Before we get into today's episode, if you want to actually improve your body composition and are sick of random workouts that just wear you down and burn you out, that's exactly why I built Evlo. Evlo is science-backed strength training designed to help you build muscle, improve body composition, and feel better in your body without beating yourself up or living in the gym. You can try Evlo now for two weeks free if you visit evlofitness.com. Welcome to the Dr. Shannon Show Body Recomposition Capsule. There's so much fitness advice out there. And quite frankly, much of it isn't true. So in this 10 episode series, we're covering all the science-based tools for body recomposition. You may have heard me cover many of these topics before, and some things will be brand new. I wanted to create one organized capsule of information that will give you all the important concepts for improving your body composition, because we know improving your body composition isn't just external. It has incredible benefits for your health, energy, mood, and longevity. I'm your host, Shannon Ritchie. Welcome to the show. Cardio for body recomposition. Cardio is one of the most overly complicated aspects of health right now, it seems. And I won't lie, I've done many podcast episodes about cardio and my opinion has shifted and molded over the years. I went from doing a lot of cardio and thinking that more and more exercise was needed to body recomposition. And obviously that didn't work. It just wore me down and made me feel exhausted and in chronic pain and really hungry. Um, to then I did almost no cardio. And I even used to say on this podcast years ago that strength training can double as cardio, which we have seen that strength training and cardio have different adaptations in your body. So you really do need both. So now I recommend cardio to everyone. And the truth is cardio and strength training don't need to work against each other when they're dosed correctly. In fact, your cardio will help your strength work and your strength work will help your cardio. That said, not many people properly balance cardio and strength training. It is tricky. And of course it depends on your goal. If your goal is to run a marathon, on, you'll be balancing strength and cardio doses much differently than if your goal is body recomposition. But if your goal is body recomposition, which I'm guessing it is, since you're here listening today, I'll help you configure a cardio schedule to do alongside your strength workout that will be effective and sustainable. So let's talk about what the science actually says about burning calories or energy expenditure. I did a podcast recently about the updated science on this if you wanna learn a little bit more, but it's extremely common for people, including myself in the past, to rely on cardio to burn more calories or to burn fat or to burn off what you're eating or what you will eat if your goal is to be leaner or even maintain the amount of leanness that you have. But focusing on building muscle, not burning calories, will have so much of a better, more sustainable, higher payoff than just trying to burn calories. This doesn't mean that cardio is not a part of the body recomposition equation because it is. In fact, our understanding of how we burn calories is evolving, but it's still very uncertain. So I did a podcast about how there are two conflicting schools of thought. One is that calories burned are constrained and that you burn calories from exercise only to a certain point, then you plateau as the body compensates. The theory is that the body reduces energy expenditure in other systems like fidgeting or hormonal processes or reproduction or your immune system as you burn more energy from exercise or activity. Then in October of 2025, a study was published that found the opposite. It did not find any evidence for calorie compensation. It found that as we increase activity, your daily energy expenditure continues to increase with no signs of a plateau. So where's the truth? Does your body plateau or does it not plateau? There's likely some compensation when you're in a calorie deficit or at high levels of activity. A lot of activity also may cause compensatory eating right So if you do a lot of activity your hunger may increase in which you end up replacing any calories you burned in the food that you're eating. So in short, we don't fully have the answers. We don't understand. I'm just gonna let the researchers duke it out and I'll continue to stay tuned on what the answer is. Odds are our metabolism is extremely complex and it's more individual. So I don't recommend tracking calories because we just don't have the answers. Exercise also doesn't burn as many calories as you think or as your fitness watch is telling you. A jog may burn maybe anywhere between like 150 calories all the way up to 400 calories. It just depends on you. It depends on the intensity. It depends on your genetics. So many things. The length of the run. So I don't recommend tracking calories burned. I just don't do it because your smartwatch may estimate that you burn 500 to 700 calories, but that's often very inflated and not physiologically realistic for most people. Most people dramatically overestimate how many calories their workout burns. So I don't recommend tracking it because when your goal is body recomposition, we want to be in a small calorie deficit. If you're just tracing calories, you might overestimate how many calories you burn. If you're tracking your food, you might enter that into something like MyFitnessPal, and that might overinflate how many calories you can eat. So you might be unknowingly eating in a calorie surplus. If you're chasing calories, you might also opt for a workout that feels sweaty or exhausting rather than one that creates substantial tension on the muscle, which is ultimately what has the biggest impact for body composition because muscle growth is extremely important in this equation. All that said, incorporating regular cardio will help keep your total energy expenditure high, which can be helpful for fat loss. It's small, but it's a meaningful piece of this equation. So I don't want to say that it's not important. I just want to say, don't overemphasize it and don't do too much because the last thing we want to do is burn ourselves out and hurt ourselves. So how much cardio should we aim for if your goal is overall health and body recomposition? For health benefits and to keep energy expenditure high, I recommend aiming for 150 minutes per week of light to moderate intensity cardio in addition to your strength workouts. For me, this is our steady state class, which is our 15 minute kind of moderate intensity cardio class. I do that one to two times per week. I teach it once and then sometimes I'll take it again. and I also just walk daily. In our neighborhood, we have hills and I also wear my baby. So my walks are probably considered light to moderate and I do that for at least 30 minutes every day. The World Health Organization says that you can do 150 minutes of light to moderate intensity cardio or you can do 75 minutes of moderate to high intensity cardio instead. So 75 minutes of moderate to high intensity cardio could be, let's say a 15 minute hit session, like our Evlo intervals class, and then maybe two 30 minute moderate intensity workouts like running, or you can do a mix of everything. What matters is that you are staying consistent with this. Some people feel great doing shorter, slightly higher intensity cardio sessions, and some people like longer, more low to moderate intensity cardio sessions. Like me, I just feel like if I do too much high intensity cardio or even too much moderate intensity cardio, it negatively influences my recovery. And then I can't show up to my strength classes with enough intensities to build muscle and stimulate muscle growth. So don't overcomplicate it. Just do some cardio each week. And if you can tolerate it well, you could layer in some higher intensity work really slowly. As far as heart rate zones. So you may have heard of zone two, zone five. I've done podcasts on those in the past, but to be honest, my opinion has simplified as time goes on. And again, the experts are arguing over what intensity is best and what intensity men need, what intensity women need. And it's all, all over the place. The advice is everywhere. And so my thought is, let's just simplify it. Consistently challenge your cardio in any zone on a weekly basis. If you want to add intensity or time do it but you want to increase your heart rate regularly As long as you recovering do as much cardio as you can stay consistent with But in case you're interested, let's briefly go over each cardio zone so you feel educated and have an understanding of how to incorporate the different types of cardio into your routine to make it work. Just a disclaimer, I don't track my zone 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I just do cardio. Again, I think we really need to simplify this piece. So I'll go into it just in case you're interested. Zone one. Zone one is easy movement. This is a leisurely walk where you barely feel your heart pumping. Zone two. Zone two is the popular one that you may have heard experts arguing about. Some people say you have to have zone two for longevity. Others say that it's a waste of time. I think that if it's improving your cardiovascular health, it's important. So zone two is that light to moderate intensity work. So this is about 60 to 70% of your heart rate max. It's cardio where you could still talk, but you feel your heart rate climbing and it's getting harder to hold a conversation, but you still could hold the conversation. This type of cardio is typically great for body recomposition because it's easy to recover from and it's less likely to cause fatigue that trickles into your strength workouts and decreases your performance or your strength in your lifting workouts. In EVLO, we have our 15-minute steady state class. You can stack those if you want to make it a longer workout. We also have our Cardio 150 program. Those are 30-minute classes that typically fall in that zone two, maybe zone three area. These classes are really fun if you find traditional cardio like biking or running or swimming boring because they're beat-based, they're kind of dancey. I personally, that's the only way that I'll do that kind of moderate intensity cardio. Then we have zone three and zone four. I've heard of these zones as kind of no man's land. And although I once agreed with that, I just think it's less important than I realized because everyone is individual with what they can tolerate. Zone three and zone four is kind of your moderately hard cardio. Think running, spin classes, bootcamp classes, many group fitness falls into this category. This type of cardio burns more during the session, but it can be harder to recover from and sometimes causes kind of hunger spikes and fatigue afterwards. Because some people have harder time recovering from zone three and four cardio, it may not be the wisest choice to put all of your cardio minutes in this bucket. This type of training definitely improves cardiovascular health. It's not bad or wrong. I don't want to fear monger around it. And you will adapt to it over time and it'll get easier to recover from. So it may just be that you need to dose it correctly, start with just a little bit and slowly increase it over time, keeping an eye on your recovery and watching for symptoms that you may be overdoing it. The risks can sometimes outweigh the rewards if you do too much of this type of cardio. Again, I wouldn't recommend going to bootcamp classes every single day and doing a lot of this type of cardio because back to the concept that we want to do enough that we'll have a positive adaptation, but not so much that we can't recover from it and can't effectively show up to train in the right ways. So that's zone three and zone four. Finally, we have zone five. This is your all out intensity sessions. These are extremely taxing if done correctly, and they can be a very potent stimulus for metabolic health. I do recommend these zone five workouts. If you feel like you have your strength training down and you feel like you're recovering well overall. But if you are in a season of life where you're really stressed and you're just struggling to show up for your 150 minutes of light to moderate intensity cardio in your strength training sessions, I don't necessarily recommend adding zone five cardio. But if you feel like you have all of those things done correctly, you can add it. Dosing is extremely important with zone five cardio, think one, maybe two all out high intensity sprints, maybe 30 seconds on and one to two minutes off, repeated a few times. And this is our intervals classes. If you're an Evlo member, a lot of people will choose zone five cardio because they think it accelerates fat loss, but it really doesn't cause a lot of fat loss. Most studies found that over of about eight to 12 weeks, it may cause maybe one to five pounds of fat loss. But in these studies the participants were doing only HIIT and they were doing HIIT maybe three or four times per week which is not what I recommend because it overly fatiguing and it will influence your strength training sessions So if you're only doing HIIT one or maybe two times per week, which is what I recommend in a body recomposition phase, it likely won't have a huge impact on fat loss. So don't choose this form of cardio just because you want to accelerate fat loss. To me, the biggest advantage of HIIT is improving your cardiovascular capacity. And this will improve your ability to do more work in your strength training sessions. When you are more fit from your cardio work, you're less likely to be limited by your heart rate in your strength training sessions, meaning you are stopped because of your muscle, not stopped because of overall fatigue. So this is something I personally really notice when I add HIIT to my weekly schedule and maybe one of the best reasons to add it if your goal is body recomposition. If you hate HIIT, I have a tool for you that I personally use myself because I'm not the biggest fan of HIIT, but I know that it's impactful for your metabolic health. So you can do what's called RE-HIT. It's Reduced Exertion Interval Training. I did a podcast all about this. If you want to learn more, that's episode number 182. Essentially, this is two 30-second all-out sprints with one to three minutes of rest in between. So it's not a lot of total work. that's 60 seconds of total work. So that can be very manageable if you're someone that it's mentally hard to show up for. If you tack on a warmup and a cool down, you're done in under 10 minutes. So this is a way to improve your cardiovascular health while not committing to a ton of hit. And this is how I will be incorporating zone five training into my routine. So that's how much cardio I recommend for overall health and for body recomposition. But when does cardio become too much and what can happen? So you may have heard that cardio makes you look puffy or too much cardio will make you over inflamed. But contrary to popular belief, too much cardio won't necessarily cause you to quote unquote, hang on to fat or quote unquote, have a fat loss stall. The reason too much cardio can become counterproductive is if it causes you to overeat. So eating in a surplus, which will cause fat gain, or if it influences your recovery, which may make you more likely to get injured, be overly sore, and affect your performance in your strength training sessions. So signs that you're doing too much cardio is poor sleep, your strength is stalling, excessive fatigue, excessive soreness. All of these things might indicate that your dosage of cardio is just a little too high and you could afford to back off a bit. So adding cardio in addition to your strength training workouts is great, but continue to track your recovery to make sure you're not overdoing it. Make sure you come back for tomorrow's episode to learn how to track your recovery. We'll talk all about it. The last concept I want to cover is if you should prioritize strength training or cardio. With a body recomposition goal, ideally you do both. But if you only have time for one, choose strength training. If you are trying to recomp, you'll be in a small calorie deficit. And lots of cardio without lifting an adequate protein can increase the chance that a meaningful portion of the weight you lose is lean mass. That is negative for body composition, even if the scale weight is dropping. So just to summarize, cardio is a health tool, not a fat loss hack. For recomposition, the ideal structure is strength training as the cornerstone for building or at least maintaining muscle mass. So weight loss is coming from fat, not muscle. and then adding around 150 minutes of light to moderate intensity cardio, or you could do 75 minutes of moderate to high intensity cardio per week. A mix of any cardio zone works as long as you just aren't overdoing zones three through five. If you're doing any zone five training, you want to keep those workouts one to two times per week max. Tomorrow, we'll talk about how to track recovery. I'll teach you some tools that will be really clarifying to know if you're crossing the line and doing too much, or if you aren't doing enough or if your dosage is just right. See you tomorrow. Before we get into today's episode, if you want to actually improve your body composition and are sick of random workouts that just wear you down and burn you out, that's exactly why I built Evlo. Evlo is science-backed strength training designed to help you build muscle, improve body composition, and feel better in your body without beating yourself up or living in the gym. You can try Evlo now for two weeks free if you visit evlofitness.com.
