Save your Cardio.

Every time someone plans to cut down his body fat % or weight-loss journey; they want to jump on the nearest cardio machine and spend hours. People get fascinated with someone’s weight loss journey achieved by doing cardio, but we fail to see how long they can sustain the weight loss and struggle they have to keep up their weight loss journey. At the same time, you will hardly see someone lean and muscular spending a lot of time on a cardio machine, tdaaaaaa !. Cardio should be part of your plan, but we should add this to our program’s at later stage.

Below pic is of women who shifted from aerobic ( cardio ) exercise to anaerobic ( strength training ). Which looks better and more muscular, I will leave that to you.

Majority of our senior citizen take up cardio ( walking ) as a form of exercise; they feel it’s safe don’t want to run a chance of any injury while training with weights. But is it safe ?? is it productive? We all know how the human body can benefit from weight training from hormonal to the mental aspect.

Below is the pic of a senior citizen who does weight training, does he look strong ???

I am not trying to be anti-cardio; it is excellent to do cardio and has many benefits. Cardio is always beneficial if the person is not doing any other form of exercise. Any mode of exercise is better than no training.

Let look at a scenario where a person started his weight loss journey with 45-60 min of cardio; this program initiated the fat loss. After a few months of cardio weight loss plateaued, we increase our cardio to 90 mins & continuing. Where do we stop?. Our body adapts to the exercise we do and stop responding. Doing too much cardio, increase our stress hormones &  hinder our recovery and muscle loss which is counterproductive to our plan.

Better approach:–

Focus more on strength training. Do 4-5 session of strength training a week, Work on packing on muscles.

Keep the cardio at bay for sometime when you start your regime. Introduce cardio slowly.

Start your cardio with low intensity , start with 30 min a day for two times a week and gradually increase it to 3 times a week, depending on how many times you do strength training.

HIIT cardio is in vogue and seems like great fun, But hold on to your horse. If you are new to training, doing HIIT would give you a negative outcome like poor recovery.

Work on your food habits to get lean.

When you plan to shed your weight, you should think about getting a maximum outcome from the least work.

Think like an athlete and train like an athlete.