Weight Loss: Cardio

Loosing weight can be approached in a number of ways, however, possibly the most popular method is increasing the amount of cardiovascular exercise you do. As well as burning calories, cardio offers a great number of benefits to your overall health and progress.

Understanding cardio and the types you can perform is an important factor to make your sessions worthwhile. Doing several minutes on the treadmill here and there isn’t going to have the desired effect.

What is Cardio?

Cardio often refers to aerobic exercise that is performed to increase your heartrate and in turn burn calories. It mainly relies on your bodies ability to use oxygen throughout the exercise and will improve the strength of your lungs, heart and circulatory system.

There is often a misconception that doing a walk on the treadmill for 10 minutes as cardio, however although it may slightly raise your heart rate it wouldn't do so in a way that will improve the factors above. You have to treat cardio like you would training a muscle, you need to challenge your bodies ability and push it out of its comfort zone.

How cardio aids weight loss

Cardio doesn't only improve your overall health and aerobic abilities, but it will also help burn calories and in turn burn fat. Depending on the intensity of the workout and what exercise you're doing will dictate how many calories you will burn. There are also different heart rate zones to which will impact how effective the exercise will be.

Cardio will aid weight loss however won't be the fundamental factor as for this, you will need to be in a caloric deficit. A caloric deficit is where you burn more calories then you consume. So, if weight loss is your aim, remember that your diet will be the most important element.

Types of Cardio

There are a number of different cardio/aerobic techniques you can incorporate into your workout routine, each offering a number of benefits and progress to your cardiovascular system.

HIIT

High intensity interval training is performing aerobic exercise at a high demanding rate in short bursts along with short rest intervals. Due to the high intensity burst, it will rapidly elevate your heart rate into a fat burning zone, leading to more calories being burnt.

It can be done doing a vast amount of different exercises such as, sprinting, biking, skipping etc. A HIIT workout on average will last around 20 to 30 minutes of these intervals.

Benefits of doing HIIT include:

Burning more calories in a shorter amount of time
Burn fat
Metabolic rate will be higher for longer after training
Improve oxygen consumption

Steady State Cardio

Steady state cardio or sometimes referred to as continuous is I guess you could say a more relaxed form of cardio than HIIT. It involves maintaining a moderate level of intensity throughout the whole workout keeping your heartrate within a certain range.

Although it may not be as taxing on your oxygen consumption and explosive effort, it is still an effective way of burning calories and improving overall endurance.

Benefits of doing Steady State Cardio include:

Easy to do
Allows recovery
Burns calories and fat
Therapeutic and social
Increase endurance

FARTLEK training

FARTLEK is actually a Swedish word that means 'speed play'. In other words this is a form of training that adds a variety of different speeds and intensities to your workout.

FARTLEK is a great way to keep your endurance training interesting and allows you to try new exercises and activities at a level of intensity you deem fit.

You will often see runners and people preparing for races adopt this method as it can offer a more realistic demand of what a race would.

Benefits of FARTLEK:

Keeps things interesting and adds variety
Enables you to push yourself to a level you deem fit
Increase speed and endurance
A good stepping stone for introducing HIIT training

Cardio and Weight Training

If your goal is to build muscle mass and overall gain weight, then extensive long durations of cardio may not be suited. However, incorporating some form of cardio vascular exercise into you routine will offer benefits. Perhaps adopting a more explosive style of cardio such as HIIT would be more beneficial.

Cardio is about endurance and your bodies ability to pump blood and oxygen around the body at high demand to which is a key part of weight training, resulting in the two going hand in hand.

If you have good endurance and strong circulatory system, the blood and oxygen needed when training will reach the muscle more efficiently promoting recovery and growth.

Benefits of doing cardio include:

Reduced risk of injury
Better sleep quality
Aids recovery
Aids fat loss