For example you could be super in shape from a muscular perspective but have really bad cardio and vice versa.
How is cardio different from physical shape and what exactly happens in your body that makes you have more cardio?
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Cardio health is the health of your heart muscle. If it’s healthy and strong it can circulate your blood more effectively and blood is an extremely important part of your body. You train it by doing aerobic exercise that increases your pulse into a target zone and keeps it there – sort of like doing reps with weights. The “swimmer’s body” is perhaps the best example of what you have with good cardio but not a great deal of strength versus something like the “powerlifter body” if strength is your whole build.
Cardio also, crucially, improves the distribution of fat around your body and so regular non-athletic type people will seem slimmer if they have good cardio because their fat doesn’t just sit around their bellies where it was the easiest for their body to accumulate it.
This question for whatever reason really reminded me of Aziz Shavershian who was a hero to incels because he lost a ton of weight through simple starvation and discovered he had naturally exquisite musculature and went on to do some modeling then died in a sauna because he had never even tried to build up his cardio at all.
One odd thing is having “runners heart” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athletic_heart_syndrome where your pulse gets really low at rest. Mine is regularly 45-55 at rest and sometimes doctors get concerned.
Think of your body like a car. You have different sizes, configurations, and so forth. Lifting weight is like a diesel pickup – you get power and big. Cardio is like a Civic or Prius – small, efficient. Mixing the two is where you get middle ground cars but compromise power a bit for fuel efficiency (think Ford and their Ecoboost engines).
You know how some cars off the lot have ok gas mileage. Then you can be a kick-ass mechanic that can do things like replace the wheels, lower the weight, improve the aerodynamics, and fix the engine/fuel injector to not only all the car to go faster but also use less gas in the process.
Good cardio is the ability of your body to somehow take in oxygen, get it to parts of the body that needs it, get the energy (carbohydrates and fats) to the parts as well, then remove the waste generated in an efficient way as possible. This can be aided by reducing weight which reduces need for energy to move that weight as well as mobility to aid in efficient movement.
The most important changes are to your metabolism.
Sure the heart gets stronger, you might produce more red blood cells, etc. but your muscles will adapt to produce energy for longer duration which is different from the way they adapt to weight training (getting larger and having more peak/short term energy).
Your muscle cells will make more mitochondria (power house of the cell), which will allow them to burn more fuel and make more energy. They will suck sugar in from the blood, reducing insulin resistance and diabetes risk (as well as risk for heart disease, dementia and cancer). This is so dramatic it can even cancel out bad diet. Look at any serious runner and they likely consume several times the amount of simple sugars as a normal sedentary person but they have none of the consequences of it because the sugar is burned in their muscle rather than being converted to fat.
Cardio is about the strength of your heart and your body’s ability to better deliver oxygen and absorb it into its cells. It is what allows your muscle to keep performing in an aerobic state rather than resorting to an anaerobic state.
Anaerobic activity is what makes your muscles sore.
Cardio effect all the body at different levels.
You need cardio for your brain to be in good biological health and work properly. It increases chemicals and hormones in you brain such as BDNF, which helps your brain grow connections and work properly. It improves the health of the blood vessels in your brain, it improves brain volume, it helps your brain have better connectivity, etc. The increased blood flow helps clean out the junk from your brain, etc. All of these are linked to brain functionality and stuff like mental health.
Cardio stresses your cardiovascular system, so when you make your hart work hard it causes your heart to become stronger and healthier.
A big thing is around improvement to your mitochondria, basically the energy centres of your cells increase and become better.
Your blood vascular system improves, which means you have better blood flow to your cells, so your cells can get stuff they need better and get rid of stuff they don’t need. Your immune system can better identify and attack bad stuff.
You even have stuff like how exercise is good for your gut michrobiome and vis the short term fatty acids, it improves mental health.
You could go on. Another way to think about it is that your body needs exercise to function properly. So I would gather that almost every biological system, cell and mechanism in your body benefits from physical activity, since they all evolved in organisms that did a decent amount of physical activity.
Think of cardio as lifting weights for your heart. If you want to build up your biceps, you do curls, if you want to build up your legs, you do squats and leg presses, if you want to build up your heart and make it stronger, you do aerobic exercises (e.g. running, bicycling, swimming, etc.)
Your heart is a muscle just like your biceps and it’s needs a workout to get bigger just like those curls for your biceps.
When you exercise your muscles need extra oxygen to burn energy and so your heart needs to pump faster to get that oxygen to your muscles. Only problem is the fact that the heart needs to fill up with blood in between each beat to be able to pump effectively, and so if it beats to fast it will reach a ceiling where pumping any faster will start to become less effective at pumping (above 160bm roughly). If someone is exercising so hard that they need more oxygen then the heart can provide to them when pumping at 160bpm then they are in trouble. To combat this, we can train our heart by doing cardio (cardiopulmonary exercise) which results in making the heart muscle grow bigger and stronger (just like bicep curls give u big biceps like popeye). By making the heart 2x stronger, the heart can beat at 80bpm and can pump the same amount of blood it used to pump at 160, and therefore it can pump even more blood when it reaches the max HR of 160, increasing someone’s overall exercise tolerance+endurance+capacity.
Now unlike your biceps, you can’t consciously control your heart to work it out by doing 10 reps of heavy pumping, so instead you get it to do sustained fast pumping which works similar to doing low weight high rep curls at the gym. So you do anything that causes your heart rate to go up (above 100) and you sustain it at that level for a extended period of time (5+ minutes). Common forms of cardio include running cycling or swimming. This is why getting jacked at the gym by doing heaps of heavy lifting won’t necessarily result in having a good strong heart, because the heavy lifting doesn’t cause sustained high heart rate, it’s just raises it during the set (1-10 reps=5-30 seconds) as opposed to 10 minutes of running on a treadmill which might not lead to big muscles on the outside but will help build a big strong heart muscle on the inside.
Anaerobic exercises (weight lifting, etc) increase the size of the “tank of gas”. Aerobic exercises improve the efficiency of “the engine”.
When you increase your cardio, you work all the systems that help replenish oxygen & fuel to your cells. That includes increasing red blood cell count, increasing vascular strength, increasing heart health, working your diaphragm which improves lung capacity, improves capillary growth, and especially at beginner levels your form improves a lot which gets you a ton of free endurance by just doing the exercise efficiently
>For example you could be super in shape from a muscular perspective, but have really bad cardio and vice versa.
That usually happens as a result of hypertrophy, which is caused by steroid use. People who are muscular without good cardio-vascular health are, almost without exception, that way because they’re cheating chemically. If you exercise enough without them to obtain gains, you are going to get better heart function.
Now, I should disclaim here that carrying more muscle mass *reduces your endurance*. This is why marathon runners are skinny: all that muscle requires sugar and oxygen to fuel, and those inputs must be delivered by your circulatory system. So if you’re musclebound, that’s not “bad cardio”, you’re just metabolically expensive to support, the difference between a SUV and a motorcycle.
Now, doing cardio is beneficial in and of itself. It exercises your heart, with more intensity than your skeletal muscles, which is important because your heart muscles are a different type of muscle, which are much harder to strengthen. You can’t lift anything with your heart, so all you can really do is raise your heart rate and make the muscle work faster, over short and long periods of time.
But the thing is, all the cardio in the world still won’t make a bodybuilder able to beat that marathon runner. If you want a very good object lesson in this, watch Tour de France races. The sprinters are big and muscular, the mountain climbers thin and light. No matter how much you exercise your heart, it’s still only a pump of a certain capacity.
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