

By varying up your cardio approach, you continue to improve while preventing adaptation. On yet other days, do intervals or “blocks” of challenging endurance work (say, 2-4 minutes at a time) followed by short rests. Other days, do long, endurance-style workouts that are tiring but not intense. Some days, do short sprints followed by rest. Instead of doing the exact same cardio workout every single time, mix it up. Vary your cardio length, intensity, and style. Alternating days is a great plan, with a few rest days per week. One to three days per week is sufficient.ĭo strength train. Focus on mixing up cardio with weight training. It just means that you’re peppering your exercise days (which should be sufficiently vigorous/difficult) with recovery days in between.
#Daily cardio workout license
In other words, taking rest days isn’t a license to exercise once a week. Keep moving as part of a healthy lifestyle, but give your regular cardio habit a break several days a week. Here are my top 10 tips for maximizing your cardio work:ĭo something fun and easy on rest days. Take walks. You will make progress faster, whether you’re working on weight loss or sports performance, by including rest days and variety in your training plan. In fact, the best way to provide metabolic challenge for your body is to vary your workouts and to give yourself plenty of rest and recovery time. You need rest days, because your body learns how much energy it needs to expend for your lifestyle, and it adapts through efficiency. It is a ritualistic death-grip on calorie burn motivated by fear of weight gain that blocks people from their goals by allowing the body to adapt to nonstop training. Overtraining, especially doing cardio every day, is more than a mistake – it is a mindset. His half-joking reply revealed why he was not making progress: “Rest days are for the weak.” Otherwise your body is just adapting and you will probably lose muscle.” “If you take rest days,” I said conversationally, “it will give your body a chance to catch up with itself and you will make more progress. He was banging out 30-60 minutes of cardio every single day on top of our training sessions.

It was so consistent, that one day I casually asked him, “You’re not doing the elliptical every day, are you?”Īs it turned out, he wasn’t just warming up.

Then, I began to notice that every time I arrived at his apartment gym for our training sessions, he was warming up on the elliptical. He maintained his healthy weight but still carried that small, baffling margin of fat that is maddening to people who want to lean out. However, as months of training went on, he did not make significant gains either in muscle mass, in fat loss, or in performance. His commitment to attaining a ripped physique was realistic at his current level of fitness, and he arrived at every session with a fantastic, can-do attitude.
#Daily cardio workout professional
Last year, I trained a highly active young professional who had the goal of being at competitor-level muscle mass and body fat percentage.
