Cardio Training

Your cardio should burn fat and improve your heart health. There are many ways to do cardio but keep these two goals in mind.

Boredom is built into cardio exercise because of the repetition. You can avoid the boredom by changing up your routines and keeping the sessions short.

Use cardio as a major calorie burner. It does NOT require long cardio sessions to burn major calories. Too many long (such as 45-60 minutes) cardio sessions will waste away your muscle mass.

Here are some cardio tips to burn fat:

1. Traditional long, slow lower-intensity aerobic exercise on treadmills, bikes, ellipticals, etc. is good for beginners or those who have been inactive.

2. Research has proven that the benefits of anaerobic exercise (like sprint interval cardio) is superior to aerobic exercise for fitness and heart health. The progression of your cardio exercise should be low-intensity aerobics to moderate/high-intensity aerobics to high-intensity anaerobic exercise.

3. High intensity cardio (HIC) and high intensity interval cardio training(HIIT) will give you faster body fat burn in less time. You only need to do 20 minutes per session, 3 times a week.

4. High intensity cardio (HIC) and high intensity interval cardio training (HIIT) will: a) significantly boost your metabolism--during and after exercise, b) give you less lean body mass loss, c) give you a faster rate of body fat-to-energy conversion and d) significantly increase your VO2 Max capacity.

5. Circuit weight training (including bodyweight circuits) has dual benefits as a strength/cardio workout.

6. If HIC or HIIT is too hard on your body, you might want to try a HIC, HIIT and moderate intensity combination during the week. Just get to know your body so you know when to back off.

The evidence is clear----if you want maximum body fat burn in the least amount of time, then HIC and HIIT is the way to go! I personally do 2 days of HIIT, 2 days of HIC and 2 days of circuit weight training per week. I know it works.

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Mark Dilworth, BA, PES
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