How much cardio should you do?

Do you try to do cardio continuously because you want to lose weight quickly to have a slimmer body? If you don’t find out how much cardio is reasonable, you could be overdoing it and risk getting tired and still not losing the weight you want!

Many people when going to the gym often try to run or cycle for an hour with the desire to burn fat quickly. Of course, these movements make us sweat more, but inadvertently burn valuable muscles and reduce the effectiveness of the workout. Make your workout smart by adjusting your cardio time to a reasonable amount.

Signs of too much cardio

Cardio training is really beneficial for your health and physique. However, the duration and intensity of cardio will greatly influence this benefit. If you have the following symptoms, it means you are doing too much cardio:

• You are often tired: If your body is stressed by continuous cardio exercises, you will feel tired, sluggish and depressed all the time.

• You feel pain all the time: Many people think that pain during exercise is normal and can be ignored. But these aches are a sign that your body needs time to rest to recover.

• You have trouble sleeping: One study has shown that doing too much cardio can increase stress hormones and make it harder to fall asleep.

• You’re not losing weight: If you’re consistently doing cardio and you’re still not improving, you’ve probably done too much exercise and have lost muscle instead of fat. Too much cardio can reduce muscle mass, which in turn slows down your metabolism and prevents you from losing weight.

• You are afraid to go to the gym: If you were always eager to go to the gym but now feel afraid to exercise, you are probably forcing your body to do too much cardio.

Reasonable intensity of cardio

As recommended by the American College of Sports Medicine and the US Department of Health and Human Services, each week you should spend about 150 minutes of cardio at moderate intensity and 75 at vigorous intensity or a combination of these. strong and medium intensity. With high-intensity cardio exercises like HIIT, you only need 3 sessions of 25–30 minutes per week.

If you are doing moderate physical activity such as walking briskly, learning to dance or cycling, then you only need to do cardio for about 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week is enough.

If you’re still wondering how much cardio you should do, choose an average of 30 minutes a day most days of the week. With the intensity of training as above, you will not be overwhelmed and always feel full of energy and motivation to go to the gym every day.

Principles of doing cardio

In addition to deciding how much cardio you should do properly, you need to learn some principles to make the exercise more reasonable.

• Mix cardio with other forms of exercise: To strengthen your body, mix cardio with strength training and rest days. Strength training will help protect and build muscle to burn more calories.

• Do cardio at different intensities: You can schedule a heavy workout day, a light workout day, and then a rest day to give your body enough time to recover and avoid affecting your health.

• Increase the intensity of your cardio exercises: Instead of increasing the exercise time, try to increase the intensity of your exercise. For example, when exercising on a treadmill, you can adjust the mode to climb or increase the running speed.

• Change up your cardio: If you’ve been doing certain types of cardio over and over, try new exercises like learning to dance zumba or indoor cycling to increase the excitement of your workout.

In addition to limiting how many minutes a week you can do cardio, you should also pay attention to a healthy diet. When combining exercise and eating scientifically, you will soon get the body you want.

Minh Thu HELLO BACSI