompassing term, without the right core and musculature and stability there, they are going to end up with problems.

I can find . . . I guess I can poke a hole in any of these types of training.  Nothing’s perfect, but there are some things that are often overlooked by people who use these things.  We should all have a little more critical thinking in how we train.  I mean I’m not perfect in what I do in my own workouts too, but I think that’s a huge, huge thing that we want to avoid overuse injuries from cardio, especially in the weight loss industry or the weight loss goal setting plan that we have.

One last thing I’ll say on this is that an aerobic training program is probably one of the worst places to start a 300 pound person out on a fat loss program because their muscles are not prepared for this and neither are their joints.  Quite frankly, I wouldn’t want to run with an extra 120 pounds on my back, or even walk quickly.  We need to re-examine where we start people out.