How Much Cardio to Lose Fat, Not Muscle (the most effective cardio)

How much cardio to lose fat, not muscle (the most effective cardio)

So how much cardio can you do to burn the maximum amount of body fat without risking any muscle loss?

To properly answer this question, there are a few things we need to establish.

First, you must be doing some form of resistance training while in a calorie deficit to protect your muscle mass, and you can even continue to build muscle while you're in a slight deficit. However, the leaner you get, the more challenging this becomes.

Next, you need to be eating enough protein. Studies have consistently found that you will lose less muscle when eating a high protein calorie-restricted diet even if you aren’t doing any resistance training. I just read a meta-analysis discussing this, and it considered anything over 25% of your daily calories to be a high protein. Personally, I go higher than this, keeping mine in the 30 to 35 percent range.

We need to be doing these two things first before we even start talking about cardio.

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We don't have to do cardio to lose weight, but there are a couple of reasons why we might want to include some in our training. One is health, cardio is good for you, and the other one is that it allows us to be able to eat a bit more, which makes dieting more comfortable.

The two forms of cardio most commonly associated with weight loss are LISS or low-intensity steady-state cardio and HIIT or high-intensity interval training. Both have their pros and cons.

First, let's talk about LISS cardio. This is nice easy cardio like going for a walk in the park, a leisurely bike ride or going for a swim. It isn’t hard on the body, making it easy to recover from. The drawback is you have to do it longer to get a significant calorie burn.

For example, if you are a 200-pound man, you would have to walk for 45 minutes at 3 miles per hour which is considered an average walking pace to burn 250 calories, and you would have to do this every day to lose half a pound a week. Interestingly enough, as you lose weight, you will have to walk even longer to continue to lose the same amount of weight.

On the positive side, because it’s so easy to recover from, it has no negative effect on your muscle mass. But remember, emphasis should always be on your weight training to protect that hard-earned muscle, and when it comes to time management, it may make sense to reserve long easy cardio sessions for non-weight training days.

Another good thing to think about is you don’t have to do this cardio all at once. You could do 15 minutes in the morning. 15 minutes at lunch and finish off with the last 15 minutes when you get home at the end of the day.

You can break into an all-out run to burn more calories faster, but you have to be careful as running is much harder on the body and more Apt to have a negative effect on your muscle mass, particularly in your legs.

You would be much better off doing a hardcore cycling session as cycling is much more muscle-sparing than running. If you are short on time, interval cycling makes a lot of sense. I read a study where they had detrained hockey players doing interval cycling for 4 weeks, and they actually added some muscle to their legs.

High-Intensity interval training has been shown to burn more calories in less time. These intervals can vary anywhere from 40 sec to a minute of high-intensity effort alternating with 20 seconds to 2 minutes of low-intensity work.

These sessions should be no longer than 20 minutes, and you should allow at least one day in between your HIIT training and your next leg day to ensure your legs are fully recovered and make sure you are protecting that hard earn muscle mass.

Too many HIIT training sessions can interfere with your weight training and recovery. So it is best to keep these down to once or twice a week and fill in any other opportunities you have for cardio with low-intensity options.

Of course, losing weight isn’t the only reason we should be doing cardio. It’s a key component in improving our overall health. To find out how to improve your cardiovascular fitness as you age.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4892287/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5946208/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267096096_High-
intensity_Interval_Training_Has_Positive_Effects_on_Performance_In_Ice_Hockey_Players
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Concurrent-Training%3A-A-Meta-Analysis-Examining-of-Wilson-Mar%C3%ADn/26fb11d95a94c238a4cd70dd5df04a5bce2aa9ba?p2df