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Doing cardio to lose weight is nothing new. It’s something that millions has people have been doing for the past few decades. Cardio workouts, in their various forms, are a useful way to burn more calories and shed pounds. However, there are people who achieve great results with cardio and there are those who don’t.
The question is why is there such a difference among people who all do cardio and how can you work to be one of those who achieves fast and quick results? I hope that these tips will help you answer this question and lose weight quickly.
1. Do cardio before breakfast – research has shown that doing cardio before eating breakfast creates an enhanced fat burning experience. The reason why this happens is still not entirely clear. What is probable is that your body is relatively low on easy to get energy, having not eaten for the past few hours. So, your body needs to use the calories it has stored as fat in order to fuel your workout. This is why doing cardio early in the day can help you achieve faster results in terms of weight loss.
2. Quality over quantity – In the past, people used to judge the effect of their cardio workouts by how long they took. This is the wrong way of looking at it. You need to judge your workout by the quality of it. Your workout need to be challenging, it needs to be hard, it doesn’t have to be long. So, during each and every one of your workouts ask yourself this: “is my workout challenging me?” If the answer is no then you need to change it.
3. Do a variety of workouts – Each cardio workout trains your body in a different way. Swimming and running work different muscles. Rowing trains the upper body while cycling works the lower, primarily. You need to do a variety of cardio workouts to lose weight and build your fitness. Don’t just do one.
4. Don’t eat too much afterward – This may seem obvious but many people make this mistake. Doing cardio can often lead to overeating after the workout has been completed. It’s because you feel that you burned way more calories than you actually did. In a way, you may “undo” your workout. So, eat after a workout. Feed your muscles. Just don’t over do it.
Take these 4 tips, remember them and go do some cardio.
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It’s one thing to lose weight. It’s quite another to be able to do it fast. Sure, you can starve yourself silly or use some unhealthy pill or supplement to induce a quick weight loss, but this doesn’t really count. You’re not out to lose weight in an unhealthy and unsustainable way. You’re out to find ways to drop body fat and to keep it off.
This is what I hope this article and the tips in it will help you do. I hope that you find them useful and apply them soon in your life.
1. Train your entire body – One mistake that people make in their workouts is that they focus on their problem areas. Each of us has body parts that we’re less than happy about. It can be the abs, the thighs, the buttocks, the arms. It makes sense to train those body parts primarily.
It may make sense but it is wrong. Our body doesn’t burn fat from anywhere specifically. For the most part, it burns fat according to your genetics. Your goal is to make it burn as much fat as you can (healthily). The more muscle mass you train, the more calories you burn, which is why you need to do total body workout routines as they will target more muscles and burn more calories.
2. Get enough sleep – One reason why so many people are fat these days is that we tend to sleep less hours than we used to. When you don’t get enough sleep your hormonal make up starts to change. You secrete more hormones that make you feel hungry so you tend to eat more. Naturally, eating more than you should is detrimental to weight loss. So, get at least 7 hours of sleep each night.
3. Do circuits – Working out is great. Doing circuits is better. Circuit workouts are at the basis of metabolic resistance training, one of the best, if not the best, fitness methods to burn body fat quickly. Working out in circuits creates a more intense exercise experience. It burns more calories and gives you a metabolism hike that helps you keep burning more and more calories for hours.
4. Choose your snacks carefully – People tend to disregard the calories in their snacks. This is a mistake as snacks can contain hundreds of calories. You need to eat healthy snacks, primarily fruit and vegetables and avoid candy bars and other calorie rich items.
I hope that these 4 tips have been useful to you. I believe that if you follow them you will achieve results.
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Most weight loss programs give you an idea that it’s easy to lose weight and some diet books will tell you that you can do it just with the right diet. A proper diet will help you lose weight but I also recommend doing exercise. Our body is made to exercise and if you don’t do it you might end up gaining weight or having other health related problems.
Many people complain that they can’t exercise to lose weight but reality is quite different because you don’t even need to exercise at high intensities. A medium intensity is perfect to lose weight because you use mostly fat, you use fat as a energy source when you have enough oxygen to oxidize the fat and that doesn’t happen in high intensity exercises where you use carbon hydrates to burn without oxygen. But remember that the main thing is to burn fat and because of that you want to exercise at a moderate rate were you burn all the fat.
So I think that by now you agree with moderate exercise and the best is to perform daily sessions, start with 15 minutes and try to go up to an hour or more of daily exercise but an hour should be more than enough for you to lose weight.
The next step is to make a good collection of diet books, diet books that work will allow you to vary your meals so that you don’t get bored from eating the same things every day. Most diet books will allow you to have a healthy diet but the best to lose weight are the weight loss diet books and those also improve your health.
It’s important to follow the diet books guidelines and portions, if you eat too much there’s no point in doing exercise, you need to make sure that you eat less calories than the ones you spend, don’t starve yourself but get a caloric table from the recommended food in the diet books and compare the number of calories relative to the amount of food you eat, make sure you don’t have more calories than the daily guidelines for your age and sex. You can find all this information in the internet and it’s completely free.
You’ll see that diet books will recommend a lot of vegetables and will teach you not to cook them in oil, cooking in oil isn’t good because oil turns into fat in your body and is especially bad for your health if it gets too burned up while cooking. Like vegetables, seeds are also very good especially sesame seeds that have a lot of protein and no fat at all. Fish and mollusks are really good. Cereals are also recommended and cereals derivates like seitan that have many proteins, have no fat, and is very easy to cook. Fruit is also high advisable and you can eat it with the meals or between the meals if you feel hungry.
A diet book that works will tell you this and much more but I can’t write everything in a single article, I advise you to check my website where you’ll find more information. But you should keep in mind that I don’t want to trick anyone and that’s why I tell you that you need good diet books.and some exercise, you can really invest in this solution because it won’t disappoint you if you follow it to the letter. You should always remember that like diet books exercise also is essential to obtain good results. Exercise will make you lose weight and improve your health which leads to a better life quality.
Most of us all know the basic ways to exercise, cardio, some weights, and diet. Those are the basics. You can always change the order or amount or anything like that, but that is most of what weight loss is. And for the most part, I would never do it if all I chose to do was run on the treadmill or elliptical.
So what other options do we have? Well, I think that you will find that jumping workouts can burn more fat in 20 minutes then you can in an hour of the treadmill.
Why? Because in order to keep burning fat and keep your metabolism up, you need to keep things changing and surprise your body so it doesn’t know what is coming next. By keeping things new all the time, your body will have to adapt to whatever you throw at it and it will grow much quicker than hours of treadmill time.
So in order to get the most out of your jumping workout, you will need to throw in a few jumping exercises like jump rope or line jumps or some other plyometric exercises that will feel like strength training, but it will act more like a cardio exercise. It is the perfect combination to get the benefits of both.
Try out these following exercises and see what they can do for you.
- Jump Rope Variations — You can do your normal routine with a jump rope, or you can switch things up so that you surprise your body again. Instead of using a rope, jump without one. Do the same movement but no rope. Do this and jump a little higher each time. This will make you work a little harder and focus on your legs instead of trying not to hit your shins. Or jump with just one leg, or even alternate legs so that you keep things new and different.
- Line Jumps — These are quick plyometric exercises that will keep your body moving and keep your body guessing. Find a line on the ground and stand to one side of it. Keeping both feet together, hop back and forth over the line. Just like the jump rope variations, keep jumping a little bit higher each time to get the most out of the exercise. Also switch it up to jump with just one foot and then switch legs.
- Squat Jumps — These are just like normal squats, but no weight. And instead of pushing up the weight, you will jump as high as you can into the air. This will build explosive strength on top of the strength from normal squats.
And best of all, you don’t need any equipment to do any of these jumping exercises. So use these to switch things up and see how much more weight you can shave off.
Colin Reay has been coaching basketball and track for the last 7 years and has been writing about how to Jump Higher at his own blog at JustJumpHigher.com
Is it really possible to lose weight without dieting? The resounding answer to this question is, yes.
Contrary to what you might be thinking right now, this is not a sales pitch for the latest “fad” weight loss pill that promises to magically burn body fat away. Although there are a few weight loss products (be sure to read our Shakeology review) that can yield tremendous results when combined with a solid exercise plan, it’s important to realize that there really are no shortcuts. Losing weight the right way way takes hard work and discipline on your part, but if you’re excited to know how you can truly lose weight without dieting, read on.
Before we reveal how, let’s get one thing straight: When we refer to the phrase “without dieting”, we mean fad or crash diets. You can lose weight without starving yourself half to death or driving your metabolism awry. It is important, however, to eat healthy if you want to actually lose weight without dieting.
Consuming fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean meats, and fish while reducing your intake of highly-processed junk food and pastries is vital. Also, it’s important that your food intake is sufficient for your body’s needs. Eat too much, and you can’t expect to ever actually lose weight. Eat too little, and your body will be lacking the nutrients and vitamins it needs to operate at optimal capacity.
How to Lose Weight Without Going on a Diet
So, on to the meat of this article: How exactly do you lose weight without dieting? The answer lies in good old-fashioned exercise.
This is probably no surprise to most — after all, some exercise is expected. However, what we’re referring to is more than just your usual walking or jogging regimen.
To accelerate fat loss, it’s important to structure your workouts so that you target very specific muscles of your stomach, thighs, obliques, triceps, butt, and core. As a result, you’re able to tackle each of these problem areas head on and will be able to effectively tone your muscles to achieve that lean look you’ve been after. Programs like the P90X workout from Beachbody do a tremendous job of this, and are definitely recommended if you don’t feel comfortable structuring your daily workout schedule.
In a nutshell, you should be training your muscle groups two to three times a week on alternate days. Don’t be tempted to go overboard with your training and hit the same muscles each day, otherwise known as “over training”. Sufficient rest is a necessary part of every effective fitness plan, and training your favorite muscles every day will only hinder your progress. Without rest, you also stand the chance of tiring yourself needlessly which could result in excessive fatigue. Once overtraining occurs, you’ll have to rest for a longer period of time before continuing.
Here’s an example exercise plan: Workout your stomach by doing crunches and sit ups. Train your obliques or the muscles on the side of your abdomen by doing oblique crunches using a Swiss ball and get leaner triceps with tricep dips and extensions. In these three exercises, strive for 10 to 15 repetitions of 3 sets each. Rest for a minute in between sets. To get rid of the fat in your thighs and shape your butt, perform leg exercises such as walking, squats, cycling, or running for about 20 to 30 minutes three times a week. Core strengthening workouts include planks and side planks. Strive to hold the poses for about 60 seconds for maximum benefit.
By following a structured exercise program such as the above example and combining it with a well-balanced diet made up primarily of vegetables and lean protein, you’ll find that losing weight without yo-yo dieting becomes easily attainable. Lastly, keep in mind that weight loss is a gradual process that takes time — don’t get discouraged when you don’t see results overnight!
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