CARDIO FOR WEIGHT LOSS

It is common practice for people to focus mostly on cardio training to lose weight. This is especially true for women although some men do too.

Training your cardiovascular systems (there are three of them) is very important and one component of fitness. There are many benefits including:

• Strengthening your heart (the most important muscle of all)

• Helps to burn calories

• Can help to lose body fat (depending on how you do it)

• It is a natural thing that humans should be doing

So what is the connection to weight loss, and is it the best thing to do to lose weight?

Cardio will definitely help, but as mentioned above it is only one piece to the puzzle. To lose weight it must be combined with eating healthy, staying hydrated, being in a calorie deficit and resistance training with weights.

There are many ways of doing cardio to aid weight loss. These include:

• Running, cycling or walking outdoors

• Gym machines (treadmills, bikes, rowers and X trainers)

• Circuits (with equipment, body weight or mixing both)

• Some type of H.I.T.T. (high intensity interval training) class

• Swimming

The best and most effective time to do your cardio exercise for losing weight is after a weights session. So a training plan would look like this:

• Warm up

• Resistance training

• Cardio

• Cool down

The reasons to do weights before cardio is mainly because:

• You are going to be stronger at the start of the session

• Weight training helps to build lean muscle, which speeds up your metabolism and burns more calories throughout the day

• You will reap the benefits of the session for longer. You can burn calories up to 72 hours after the workout

The best type of cardio to do for fat loss is some type of HIIT training. This is an all out effort of a short explosive activity (sprinting, cycling, circuits etc) followed by short rest periods.

For example Tabata training which is 20 seconds of all out effort followed by only 10 seconds of rest. You would repeat this 8 times for a total of 4 minutes. You then have 2 minutes rest and repeat the Tabata again. This also improves your fitness levels as your heart is forced to recover very quickly to be able to work hard again.

Focus on nutrition, training hard 3 - 4 times per week, drinking plenty of water every day and recovery. If you do this, a steady loss of 1 - 2 lbs per week is healthy and achievable.