Alpha Progression
Do you have to do cardio to stay healthy
If you enjoy cardio, want to lose weight faster, or want to focus on improving your endurance performance, it may make sense to do cardio in addition to strength training. For example, you could jog, swim, or bike 2 or 3 times a week.
But what if you are "only" interested in staying healthy? Do you HAVE to do cardio even then? This is an important question because many people see cardio as torture. Either they do it anyway and endure this torture or they don't do it and feel guilty as a result.
As is almost always the case, there is no single answer to the question of whether additional cardio on top of strength training is necessary for good health. It depends on how much you move in everyday life and what your strength training program looks like.
"Good" health
But before we get into your strength training program and activity level, let's clarify what "good health" means! Since we're talking about CARDIO training, we're interested in cardiovascular health. "Cardio", in fact, comes from "cardiovascular" and suggests the cardiovascular (heart and circulatory) system.
Fortunately, we do not have to come up with our own definition here. In fact, world-renowned medical institutes have defined some indicators that must be met in order to speak of "good" cardiovascular health.
For example, the American Heart Association specifies that fasting blood glucose levels should be below 100 mg per dL, blood pressure should be below 120 over 80, and blood cholesterol should be below 200 mg per dL - just to name a few of many relevant indicators.
Now we know what constitutes good cardiovascular health, but what needs to be done to achieve it?
Here, the major medical institutes give roughly the same recommendations: 150 minutes of moderate-intensity cardio training or 75 minutes of high-intensity cardio training per week. They also recomend strength training at least two times per week. So does this really mean we need to do cardio regularly? Not quite...
For the average Westerner who doesn't do any strength training and doesn't move much in their daily life, these are very good recommendations! This hypothetical person would definitely do their health a favor by doing regular cardio workouts.
The problem with these blanket recommendations, however, is that they don't take into account activity level and strength training volume beyond two times a week. These are two factors that can have a huge impact on the health of your cardiovascular system.
NEAT level
The term "non-exercise activity thermogenesis" (or "NEAT" for short) is often used when talking about activity levels. This includes the calories you burn doing everyday things, such as taking out the trash or going for a walk.
What doesn't fall under this category are the calories you burn during exercise specifically - hence the words "non-exercise."
Why is your NEAT level important? The higher your NEAT level, the better your health is likely to be. This has already been shown in several studies and is largely down to two main reasons.
- First, if you move a lot, your muscles will need to be supplied with a lot of blood. Thus, by moving frequently you challenge and train your cardiovascular system.
- Second, the more you exercise, the less likely you are to become (or remain) medically overweight. As a result, you will stay (or become) healthier from a cardiovascular perspective. In fact, being medically overweight correlates 1:1 with poor cardiovascular health.
By the way, the differences in the NEAT levels of different people are considerable. If you sit at a desk all day, your NEAT level is likely about 300 calories per day.
However, if you have a job where you are physically very active, then your NEAT level may be a good 2300 calories per day. This large difference of 2000 calories corresponds to about 3 kebabs per day that you burn as a more active person when compared to the person with a desk job!
If you hardly move at all as part of your daily routine, your cardiovascular system will atrophy and there is a higher chance that you will gain (or retain) weight. The latter then makes it more likely that your cardiovascular health will suffer even more from the lack of exercise.
But if you have a high NEAT level, then you are exercising your cardiovascular system regularly and strengthening it even more by probably not becoming (or staying) medically overweight.
So the bottom line is: the more you move in your daily life, the less cardio you have to do for your health.
Strength training
Of course, strength training is also a relevant factor here. Not only does strength training, prevent osteoporosis, and have many other positive effects, but it also strengthens your cardiovascular system.
This was shown, for instance, in a literature review by Steel et al. (2012). The positive effects of strength training on the cardiovascular system are not quite as strong as those associated with targeted cardio training - but they do exist! How strong these effects are depends on how and how much strength training you do.
If you do strength training with longer and more frequent sessions, then you naturally also set a stronger training stimulus for your cardiovascular system. However, it is not only the amount of training that matters, but also the type of strength training.
Upper body exercises for small muscle groups (e.g. curls for biceps) with long rest times between sets (e.g. 5 minutes) and few reps (e.g. 6 reps) performed far from muscular failure (e.g. 10 reps in reserve (RIR) at the completion of sets) have little positive effect on your cardiovascular system.
On the other hand, lower body exercises for large muscle groups (e.g. quad-focused squats) with short rest periods (e.g. 2 minutes) and many repetitions (e.g. 15 reps) performed close to muscular failure (e.g. 1 RIR at the end of sets) will have a strong positive effect.
Try it out! Your heart will be pumping at full speed in the second example!
That said, if you structure your strength training around maximizing the cardiovascular impact, focusing mainly on sets like the ones in the second scenario above, this may be suboptimal for your training from a hypertrophy perspective. Be sure to still work out all of your muscle groups and use the rep ranges and rest times that will work best for building a balanced physique if that is your goal; if this conflicts with the heart-healthy style of training described above, cardio is always there as an option!
The more strength training you do per week, the less cardio you need to do.
If you then also train your lower body hard with great exercises, not too few reps, not too long breaks between sets, and close to muscular failure, then you will need to do less or even no additional cardio.
Conclusion
How active you are in your daily life and what your current strength training program looks like will determine if you need to do cardio in addition to strength training to maintain your cardiovascular health.
If you rarely exercise and do little taxing strength training, then you would be well advised to do cardio in addition.
In this case, as the major medical institutes suggest, you could do, say, 150 minutes of moderate-intensity cardio exercise per week.
This is equivalent to about 45 minutes of jogging three times a week. However, if you move often during your daily activities and do a lot of strenuous strength training, then you don't need to do additional cardio.
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