In today’s post I’m going to change the way you think about cardio and give you the truth about different cardio plans and which ones you should be doing. By the end of reading this you will understand what kind of cardio burns the most fat in the least amount of time.
Lets start by tackling the most popular/oldest type of cardio, “Slow Steady State Cardio”. This type of cardio is by far the most widely known cardio plan and unfortunately the least effective cardioplan for burning fat. Studies have shown that even doing 40 to 90 minutes of slow steady state cardio produced no loss in belly fat over a 12 week period. Not to say that this type of cardio doesn’t have its place in the fitness world, it just doesn’t provide results when it comes to fat loss.
The next type of cardio and my absolute favorite method of training is Interval Cardio. Interval cardio when compared with slow steady state cardio blows it out of the water for fat loss. Not only do you burn more calories, a majority of those calories come from fat calories. The interval cardio plans come in a variety of schemes, however I prefer a 1:3 work to rest ratio. This is achieved by bringing your heart rate up around 85-90% for 30 seconds, then letting your heart rate recover around 50-60% for 90 seconds. This should only be done for 20 minutesor 2 miles, which ever comes first and should never be done on consecutive days.
The most time conscious fat burning cardio plan brings us to Tabata Interval Training. The basic idea is that after a 5 minute warm up, you perform 20 seconds of intense work 90% of your maximum heart rate(MHR), followed by 10 seconds of rest, 50% of MHR, then repeat 8 times. This is a total of 4 minutes of intense work and isn’t a bad option for someone who doesnt have much time and in good cardiovascular shape.
Body weight circuit training is the most nontraditional cardio plan but isn’t really a cardio plan at all. I prefer to start circuits with a simple total body exercise like step ups, then follow that with 6 exercises, alternating between upper body exercises and lower body exercises, finishing off with an explosive plyometric total body exercise like burpees.
I hope this sheds a bit of light on the subject of cardio for you. If you are not sure what exercises to choose or are completely lost on how to get started, head on over to my online training site for more info.
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