Stop doing cardio and increase your metabolism

Now I’m not saying doing cardio is bad I’m saying if you only do cardio it’s not great. Or if you mostly do cardio and put poor effort into resistance training it’s a waste of time. Let me explain.

If your objective is to lose weight you probably mean you want to lose fat. If you want to lose fat your best plan of action should be to increase your metabolism and increase how much energy you use throughout the day.
I’m assuming at this point you’re hoping I’m going to tell you exactly how to increase your metabolism. And yes, I will.

Now let me tell you a well known secret. If you do a lot of cardio and only cardio, you will decrease your metabolism over time.

When your goal is weight loss you are most likely on some sort of calorie restricted diet paired with your exercise program. The end result while you’re losing weight will always be fat loss and a decrease in lean body mass (Muscle). When you only do cardio and no resistance training your muscles will melt away almost as fast as the fat, and even faster if you’re on a very low calorie diet.

This is a huge factor that leads to people gaining weight back twice as fast as they lost it.
So how do you prevent your muscles from shrinking into nothing? You put them through a tough resistance training program. You most likely will continue to lose muscle mass as you lose weight on any diet. But if you’re training them well you will decrease the rate that you lose them, and in some cases some people may increase muscle mass if training hard and eating correctly.

So is that it? No way, there's more!
When you lift weights you cause minor tearing in your muscles, don’t worry this is normal (This is also what causes them to grow). But that damage needs repairing, so your body spends more energy (increases metabolism temporarily) to repair the damaged muscle cells. The repair process generally takes a few days, or it never stops if you keep working out. Whereas with cardio once you stop exercising and your heart rate returns to its normal rate you stop burning extra calories.

Now let me tell you how you increase your metabolism (Resting Metabolic Rate = Energy required for all bodily functions including energy used to build up and break down the body).

The more muscle mass you have the faster your metabolic rate will be. Why? Because muscle mass requires a lot of energy to constantly be fed nutrients and oxygen to maintain themselves.

Now that all sounds great, right? But there’s more. As you become more comfortable training you will be able to increase the intensity of your work out. Imagine a time when you did an exercise or activity and it left you breathless. This is referred to as EPOC (Exercise post oxygen consumption), that’s as technical as I will get. What this means is your body will need more oxygen to recovery from the activity you just completed. The more intense the workout the longer EPOC will have an effect. Basically you will have a heightened heart rate and breathe a little more rapid for hours after your workout. You won’t even notice it after 15-20 minutes. But an increase in heart rate and breathing is exactly how you increase your energy expenditure even after you’re done your exercise.

So let’s recap the main points.
• Doing only cardio will decrease our muscle mass, slowing down our metabolism.
• Doing resistance training causes damage to muscle cells, increasing energy expenditure of the body to build larger muscles. End result, higher metabolism.
• Exercise done at a high intensity will increase our energy expenditure for hours after exercise, causing even more calories to be used all day (EPOC). Very high intensity training should be done only once you have gained a lot of experience with exercise or under supervision and guidance of a professional.

The last thing I would like to say is that cardio should not be avoided at all costs. The reason why I wanted to share this information with you is to open your eyes to better solutions for weight loss. Cardio still has many health benefits and should still be done regularly if not on a daily basis. Cardio is a great solution for weight loss especially for very overweight people. If you are thin and want to tighten and tone I would recommend more weights and less cardio.
I really hope this information was useful for you and you find a way of implementing some of it into your routine.

Thank you for reading. I would love to answer all your questions in the comments.

Please follow me if you enjoy this kind of content and want to see more and a resteem and upvote are always very much appreciated.