Today I’m going to explain 5 new reasons why you should NOT do cardio to lose weight…
Disclaimer…
First, I want to start with a disclaimer. Cardio is not a bad thing to do. Generally speaking, cardio is a good, healthy thing practice. It’s good for your heart, lungs, brain, circulation…it’s a good thing to do. I do cardio, and if you have the time the desire to improve your health, I think you should do cardio too.
BUT…if your goal is to lose weight.
And if you’d rather NOT spend hours and hours on an elliptical machine trying to fit back into your “skinny clothes”…
Then you can feel free to skip the cardio.
Cardio Is Inefficient
It’s not that cardio doesn’t help with weight loss. Doing cardio does burn a few extra calories.
But it’s not an EFFICIENT way to lose weight.
In other words, compared to the amount of time and energy it takes to do cardio…cardio does not give you a very good return on your investment.
Let me explain.
If you jump on an exercise bike for an hour, that’s 60 minutes, you might burn…depending on how hard you go…maybe 400-600 calories.
And…that depends on your conditioning. If you’re in really good shape, you’ll be capable of pushing your body harder and burning more calories.
If you’re not in very good shape, you won’t be able to pedal as hard, and you won’t be able to burn as many calories. But let’s just say 400-600 calories per hour as a general ballpark number.
So…let me explain why that is NOT very good.
Here are 5 reasons why you should NOT do cardio to lose weight.
New Reason #1 Why You Should Not Do Cardio To Lose Weight
First of all, that’s 400-600 calories per HOUR. Compare that to how quickly and easily you can EAT 400-600 calories. You can EAT 1500 calories in less than 15 minutes. Just go to any fast food restaurant and order a combo meal.
So…burning 400-600 calories in an HOUR is NOT going to be able to make up for a bad diet. That’s why people say things like “abs are made in the kitchen,” and “you can’t out-train a bad diet.”
It’s because your weight is a factor of the food you eat…first and foremost. NOT whether you exercise or not.
New Reason #2 Why You Should Not Do Cardio To Lose Weight
That 400-600 calories thing may be misleading. I’ll explain.
You know how, when you’re on treadmill or something, you can look at the screen and see how many calories you’ve burned? So, say you do an hour of cardio and the machine tells you that you just burned 400 calories.
Well, that number may be ACCURATE…but it may also be MISLEADING.
See, your body has what they call a basal metabolic rate. Your base metabolism. In other words, your body has to burn a certain number of calories…just to stay alive. Just to keep your brain, and heart, and lungs running.
And it varies from person to person, but your base metabolism is probably somewhere around 1800-2400 calories per day.
So, if your base metabolsim is 2400 calories per day, and if there are 24 hours in a day, that means your body burns about 100 calories per hour just to stay alive.
And a lot of machines take that base metabolism into account. That’s one reason why they ask for your age and weight; they can use those numbers to calculate your base metabolism when they display how many calories you’re burning.
So when a cardio machine tells you that you burned 400 calories in the past hour…you have to realize that you would have burned 100 calories anyway.
By spending an hour on cardio, you burned 400 calories. But…if you had skipped the cardio and just gone about your day, you would have still burned 100 calories.
So the NET calorie loss isn’t 400 calories. It’s 300 calories. That’s 25% less.
Make sense?
New Reason #3 Why You Should Not Do Cardio To Lose Weight
Doing cardio tends to make people eat MORE food later in the day.
It’s a form of overcompensation. You do some exercise, so you rationalize it to yourself: “I can have a cookie. I exercised today!”
But remember from reason #1…that when it comes to weight loss, your DIET trumps exercise every time.
That cookie could have 180 calories. Two or three cookies could completely wipe out the entire benefit of your workout.
New Reason #4 Why You Should Not Do Cardio To Lose Weight
It’s a drop in the bucket. Even if 400-600 calories sounds like a lot… Keep in mind that you have to burn 3500 calories just to lose ONE pound.
So, if you burn 500 calories in an hour of cardio, you would have to do that hour of cardio 7 days a week…just to burn ONE pound. Because 500 times 7 is 3500.
Sounds like a lot of work to lose one stinkin’ pound, doesn’t it?
New Reason #5 Why You Should Not Do Cardio To Lose Weight
Too much cardio could cause you to lose muscle.
Losing weight is a good thing. But…you need to be careful to lose fat, NOT muscle.
Too much cardio + a calorie deficit = muscle loss.
This is why I recommend lifting weights while dieting to maintain your lean muscle while you’re losing weight.
Looking For A BETTER WAY To Burn Fat?
So there you have 5 reasons why cardio is NOT the best way to lose weight.
If you’re looking for a better way to drop your unwanted fat, a more efficient way to get the lean, healthy, attractive body you REALLY want…
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