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Cardio is an effective way to lose weight. It focuses on burning calories by dipping into the stored calories for the excess energy required during a session. However, there’s more to understanding about how cardio can help you lose weight than just knowing it burns calories.
How to lose weight?
You can only lose weight if you’re following the basics of being in a calorie deficit. Now, to create this deficit, you need to focus on a calorie deficit diet or you can eat during maintenance and increase the amount of calories you burn. Regardless of how you do it, a calorie deficit is a must for weight loss.
What is cardio?
Cardio, also referred to as cardiovascular exercise, is a form of workout where the body uses bigger muscle groups, controlled breathing, and focuses on raising the heart rate for a specific amount of time.
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Usually, exercises such as walking, jogging, running, and swimming are referred to as cardio, as there’s no strength training involved. While these exercises do contribute to making the muscles stronger, they take a much longer time to do so than strength training. However, cardio does help in improving muscle endurance and stamina.
Using cardio to lose weight
Ideally, you should be able to dedicate an hour or an hour and a half doing cardio for proper weight loss. However, you can choose to do HIIT to reduce the time but maximize the impact.
HIIT stands for high intensity interval training. The idea is to raise your heart rate and metabolism for a set period of time, followed by a time span where it’s allowed to become slightly steady and then raise it again.
Usually, it’s suggested that you do 8-10 rounds of HIIT. Interestingly, the effects of HIIT and weight loss continue even after you’re done with the session, making it an effective type of cardio.
Alternatively, you can couple cardio sessions with weight training or resistance training. That allows you to burn extra calories since both resistance training and cardio require the body to dip into the stored calories to generate the energy required for the extra work.
While exercising is the way to lose weight, you cannot drain your body every day without rest. Recovery period is essential for weight loss, and it’s best to give yourself an entire day’s rest every week.
If you want to keep some form of exercise, you can add yoga to your rest days to warm up the muscles, but do not train them to extreme fatigue.
Bottom Line
As mentioned earlier, cardio to lose weight is a great option, but coupling it with other forms of exercise is a better option to lose weight.
Exercising alone will not help, though. You must follow a proper diet made up of the macronutrients - proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Also, keep yourself hydrated. Even if you don’t feel thirsty during workout sessions, you must keep hydrating yourself at regular intervals.
Keep adding variations to your routine so that your muscles and body do not get used to one type of exercise. So, use the treadmill (running), elliptical (hiking), stationary bike (cycling) and any other cardio exercise in variation to avoid hitting a plateau.
