I just read an interesting article by a fitness professional that advocated sticking strictly to cardio, and lots of it, if you are looking to shed weight. They recommend that instead of focusing on strength training when trying to slim down quickly, it’s better to focus more on more intense cardio workouts, to the tune of one hour at a time!

That seems like a long time, especially if you’re like me and you tend to max out on cardio workouts at about 45 minutes, and it is a lot of time, but you may have to work up to it if you are serious about slimming down quickly. They even recommended that you do what’s called “split training”, and do an hour of cardio in the morning and then another cardio session at night.

This way you are keeping your metabolism higher at both ends of the day, making it more likely that your body will continue to be a calorie burning machine so you can drop those excess pounds quickly.

I know more cardio is not what most people want to hear who want to lose weight, but the simple truth of it is that intense cardio is excellent at rapidly burning off calories and speeding up the metabolic rate at sustained periods of time. Extra pounds are, after all in essence just extra calories that need to be worked off because when we pile on pounds, it is from excess calories and fat that have no where else to go besides our thighs, love handles and bellies.

You could probably at least mix it up a bit and do a little on the elliptical, the recumbent bike and then the treadmill, as long as you are doing a solid hour, I would think. At least then you wouldn’t get bored with the same excercise for a full hour, which seems like a long time to be doing any one thing. Again, the key is to keep that metabolic rate up for that whole time, so as long as you’re moving and preferably sweating a little, you should be fine.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 8:11 am and is filed under Workout Regimens. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.