Are you someone who is afraid to integrate cardio training into your workout? You are not alone. Many lifters do not want to do much cardio because it effects recovery time from their lifting workouts. When you are trying to build muscle mass quickly you do not want to do anything that may hinder your attempts.

Cardio can have two negative effects on your weight training and muscle building progress. First, as mentioned, it will slow recovery time since cardio works the muscles and the body and your body has to recover from it along with the recovery from the muscle building. Second, cardio uses calories that could have been used to build muscle.

The important thing to note here when it comes to calorie burning is that you have to be diligent in your calorie consumption. Your body is capable of building only a certain amount of muscle per day. If you are eating more calories than your body needs to build muscle then you are going to gain weight. You will actually need to burn those excess calories so you can keep your body fat levels down.

It is much easier to just watch your calorie consumption and not go above what you need instead of trying to use cardio to burn off the excess calories. However, if you want to add cardio to your muscle building routine then you need to do it smartly.

There are different options in cardio workouts that you can use. A moderate cardio workout is fine to add in on occasion. You don’t want to be doing it for hour long periods five days a week as that would be too much. Aim for a consistent pace for about 20 to 40 minutes max. Interval training, often called high intensity interval training or HIIT, involves short bursts of high intensity throughout the workout. You alternate between the high intensity and rest throughout the workout. It is very intense on your body and works you hard. If you lift about four days a week then this will be too much cardio for you. If you want to try HIIT then do it only once a week.

The last type of cardio is the best option for weight training lifters that want to add in cardio without affecting their muscle building. It is called recovery training. Recovery training involves light cardio that really is done to improve circulation and not to burn fat. It is done for about 10 to 20 minutes and can be done the same day as a workout. If you are doing an intense muscle building routine then stick with recovery cardio.

Integrating cardio into your workout is done with care. You need to easy make cardio second in importance to your muscle building. You can use a light cardio workout to warm up before muscle building. This is the ideal option. You can also use it afterwards to loosen tight muscles and wind down from a workout.

If you must integrate cardio training along side your weight training workouts then be sure to do it right. You have to make sure it is not affecting your muscle building. Pay attention to your body. If you notice you lack energy for your weightlifting then back off the cardio for a while and see if that is what is affecting you. Any cardio you do is secondary and should be stopped if it is causing issues with your muscle building.

You can do cardiovascular intervals no matter what equipment you have. Even body weight is sufficient for these workouts. First, the benefits of interval workouts:

1. More time moving and less rest makes for a more intense and purposeful routine.

2. Shortens workout times by combining cardio and strength components into one session.

3. Loosens and limbers the body throughout the workout.

After a warm up, try cardio and strength interval workouts by using these suggestions:

1. Work one muscle group (chest) and follow your strength set with 2 to 5 minutes of cardio (running, jump rope, burpees). Next, go back to strength training and work another muscle group (back) and repeat this process until you have worked out all of the muscle groups planned for the day.

2. Perform cardio for 10 to 15 minutes. Next, do your strength training workout. I suggest 2 sets for every muscle group being worked. Finally, go back to the cardio workout for an additional 10 to 15 minutes.

3. Alternate between a set and 1 minute of cardio. Jump rope, mountain climbers, dancing or walking on the spot works best for this workout. After each minute of cardio, perform another set of strength exercise. Repeat until strength exercises are complete.

After any workout perform 5 to 10 minutes of stretching after completing all exercises.

There are multiple ways to work cardio intervals into your strength routine. The results are plentiful: Stronger resting heart rate, more fat calories burned and greater flexibility.

Try It!

When it comes to exercising, it goes without saying that the more you push yourself the more weight you will lose. There is no better way to push and challenge yourself to amazing weight loss in a short period of time than staircase/steps running. This article will direct you towards free cardio step exercises at home that will provide weight loss results like no other.

Now if you happen to be living in an apartment, finding a fleet of stairs just outside your home will not be a problem at all. Whereas if your home does not have a fleet of stairs then find the nearest apartment building around your neighbourhood and use that. Once you have found a fleet of stairs which is particularly going to be about 12-15 storeys you are ready to start. Now always remember before any strenuous exercises always do a simple warm up. So a few squats and stretches for about 15 minutes and get your leg muscles loosened up. If you are new to running up staircases then it is wise to start off with just 2 sets of 12-15 storeys with a 6 minute break in between. Try to avoid increasing the break in the middle. So go about doing that for roughly 2 weeks with 5 times each week. Keep in mind another important factor please do not run down after reaching the top because your legs will be rather unsteady and you might not be in full control of your legs. This might cause you to lose your balance and fall so avoid running down once u reach the top and take the elevator down.

After accomplishing the first stage of 2 sets of 12-15 storeys, 5 times each week for 2 weeks then u are ready for 3 sets. Now 3 sets there will not be any difference except for the break time in between each set should be reduced to 4-5 minutes maximum. Breathe in and out during breaks and avoid sitting down. What is recommended you do is walk around and looses your leg muscles further and do not let it contract. Do 3 sets, 5 times a week for another 2 weeks. Right after that, the final stage of staircase running, is do 4 sets of 12-15 storeys, 5 times a week with the same 4-5 minutes of rest in between. This particular exercise is very strenuous but extremely effective if you are looking to lose weight fast and in huge amounts. Always remember to wear a good pair of shoes and always keep your shoelaces tied when doing an exercise like this. It is important to be safe rather than sorry.

Weight loss will be noticed within just 3 weeks of this exercise on a scale of about 9-14 pounds depending on your body type and gender. Of course for this to happen you have to be consistent with the plan mentioned above and not have a stop and start routine as that will be rather ineffective. If running is not your thing, walking up the fleet o stairs will also be good to lose weight but it will take a rather longer time to see results. Whether it be walking or running up the staircase there is no doubt these free cardio step exercises at home will help you get rid of unwanted fat in no time.

The ideal duration of aerobic exercise(cardio) is different for different circumstances and depends on parameters as:

– Frequency.

How often is it done?

– Intensity.

At what percentage of our maximum heart rate?

– Our objectives.

Do we aim for maximum fat loss,increased aerobic or anaerobic capacity? Maybe something else?

– The kind of the workout.

Purely aerobic or a combination with weight training?

– The time we have at our disposal.

– Our fitness level.

General advice on the duration of aerobic exercise(cardio).

1. Avoid long,boring, low intensity aerobic workouts because your gains will be minimal and disproportional to your invested time.

The fat burning zone is a myth which still has appeal because it is convenient. To burn more fat you will need higher intensity.

2. When speaking for a medium to high intensity–that is to say for about 70-85% of our maximum heart rate–a duration of 30′-40′ is considered as ideal.

A shorter duration will not give substantial results while a longer one may have unpleasant consequences on our muscle mass.

3. If you can only afford limited time maybe you should try for a most time-efficient exercise form like hill sprints or equivalent.

4. If your objective is maximum fat loss you can try two sessions in the same day of about 30′ each.

5. A high intensity is perfect for impressive results but is risky too. Overtraining,injuries and losing valuable ground could be some of the consequences.

To burn a lot of fat you will need sufficient intensity and duration.

If you simply want to reap benefits like…

– Higher aerobic capacity.

– Lower resting heart rate.

– Decreased blood pressure and cholesterol etc.

… then durations of 15-20′ will suffice.

To your great health!

When most people think about cardio they thing about using a big machine like a treadmill or an elliptical or going outdoors to run for an hour. However, there’s another way to do cardio which takes a lot less than traditional workouts and requires no equipment and no gym membership: bodyweight cardio.

Bodyweight cardio workouts are made of exercises that use your body alone as its creator of resistance. By creating a circuit of these exercises, reducing the rest between them and doing them fast, you’re able to get a cardiovascular stimulation and a strength workout at the same time.

This has several benefits:

1. It is a lot shorter than traditional cardio workouts that most people do.
2. Bodyweight cardio requires no equipment and can be done anywhere that you have some space: your home, park, hotel room, etc.
3. These workouts can be very effective, help you build muscle tissue and burn a lot of calories and fat.
4. Unlike traditional cardio, these workouts can be much more interesting and exciting than long duration workouts.

What are some of these bodyweight cardio exercises that you can do? Here are some examples:

1. Lunge walks – This is a hard exercise which is perfect for you if you want to build strong legs. You need to pick a destination and walk to it but each step needs to be in lunge form. This will get you sweating in a hurry.

2. Knee high running in place – A simple exercise that involves running where you stand. The higher you can get your knees to go the better it would be as it’s more intensive. Try it.

3. Squat jumps – This is a simple workout but it can really make your thighs scream… in a good way. Go into a squat and as you risk from it, jump high into the air. If you’ve got enough energy, try bringing your knees to your chest as you jump.

4. The 1-2 jump – This is a great bodyweight cardio exercise. Stand with your feet about shoulder width apart. Jump forward as far as you can and land on your feet. Allow yourself to sink a bit into a squat to absorb the shock of the landing. Jump backward in two jumps to your starting position. Repeat.

These are just a sample of bodyweight exercises that you can do. Remember to keep your rests between sets short to keep your heart rate up and burn more calories.

Have you ever wondered why athletes are so lean and strong? It’s because they play and train hard. When you turn your traditional at home bodyweight workouts into high intensity, fat blasting routines, you will no longer need to stick to traditional cardio movements such as running and cycling.

If you want to design a fat loss workout you can do at home, then design circuit training workouts using bodyweight exercises. Circuit training is where you perform two or more exercises back to back with little to no rest in between each exercise.

Some of my favorite bodyweight exercises include hip bridge, jump squat, and frogger. I tend to use more difficult movements in my workouts. I started off with basic pushups, pullups, and bodyweight squats. But these movements soon became too easy for me.

The biggest mistake people make is not switching up their exercises. Your workouts need to be more intense and difficult as you get stronger. You will not be able to burn off any fat if your heart rate is not higher than 75% of your maximum. This is because high intensity workouts are better at boosting your metabolic rate than lower intensity workouts.

Your metabolic rate is a measure of how fast your burn calories. Hence, the faster your metabolic rate, the more calories you will burn. The reason why some athletes can eat a lot of junk food and still stay very lean is because they have extremely fast metabolic rates.

But, the most important thing is to make sure your workouts are fun and challenging. The moment you get bored with your workouts, you will hit a plateau in your fat loss. This is because if you’re bored with your workouts, it will be difficult to stick to your program. If you don’t stick to a fitness plan, you’ll never see results.

Before I get any hate mail or any rants and raves from people calling me an idiot, let me clarify. Cardio does work to lose fat. That’s obvious. Cardio is great for general health, heart health, and just getting you up off your butt. However, when it comes to losing fat quickly, especially for busy moms and dads, cardio workouts are very, very overrated. Is that sacrilegious for a personal trainer to say that cardio is overrated or doesn’t work?

I don’t think so. In my personal opinion, it’s lazy and uninformed personal trainers, nutritionists, medical professionals and any other health-related professional who are the ones who should be ashamed and feel stupid for not doing the work and actually help the people who come to them seeking assistance. Before I burn anymore bridges, let me go over a few of the reasons why cardio workouts for fat loss are the most overrated type of exercise known to man (followed closely by crunches).

1. Traditional cardio workouts for weight loss are a huge time waster.

When you think of cardio for weight loss, how long do you think you need to do it? Most people that I come across tend to think you need to do it for a minimum of 30 minutes and some even go so far as to say you need to do it for 60-90 minutes A DAY to get any sort of weight loss benefit. Do you really have 60 minutes of free time to devote to an ineffective cardio workout?

2. Adaptability.

Your body is very smart and it adapts to whatever form of exercise you throw at it. That’s one of the reasons you should change up your workout every few weeks, but this is especially true when it comes to cardio workouts for weight loss. Let me give you a few numbers to consider. Let’s say that you traditionally do a cardio workout for around 45 minutes 3-6 days a week and that burns roughly 400 calories. Sounds good, right? But the thing you don’t realize is that every time you do that workout, your body is adapting to that workout, which means you burn fewer and fewer calories every time you do it.

So after a few weeks time, instead of burning 400 calories, you’re burning 380. You can take that out further and say in a few months time you’re only burning around 300 calories. But how do you fix that problem? The goal is to burn more calories, not less right? To fix it, you’d either have to do your cardio for a longer period of time, or work harder in that 45 minutes. Sounds good. You can do that…but remember, you’re working harder and going longer to turn the same amount of calories you burned a few months ago, when you weren’t working as hard. Call me crazy, but I don’t think that’s the goal you’re looking for.

3. The ‘fat burning zone’ does not exist.

This is one of my favorite cardio workout for weight loss myths because it’s a pretty skewed way of looking at science. Yes, your body does burn a higher PERCENTAGE of fat in a certain heart rate, or working zone, but who cares. When I’m sitting on my butt in front of the TV, my body is burning a higher percentage of body fat than it is when I’m working my tail off doing a fat burning workout, but that doesn’t mean I’m burning more fat. The key word is ‘percentage’.

Do you want to burn a higher percentage of fat, or just more fat? If you’re like most people you just want to burn more fat and you couldn’t care less what the percentage of fat calories is to non-fat calories. To burn more fat, you have to stop doing so much low-to-moderate intensity cardio and start doing more resistance training and interval training. The resistance training shouldn’t take long and should involve lots of full body workouts and full body exercises. It should take you less than 20 minutes (hopefully around 10) so that you don’t hav any excuses for not doing it.

It should not focus on worthless exercises like triceps kickbacks, chest flies, leg extensions, biceps curls, etc. and should focus on exercises that give you more fat burning bang for your buck. So stop putting all your faith in the treadmill, elliptical trainer, stationary bike and stair-stepper and quit going right to the cardio area in the gym as soon as you walk in the door because that is not the best way to lose fat. There are far better ways than the traditional cardio workouts for weight loss that will burn fat much quicker and have you feeling better and healthier in a lot less time than most cardio addicts spend warming up.

So what is the best cardio workout for women? Well, that is a loaded question, but I am going to give you a series of cardio exercises to help you lose weight and incinerate fat quicker than anything out there. I want to introduce to you the kettlebell circuit!

Kettlebell circuits are a hard hitting cardio workout routine that I guarantee will help you to achieve mind blowing cardiovascular fitness and the rock hard body to match. As you know the kettlebell is an ancient strength training device that is so versatile that you can execute lifts that train your body from head to toe while conditioning your cardiovascular system better than anything. To begin, you must have some basic knowledge of some more of the basic kettlebell lifts in order to execute this workout. If you don’t no worries, because the types of exercises I am going to explain can be easily learned.

To start, you will want to execute a series of double arm kettlebell swings for 30 repetitions. As soon as, you complete this exercise move on to performing a series of kettlebell front squats with the kettlebell properly racked in the clean position at your chest. You will want to do 15 squats with the kettlebell cleaned in each arm. Once you complete the kettlebell front squats then you will want to perform 30 squat and presses (15 each arm) combining the two movements. This completes the first round of your cardio endurance workout. Permit yourself 3 to 3 1/2 minutes rest and repeat this process all over again. Attempt to execute three rounds of this to classify yourself a cardio queen!

This workout would challenge any guy! Once again if you are not familiar with these basic lifts that I mentioned you can learn them quickly. Feel free to access the rest of my articles here to learn more specifically how to do each one. Kettlebell circuits are the REAL fat loss cardio workout. Remember that anyone can train hard, but only the best train smart!

One factor of a workout program that causes a lot of confusion amongst those who are trying to build muscle is what they should be doing for cardio.

Common thinking is that cardio should be avoided if you are on a muscle building program because weight lifting and cardio training are complete opposites.

Many individuals, guys in particular, tend to feel that they will ‘undue’ the work they put in during the weight sessions if they pound away on the treadmill.

Their thinking is that all the calories they burned off doing cardio could have gone towards growing them new muscles instead.

While they do have a point, this isn’t the whole story.

The thing to keep in mind is that when you are trying to gain weight, you want most of this weight to be in the form of lean tissue mass, rather than excess body fat. No one wants to gain 20 pounds and then spend the next four months dieting off the consequential 15 pounds of fat that were gained with the five pounds of muscle.

You’re far better off if you can gain 15 pounds of muscle and a measly 5 pounds of fat with it (since regardless of how well your diet is, you do have to accept some fat gain with the new muscle.

To accomplish this goal, cardio training comes in.

What you want to do with your cardio training when on a bodybuilding set-up is keep it limited in duration and frequency, but at a high enough intensity to maintain good cardiovascular shape and to improve nutrient partitioning (the amount of excess calories that are directed towards the muscle cells, rather than the fat cells).

So, aim to perform a maximum of two to three total cardio sessions a week, either at the end of your lifting workouts or on your days off.

One to two of these sessions can be in the form of sprint training, as long as you do not feel as though your legs are being too overworked. If you are already hitting legs with weight workouts three times a week (such as on a full-body weight program), throwing in two days of sprints will have you targeting legs five times a week – WAY TOO MUCH!

As a general principle, your legs should maximally be worked three to four times a week. So, this could be three days of lifting and one day of cardio, or perhaps two days of lifting with two days of cardio.

Keep in mind too that this in individual. If you have poor recovery abilities, you’ll need to knock it down to two or three total leg sessions per week.

Otherwise, moderate paced cardio to get your heart rate up, keep blood circulating, and help prevent muscle soreness should comprise the other one to two cardio sessions each week.

As long as you do that type of protocol, along with ensure that you are eating slightly more food on the days you do perform cardio to maintain a steady weight gain, you should have no issues keeping your body fat levels under control while you work on building more muscle tissue.

The Low Intensity Cardio Workout

This is one of the most popular workout solutions that are prescribed by many personal trainers. These exercises are targeted mainly at the body fats and hence are great to burn fat quickly. Research shows that low intensity workouts get the energy by burning body fat rather than muscle carbohydrates. Do not get misled by the name though. It says low intensity, but it is quite a lot of work too. To do these exercises correctly, have a cardio machine to track your heart rate. As you increase the intensity of your workout, your heart rate increases. When the heart rate reaches the required levels, you need to maintain it around there for half an hour to complete this workout.

The High Intensity Cardio Workout Solution

As the name suggests, this is a high intensity workout where you need to push beyond your pain limit to achieve the results. Just like it sounds this is really tough. If you think this is not for you, then you are not alone. Many people avoid taking this approach. However, this is a very effective technique to burn fat quickly, if followed properly. During the high intensity workout, body takes energy from the muscle carbohydrates as well as the body fat. If you can ensure that your total calorie intake is lower than the calories burnt, you create a deficit. This deficit can help burn fat and reduce your weight too.

Drawbacks of these cardio workouts

While low intensity looks like an easier option, it has some drawbacks. To achieve the right results, the heart rate needs to be brought to a level where the body starts burning fat. This can take up to 10 minutes for an average human being. This really means that the first ten minutes of your workout are not contributing much to your health. Now if you are pressed for time during the day, would you want to waste 10 precious minutes doing nothing but raising your heart rate? With the high intensity workouts, the problem is sustenance. One cannot sustain the high intensity for long.

The Best Solution: A middle way

The best solution to this is to stick to the advantages of both and get rid of their drawbacks. This is in fact very simple. Since the first 10 minutes of low intensity workouts are unproductive, perform the high intensity workouts during this time. Once you have started sweating and have pumped up your body, you can switch to the low intensity workout and sustain it for 20 to 30 minutes. This integrated approach will help burn the body fat quickly, and also create a calorie deficit to help reduce your weight. Be prudent in picking your exercises and you should be burning your body fat and smiling with confidence pretty soon.