Learn What Type Of Cardio Will Get You Best Results
by Jean-Luc Boissonneault
Are Your Doing your Cardio All Wrong?
I want to burn Fat
Should I go hard or easy? Do I stay in the fat burning zone? How much resistance should I use? How long should my cardio session last?
The reason why people are so confused about these questions is because there are actually two different questions creating all this confusion.
1- What is more effective for losing body fat while maintaining muscle and overall health?
2- What is more effective for losing body fat and not caring about muscle maintenance or my health?
Well if you’ve watched The Biggest Loser on TV, you know that they believe; “The harder and longer your cardio session, the more fat you will lose.” Now if you don’t care about muscle maintenance or your health and you simply want to lose weight you can start doing that tomorrow morning but I will tell you that that is not a good way of going about it. The reason is cardiovascular exercise is a destroyer. Yes, it destroys fat, muscle and functional and structural biochemicals. Cardiovascular exercise done for prolonged periods of time combined with a low calorie intake will actually pre-age you, create vitamin depletion and stress your adrenal glands (that’s why a lot of people catch colds as soon as they drastically increase there cardiovascular exercise.)
So here is a better solution - add intensity to your workout by increasing resistance, speed, incline or all three and try to keep your workouts no longer than a hour. Or you can combine your strength training with short periods of cardio. This will ensure that you maintain muscle because this is important not only for long term fat loss but you will look better and live longer too. Different studies have been done were it was shown that cardiovascular exercise at a low intensity burned more body fat in proportion to muscle but the studies were done while the person was doing the exercise and not after the fact when overall body fat loss for the rest of the day occurs. A good study from Laval University in Quebec showed that people who trained with more intensity had more muscle and less body fat than those who trained with low intensity and a longer duration.
So if you want to lose weight in a healthy fashion, maintain muscle mass and don’t be the biggest loser
