If you only do cardio exercise, I have bad news for you. You are not getting lean and toned.
Even if you are losing weight, your body fat is still high. You can have normal weight with high body fat. Its technically called “normal weight obese.” Some call it skinny-fat.
Always remember this: fat loss is more important than weight loss. The way to transform your body to lean and toned is to build muscle mass and burn body fat. This will keep the weight loss off your body for good. Do your strength training 3 days a week (bodyweight, dumbbell or barbell exercises).
You don’t have to stop doing cardio. Just do more effective cardio workouts. Fat burning cardio workouts should: improve heart health, burn calories (during and after your workout), burn fat and spare muscle mass.
Keep your cardio workouts at about 20 minutes. That’s all it takes to help you reach your goals. And, it will keep you from the boredom and muscle-wasting that’s built into long cardio sessions.
Intense interval cardio workouts will increase your body’s growth hormone. Research has also proven that the benefits of anaerobic exercise (like sprint interval cardio) is superior to aerobic exercise for fitness and heart health.
Here are 3 top fat-burning cardio workouts:
1.Run sprint intervals on grass or sand. Never run on hard surfaces like concrete and asphalt. Sprints are absolutely one of the best ways to blast fat and sculpt your body. You don’t have to be fast, just run as fast as you can! To make it more challenging, run uphill or on stadium steps.
If you want to tone up your body and look more sculpted, you should perform the majority of your cardio exercise using intervals such as sprints.
Doing sprint intervals (and jumps) will activate your bulky fast-twitch muscle fibers to give you a more lean and toned body. Just take a look at an athlete who competes in a speed sport. Their bodies are “ripped” for a reason (most of their training is fast).
2. Do jump training or plyometrics. This is high intensity and high risk. Perfect your jumping and landing techniques before advancing to full speed jumps. You may want to start with exercises like jump rope, jumping jacks, hops and squat jumps.
Plyometrics remains one of the best ways to help burn fat, lose weight and really sculpt your body. If your body has the needed strength and stability, plyometrics will improve your body’s composition (more muscle, less fat) faster.
You could do at least one cardio workout a week that includes mainly jumping exercises.
3. Try bodyweight cardio. Try rotating sets of exercises like step ups, squats, pushups, pullups and lunges for 20 minutes. That’s a tough, fat-burning cardio workout!
Bodyweight cardio is a great way to change up your routine. Also, you will tone your body faster because of the strength component in the workout. Bodyweight exercises help you develop strength that allows your body to stabilize itself.
If you have been needing to “ramp up” your cardio to burn more fat, any one of these workouts would work for you!
