cardio Archives

March 31, 2023 By GOQii 9 Comments

How Important Is Cardio For Weight Loss?

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.

Cardio is one of the key components because:

You burn more calories at one time.
Getting your heart rate into your target heart rate zone means your blood is pumping, you’re breathing hard, and you’re sweating and burning calories.
You can easily add intensity to increase your calorie burn. With cardio, it’s easy to increase your calorie burn with small changes, for instance running or walking faster, jumping higher, climbing hills or trying new activities that your body isn’t used to.
It adds to your overall calorie deficit. Burning calories with exercise means you don’t have to cut as many calories from your diet.
You can do cardio most days of the week. With strength training, your muscles require rest to recover and grow stronger. Cardio can be done most days of the week without worrying about injury or over-training.

The Best Cardio Exercises

While you know that cardio is important for weight loss, which exercises are best and how much do you really need for weight loss?

The truth is, there really isn’t any best cardio exercise. The best activity is the one you’ll do on a regular basis. So, finding something you like is critical to reaching your weight loss goals. That said, some exercises offer more intensity than others.

Impact activities: Exercises that involve some impact, like walking, will usually boost your heart rate quicker than no-impact activities like swimming or cycling.
High impact activities: High impact, or exercises that involve running or jumping, will often burn more calories than lower impact things like walking.
Whole body activities: When you involve both the upper and lower body, such as an aerobic activity which is also is known as cross training, it’s often easier to get the heart rate up and burn more calories.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bother with low impact exercise. Both types of activities offer opportunities to burn calories and doing both gives you a well-rounded cardiovascular endurance development.

To get an idea of just how much cardio can do for you, check out the following list of common exercises. Below is the number of calories burned for a 150-pound person in 30 minutes:

Step aerobics: 340 calories
Stationary bike: 238 calories
Swimming: 270 calories
Walking 4 mph: 170 calories
Running 5 mph: 270 calories
kickboxing: 400 calories

Everything from walking to kickboxing can burn a significant number of calories!

How Much Do You Need?

It’s tough to know exactly how much cardio we need for weight loss. The American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association recommend about 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous intensity activity on most days of the week. But, the truth is how much cardio you need varies from person to person and depends on factors such as:

How many calories you eat
How hard you exercise
Metabolism, age and gender
Fitness levels
Body fat percentage and weight
Exercise schedule

That said, here are some tips for setting up an effective cardio program:

If you’re a beginner, start with 3 days of the cardio exercise of your choice, working at a level you can handle.
Add time each week to work your way up to 30 to 45 minutes of continuous exercise.
As you get stronger, try interval training once a week to help boost endurance and burn more calories.
Work your way up to 5 to 6 days of cardio and try to vary what you do and how hard you work.

It will help you lose weight but it is most effective when combined with strength training and a healthy, low-calorie diet and adequate rest.

How Much Do You Need To Build Muscle?

You may think you shouldn’t do cardio exercise if you’re trying to gain muscle. But, cardio isn’t just for weight loss. It also helps condition the heart and lungs and promotes health and well-being. If your goal is to gain muscle, you won’t need tons of cardio. But, doing at least three 20-minute sessions a week won’t hurt your goals and will help you reap the benefits of cardio without burning too many calories. These are some simple necessities for cardio in weight loss. After reading this, I am sure all your misconceptions about weight training and weight loss are cleared!

If you want to begin working out or want to take your workouts to the next level, book a GOQii PRO class through the GOQii App and join our certified experts for a live, interactive session.

For more on weight loss, click here. Do let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

#BeTheForce

January 30, 2023 By Swati Savla 1 Comment

Cardio For Weight Loss: High Intensity vs Low Intensity

We are well aware that Cardio is the best form of exercise to achieve any kind of weight or fat loss. But to understand the intensity required to achieve this, is still a little unclear. While researching, I kept coming back to the same question, what’s better – high-intensity or low-intensity training? There’s just way too much information trying to sway readers without considering their individual goals and needs.

Don’t worry! We’ve put together a few things you should know about in this article. It will give you a better idea of what low-intensity and high-intensity cardio training mean and will also help you decide which one you should go for!

Low Intensity Cardio

This workout encompasses consistent movements anywhere between 30-60 mins. It includes walking, cycling, swimming, light jogging, etc. The intensity is approx 40-60% of your maximum heart rate (your maximum heart rate = 220 – your age).

Benefits:

Consistent movements help maintain a steady heart rate (one can talk while doing any of these exercises)
You use more oxygen in these kind of exercises (hence fat is used as energy source)
Helps reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease by promoting good blood circulation
Reduces hyperglycemia (elevated blood sugar levels) in people with diabetes
Builds muscular endurance

Disadvantages:

Due to the principle of adaptation, the body quickly adapts to become more aerobically efficient. So only doing low intensity training can eventually become counterproductive to your goals, especially if one of your goals is long-term fat loss or when you hit a plateau.
To keep up with the body’s quick aerobic adaptation process, a person would need to continually run for longer and longer distances and durations just to burn the same amount of calories they did when they first started.

High Intensity Workouts

These workouts include quick, intense exercise bouts and short rest periods. Ranging from 4-30 minutes max. These types of workouts include a combination of sprints, burpees, squats, jumping jacks, pushups and an endless variety of other drills using only body weight or sometimes equipment like dumbbells or kettlebells. The intensity varies from 70-90% of maximum heart rate with 60-65% max heart rate in rest periods.

Benefits:

No equipment or gym needed as it can be done anywhere (great for frequent travelers)
Helps build muscle mass
Time efficient: energy is burned more quickly and even after exercise
Anaerobic exercise, since there is no time for oxygen consumption, the body burns more carbs
Because of the oxygen debt created, the body consumes extra oxygen post workout (EPOC- excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) and hence, continues burning fat post workout as well. So it has the dual benefit of carb and fat burning.

Disadvantages:

The body requires a day or two post HIIT for recovery, so this form of workout cannot be done daily.
It is physically intense! They are also harsh on your joints due to the high impact forces created in exercises like Burpees or Squat Jumps. So, if you’re just starting your fitness journey or have weak joints, HIIT cardio may not be the best place to start.

Which One Should You Choose?

It depends on you, your current level of fitness, your preferences and goals. Low-intensity is a great place to start if you have not worked out for a long time or are recovering from an injury. But if you already have experience and want to switch things up, lose some weight quickly or finally achieve your goal of going faster or further, give intervals a try. Don’t forget to be mindful of your body. Take breaks when you need to, don’t overtrain. Your body needs to rest, heal and progress!

We hope this article on cardio for weight loss helps you achieve your goals! To learn more, check out Healthy Reads or tune in to live, interactive sessions on GOQii PRO by booking a class via the GOQii App, where you can get one-on-one guidance in real time by certified fitness experts.

Get active and #BeTheForce

August 8, 2022 By GOQii 10 Comments

Put Your Fat On Flame With Interval Training

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!

What Is Interval Training?

Interval training is a workout in which we alternate the bursts of high-intensity exercises with intervals of lighter activity. All that we do here is, we repeatedly challenge our body and then give it shorter breaks to recover, for a massive cardio blast. It helps burn more calories in a short period of time, as compared to a steady-state exercise.

How Does It Work?

When we vary the intensity while working out, it leads to muscle confusion. Our body gets confused and wonders what’s happening! As a regulatory mechanism, our heart rate shoots up and it starts pumping more blood. More the blood, higher the Oxygen and to your surprise, fat combustion occurs more efficiently in the presence of Oxygen.

Ever wondered why a candle stops burning when we put a glass over it and block the Oxygen? That’s exactly the principle. Any burning process requires O2 which is a key to burning fat. And since interval training involves a lot of Oxygen, it’s been gaining fame in the fat loss/inch loss sector.

There are no hard and fast rules in interval training. We can have variations as we want, to make it most enjoyable and keep boredom at bay. We can:

Interval walk: Walking fast for 2 minutes, then walking slowly for a minute, again fast, then slow and go on this way as long as we can
Interval runs Alternating 2 minutes run with a 1-minute walk
Interval swim: Alternating fast-paced swimming moves with slow-paced moves

We can also try this with cycling, dancing, strengthening exercises (Tabata – being the most popular form of High Intensity Interval Training) and the list can go on.

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.

If you are a beginner to exercising, We’d say, don’t start with interval training directly. Give your body some time to build the stamina with steady cardio workouts for a few weeks to a month. You can then add interval training to your routine. In fact, you can also add these interval training plans to your gym routine once a week to enhance your speed and cardiovascular endurance.

So what are you waiting for? Jump into your workout shoes and jazz up your workout routine by adding interval training! If you have a chronic health condition (Hypertension or Cardiovascular illness), it’s better to keep away from interval training to avoid any aggravation. You can check with your trainer or coach to take the best course. For further guidance, you can subscribe for GOQii’s personalized health coaching and get the best exercises and habits to meet your weight loss goals.

Additionally, you can also join our online classes on GOQii PRO, where our certified fitness experts will guide you on the correct form and posture in real time, while making sure that you are well motivated! You can book a class now from the GOQii App.

For more on fitness and weight loss, check out Healthy Reads.

Get Active and #BeTheForce

November 15, 2021 By Richa Doshi 1 Comment

How Chronic Cardio Could be Making You Fat

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.

Here’s 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! For more on fitness, check out Healthy Reads or tune in to LIVE sessions on GOQii PRO within the GOQii App, where you can get one-on-one guidance in real time by certified fitness experts.

#BeTheForce