There are a number of cardio workouts to lose fat and get lean, but their effectiveness at burning fat varies. The most popular cardio training method is steady state cardio. It involves exercising at a steady moderate pace for an extended period of time. This cardio will raise your heart rate up to 60-80 percent of your maximum heart rate. Research has shown that this is an optimum heart rate zone to burn body fat as energy while you work out. Steady state cardio is the most popular form of cardio and it works very good to lose body fat.
You can do steady state cardio on equipment in the gym or you can do it outdoors. Walking, jogging, running, bicycle, elliptical machine, rowing, stair climbing etc for extended periods of time are all examples of steady cardio. You can get good results with them if your workout is based on the right intensity, frequency and duration.
But there are a few drawbacks with steady state cardio. If the duration is too short you may not get optimal results from your workout to have worthwhile impact on your fat loss progress. If the duration is too long you may have to deal with severe boredom while working out and possible muscle loss. Because of these issues there's an alarming trend taking place in bodybuilding and fitness circles towards avoiding cardio completely or cutting it to a bare minimum because some people believe it's too boring and doing too much for too long may make you lose your precious lean muscle mass.
This brings us to our next cardio method - High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). HIIT isn't as popular as Steady State Cardio, but it is proven to be much more effective at burning off body fat. High Intensity Interval Training basically means alternating high and low intensities throughout your cardio workout. A typical HIIT workout might be getting on a treadmill and sprinting for 30 seconds followed by walking for 60 seconds. You then repeat this pattern to complete your cardio session. Your workout session could be just 20 minutes in duration and you'll burn a great amount of body fat
Many studies showed how High Intensity Interval Training allowed people to burn off fat at faster rates than any other method of cardio. This method was proven to be the superior method to burn body fat. They said that HIIT burned as much as 3 times more calories than steady state cardio. It has also been shown that HIIT raises your metabolism for a certain amount of time after the workout is complete, allowing you to continue burning calories after you stop working out.
The main drawback with HIIT is that the high level of intensity may not be suitable for people who are not fit enough or have some physical weakness. But no matter your circumstances and goals you will be able to design a good cardio workout plan that will work for you.
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