Excessive Cardio? You Break Down Muscle Mass And Not Able To Burn Body Fat Efficiently!
Don't do Excessive Cardio, do Moderate Cardio Instead
And do it along with strength training plus you eat a healthy weight loss diet. You'll turn your body into a "sizzling" fat burning machine!
Hmmm.....Cardio excessively, how does it come about?
You'd be thinking: ".....No way for me to over indulge in cardio training! I'm doing fine with 6 days of 2-hour training".....
You hit the bull eye....
6 days of 2-hour cardio is EXCESSIVE!
You probably think I'm making "something" out of "nothing".....
But the truth is that sometimes, you tend to indulge in excessive cardio and think nothing of it because you've got goals you want to achieve and results you want to see.
These goals and results could tip you off into doing more cardio than what's normally your take.
What goals and results have that hard-to-resist "pull" and "push" thing to tip you over into the terrain of over training?
Ha! Primo of primo - to lose weight.
Goodness! How can you achieve weight loss if you don't cardio hard and fast? Oh yes, train longer, train everyday! Your thinking, right?
You suppose that when you train long enough and frequent enough, your body will respond faster and you'll achieve your weight loss goal, faster, as well.
Wrong! You're actually doing excessive cardio. And you're not being "fair" to your body!
Let's go back to what cardio can do for your body.
Improves health and fitness of your heart and lungs.
Yes.
Burns body fat so you lose weight.
Yes.
Plus a litany of other health "goodies".
Right. We've set the correct perspective.
Now let's discuss what happens when you do excessive cardio, your argument being that it'll hasten your achievement of weight loss goal.
Are you ready for the "bombshell"?
Excessive Cardio will not Bring you to your Weight Loss Goal more Quickly!
Instead, it'll strip off your muscles and is definitely not the most efficient method for you to lose body fat!
Once you start stripping off muscle mass, your body becomes less efficient in burning body fat.
(Note: Muscle is metabolically active, meaning it stimulates your metabolism, hence you burn body fat)
For each pound of muscle you put on your body, you'll burn up to 50 additional calories per day. If you strip off muscle mass, all you do is counter-acting your effort to burn body fat!
Excessive cardio also raises your stress hormones, causes you lots of wear and tear in your body and increases your risk of injury .
That's not good for you either!
If you cardio excessively, you're actually teaching your body to constantly replenish fat stores as a fuel source to satisfy your energy needs.
This is a "No No" for you when you aim to lose body fat.
Do you know your body is in fact very smart and will fight for survival in any way possible?
Cardio-walk for more than 1 hour every day, for example, will make your body think you've to walk this length daily.
The result? Your body makes available usable energy for this walk.
So even if you don't cardio-walk in that manner for a while, your body will still deposit that fuel (stored fat) just in case!
Do you like that?
Surely not.
My advice is, cardio hard when you cardio but don't over-cardio!
You'd want to keep, maintain and continually build muscle to optimally enable your body to perpetually burn fat.
This is definitely more do-able than the short bursts of over training that mainly breaks down your muscle mass!
You'll not only conquer your short and long term goals but move beyond - the goal of life long control over your body weight.
Beautiful!
How then to Burn Body Fat to Lose Weight and at the same time Maintain Muscle Mass?
Well, simple does the job. Follow my "moderate" routine like this:
Do cardio exercise moderately, 3-4 times per week for 30 minutes per session
Blink
Del.icio.us
Digg
Furl
Google
Simpy
Spurl
Technorati
Y! MyWeb