How often do you hit the gym and go ballistic on the treadmill? Quite often? We perfectly understand the need to run! Whether you’re running to train for a marathon, to reach a goal, chase a finish line, catch a departing train or bus, we understand how crucial running is… especially to stay fit!
But what happens when you go overboard? Do you actually cause more harm than good? You can literally run for your life and not even see an inch of a difference and sometimes, even the opposite – you’ve gained weight instead of losing it!
This can be a total nightmare for someone trying to lose weight. There’s a perfect explanation for it.
How Chronic Cardio Might be Making You Fat
1. Excessive cardio can increase stress in the body and increase your heart rate to increase blood flow to your muscles. When you do too much cardio, your stress hormones stay elevated. Some amount of stress can be good for the body, but when cortisol i.e. our stress hormone stays consistently high, it can create a lot of issues.
- Stress can cause insulin resistance to circulate more glucose in the blood to supply energy for stress management. Insulin resistance not only means that you have more sugar in your blood than required, it also means that you store fat more easily as insulin promotes fat storage.
- In stress, your body shuts down or slows down to fight stress effectively. Your thyroid function slows down, the levels of TSH is reduced in the body, which again promotes weight gain.
- In women, stress can also disturb the menstruation cycle. Thus creating hormone imbalances in the body, thus promoting weight gain.
- Chronic stress also promotes the storage of fat in the linings of our organs i.e. visceral fat, as a protection to our organs from stress. This again starts a vicious cycle of excess belly fat, insulin resistance, and more fat storage.
2. Chronic cardio can take a toll on our muscles. Chronic cardio not only burns fat, it burns muscle as well. Your muscle mass determines your metabolism and Basal Metabolic Rate. If you have more muscle, you burn more fat. So when you lose muscle, your metabolism drops and you do not burn as much fat anymore.
So, how do we get the most of our workout? Do a combination of cardio and weight training to promote muscle growth and fat burn. Also indulge in yoga and meditation on a regular basis for better stress management, better sleep and preventing the issues listed above.
We hope this article helps you and keeps you from going overboard. Remember that anything in excess is bad! Stay moderate and stay healthy!
If this information helped, let us know in the comments below. You can find more articles on fitness here. To level up your workouts and get the right guidance and motivation, you can join live, interactive sessions conducted by experts on GOQii PRO. Book a class via the GOQii App now.
#BeTheForce
You are well aware of the fact that you lose weight when you burn more calories irrespective of how much you eat. The best way to lose weight is to follow a combination of cardio, strength training and a healthy diet.
Most of us have this desirable goal of losing fat but, when asked to act on it, we have a fixed set of excuses ready – No time! Too tough for me! Too boring to repeat the same pattern, etc. It’s time to ditch these excuses and rev up workouts which consume less time, can be done easily and are not monotonous. We suggest going for Interval Training!
It’s quite possible to take interval training to many levels. The length and speed of each high-intensity interval solely depend upon our strength and capacity. To get better with it, we need to make sure we push our body way past our comfort zone each time we do it. Remember, not to rush into strenuous exercise before our body is ready, to avoid injury. Ensure a good warm-up session before starting with it, and end it with stretches.
