Is Cardio Enough For Weight Loss?
You may have heard that cardio burns tons of calories and is great for weight loss. That’s partially true, but not the entire story. Just doing cardio doesn’t improve all types of fitness. You need strength, balance and flexibility training, too. Cardio also isn’t the only type of training that burns lots of calories. Strength training will also torch those calories quickly. Strength-building also has other benefits that make it a great option for your weight loss program.
Cardio builds your endurance, which builds your energy level.
That’s important. If you’re out dancing, you’ll burn more calories the longer you dance and the same is true of running or any activity. Cardio not only increases how long you can work out, but also boosts the intensity level. You need more, though. You need flexibility training to increase your range of motion and prevent injury. You also need balance and strength training to help prevent falls. Some cardio can provide all of that, but running isn’t one of those things.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.
What’s the best type of workout for weight loss and calorie burning? It’s strength training. Strength training burns a high amount of calories, while also building muscle tissue. In other words, it targets fat! When you do just cardio, it’s indiscriminate about where it gets the calories, burning both fat and lean muscle tissue. That means you’ll have less muscle tissue and muscle tissue requires more calories for maintenance. The less you have, the lower your resting metabolic rate. That makes it harder to lose weight.
Do strength training to look your best.
Why do people want to lose weight? One reason is to look thinner. When you’re doing strength training and toning muscles, you can stay the same weight and still look thinner. That’s right! A cubic inch of fat weighs far less than a cubic inch of muscle, so a pound of fat would need a larger container than a pound of muscle. Your body is that container and the more muscle you have, the smaller it is, even if you don’t shed a pound. You’ll walk more gracefully and move with ease when you add cardio, balance and flexibility training.
- Some exercises combine strength-building and cardiovascular training. HIIT—high intensity interval training—while doing strength training is one example. Kettlebells provide all types of training in one workout.
- If you’re doing strength training, don’t do it every day. Strength training makes microtears in the muscles that need to heal. Your muscles need between 48 and 72 hours to recover. Alternate between cardio and strength-building or work different muscle groups each day.
- If you want to keep your calorie-burning fires running high, vary the type of workout you do. The body becomes efficient the more you do the same exercise and that leads to efficiency and burning fewer calories.
- Strength training causes EPOC—Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption. That makes your body continue to burn extra calories long after you’ve finished your workout and left the gym.
For more information, contact us today at Next Level Fitness
If you’ve never worked out or had a regular program of exercise, it’s difficult to judge how intense, how long and how often to workout as a beginner. It’s one reason working with a personal trainer is so popular, especially when you’re also trying to learn the proper form for each exercise, while building a workout that provides all types of fitness and works all parts of the body. One question is relatively simple to answer. How much time do you spend exercising?
If getting into shape was one of your 2023 resolutions, you may be one of the hundreds now jogging, sprinting or running in Irvine, CA. Not all running shoes are the same. Walking shoes differ from shoes you use for jogging and those you use for sprinting. Sprinting has explosive movements for a shorter period. It helps burn fat, while building the legs and abs. Because it’s high intensity for a short period, it is a HIIT—high intensity interval training—workout, since the intensity volleys between high intensity and a recovery pace.
With all the noise and nerve racking urgency of living in the big city, it’s nice to get back to nature and go on a hike. Hikes can vary from a short day in a nearby wooded area to traveling to a remote location that takes several days to reach. What you bring on a hike will vary by location, the amount of time you spend and the weather in that location. You also need to know how remote the location is and whether there is any type of access to cell networks or supplies along the way.
Clients come to Next Level Fitness in Irvine, CA, for a number of reasons. Some want to learn the art of discipline, others are looking for an outlet and to have some fun, while still another group come specifically to get fit. Getting fit and staying fit comes from engaging in physical activity, but not everyone does it. Whether it’s dancing, walking or doing Muay Thai, you need to move your body to live a longer, healthier life. There’s no question about that. How much exercise do you need to achieve that goal and while something is better than nothing, is walking enough?
Plantains may look like a green or yellow banana on steroids, but they taste quite different from bananas. These 12-inch long banana style fruits taste more like a vegetable than fruit, with a starchy, rather than a sweet taste. While bananas can be eaten raw, plantains need to be cooked no matter what stage of ripeness. Both have a similar nutritional profile, besides looking the same, but plantains are starchy and lower in simple carbs. That’s what makes them good for fat loss, which is one of the benefits of plantains.
Eating healthy is the key to losing weight. Whole foods are normally lower in calories and higher in nutrition than processed foods, so in most cases, it’s hard to eat too many calories. The caveat is that sometimes you want a sweet treat or a greasy burger. If you go out with friends, it’s hard to resist a New York pizza, burger, wings or cheesecake. Cheat days are meant for those times. While you’re eating more calories, some believe cheat days offer some benefits.
One of the top benefits of magnesium is its involvement in all the biochemical reactions in the body. Your body is literally a laboratory where hundreds of chemical reactions are occurring every minute. When you consider every cell in the body contains magnesium, you understand how important it is. Most of the magnesium in the body is in the bone, approximately 60%, with the rest in soft tissue, fluid, such as blood, and muscle tissue. It aids in reactions like creating protein, converting food to energy, repairing RNA and DNA, and regulating the nervous system.
Eating healthy is important for clients in Irvine, CA. Eating healthy also includes what you drink. Too often people opt for diet soda, thinking they’re saving calories, or fruit juice that isn’t fresh squeezed. The problem is that choosing those two drinks too often isn’t healthy. You might think you’re doing yourself a big favor if you choose a bottle of apple juice or give your child a fruit juice pouch, but it’s not necessarily true. It may be just fruit flavored, and similar to soft drinks without the fizzle. Even if it’s labeled 100% pure there are often artificial flavor packs added during the processing.
If you have arthritis, inflammation may be the direct cause. The labeling of arthritis is often a description of inflammation of the joints, even though inflammation may not be the reason you have it. Rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis and gouty arthritis are examples of arthritis directly caused by inflammation, while the most common form of arthritis, osteoarthritis, doesn’t come from inflammation but obesity, aging and previous injury or damage to the joint.