It is well known that if you want or need to lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you take in. This means that the most effective way to expedite the process is to both reduce the number of calories that you are consuming and increase the number of calories that you are burning.
Cardio, or exercise that stresses your cardiovascular system is one of the best ways to burn additional calories. It gets your heart pumping, your respiration up and your blood flowing in addition to working whatever muscle groups the specific cardio exercise that you have chosen involves.
The amount of cardio that each person needs to do in order to lose weight is largely dependent upon many different factors.
How Much Cardio to Lose Weight Should You Do
The most basic number that you need to know in order to calculate how much cardio to to do lose weight is 3500. This is the number of calories that you need to take in to gain a pound, or burn to lose a pound. If your goal is to lose weight strictly by increasing your cardio and not making any adjustments to your meal plan, that means that you need to come up with 3500 calories worth of cardio exercise for every pound that you want to lose.
Different exercises expend different amounts of energy, and in addition to that variation, the amount of effort that you actually put into an exercise can also have an impact, as can whether you are a female or a male, what your weight and age are, and what your physical condition is.
A person who weighs 150 pounds is going to burn more calories running a mile at the same speed as a person who weighs 120 pounds, simply because they are carrying more weight. Two people who weigh the same thing but run for half an hour at different speeds will have a difference in the amount of calories they burn as well.
Although it is difficult to determine an exact number of calories that will be burned, an average of 200 calories per half hour is probably a safe estimate for most exercises done with moderate exertion.
This means that to lose one pound per week, you would need to burn an average of 500 calories per day, so you would need to do cardio for just over an hour every day, every day of the week. You can see how cutting calories being eaten at the same time can make things move along more quickly!
How Much Cardio to Lose Weight Fast
The most successful diets combine smart meal plans with a healthy exercise program consisting of both cardio and strength training. Small changes can add up quickly, and many people have been very pleased to find out how easily their weight has come off once they have started adding more healthy fruits and vegetables to their diet, cutting fatty processed foods, eating small snacks throughout the day to keep their metabolisms running high, and combining this with a good exercise habit.
The best cardio exercise is the one that you will stick to consistently, so find an exercise that you enjoy and try to do it for at least five days per week, for a minimum of thirty minutes each time.
Adding to the number of days that you exercise or increasing the amount of time you spend per session will make a big difference, but remember that your body does not actually start to burn fat until you have completed twenty minutes of exercise, so make sure that you are working out at least that long.
If you find that you don’t have time to do more than thirty minutes of exercise at any one time but you are trying to use cardio to lose weight fast, exercise twice a day in two thirty minute sessions.
