In this article I’m going to tell you whether or not cardio is necessary for weight loss.
I’m going to discuss whether or not doing cardio is even worth your time, and if it is, how exactly you should be implementing it into your routine.
All I ask of you is one thing. Please read the entire article. There’s a lot of information here and you need to read the entire thing to get the complete picture. Trust me, you won’t regret it. Now, let’s get into it.
If you’re like most people, as soon as you make that decision that you want to lose weight, your brain immediately goes to “Alright, I need to start doing hours and hours of cardio as often as I can to shed the pounds off.”
Honestly, I get it. It’s pretty intuitive to assume that doing tons of high intensity cardio is the answer to losing as much weight as possible as quickly as possible.
We’ve all been there. You go for a 3 mile run and you feel winded, sweaty, and completely out of breath once it’s over. And because you feel that way, you assume that you just torched hundreds if not thousands of calories that will cause the weight to start falling off.
Then you reward yourself with a super high calorie meal after because you’re starving and you figure “Hey, why not? I just burned a ton of calories doing cardio so this meal won’t hurt me at all.”
Here’s the thing: that 3 mile run that you did earlier actually didn’t burn as many calories as you thought, and candidly, you’re beginning to remember how much you hate running and how unsustainable it is for you to do on a regular basis.
Now let me make myself clear: I have nothing against running or anyone who likes doing it. It’s incredible for your cardiovascular health and I would never tell anyone not to do it if they truly wanted to. I just happen to know that most people would rather voluntarily put their finger in a blender than go for a long run. Kidding. Or am I?
In case we haven’t met yet, my name is Dylan Holvey and I’m an online fitness coach. I’m all about making this whole fitness thing as sustainable as possible so you not only GET amazing results, but also KEEP those amazing results throughout your entire life. If you like running, then run. If you like HIIT workouts, then do HIIT workouts.
But, if you don’t like those things, don’t think that they’re necessary for weight loss, because they’re not. There are many different forms of cardio. And despite many of them being very good for your overall health, I’m about to dive into why cardio is not actually necessary for weight loss.
How We Actually Lose Weight
If you’ve ever wondered how we actually lose fat (By the way, weight loss and fat loss are not the same thing. It’s possible to lose water weight without losing fat.), it’s actually pretty simple and easy to understand.
To lose fat, you need to be in a calorie deficit. This is when you eat fewer calories than you burn on a consistent basis.
The amount of calories you burn daily is known as your calorie maintenance (the amount of calories you’d need to eat to maintain your weight).
So, for example, let’s say you’re a 40 year old 5 foot 6, 150lb woman who’s moderately active and wants to lose 15lbs. You most likely burn around 2,000 calories a day on average (keep in mind that the exact amount that we burn varies on a daily basis based on a number of factors. Also, these numbers are just estimates).
There’s about 3,500 calories in 1lb of fat, so if you were to eat 500 calories below your caloric maintenance on a daily basis, you’d lose around 1lb of fat each week (500 cal deficit each day times 7 days in a week = a 3500 calorie deficit for the entire week).
So, for this example, if this woman ate 1500 calories a day, she’d lose about a pound of fat per week on average. Pretty simple, right?
Because of this, cardio isn’t NEEDED for fat loss. As long as you eat in a calorie deficit, you’ll lose fat whether you’re doing cardio or not.
Cardio Doesn’t Burn That Many Calories
One of the main reasons why cardio isn’t necessary for weight loss is because you’re actually not burning as many calories as you might think through cardio.
In fact, you’re only going to burn around 5-10 calories per minute during a cardio session depending on the type of cardio.
Let’s say you decide to run on the treadmill for 30 minutes. Despite your Apple Watch or Fitbit saying you burned 500 calories, you probably only burned around 250 calories during that workout (studies have shown that these devices can be off by up to 50% when it comes to tracking calories burned).
Listen, I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather just eat 250 less calories each day than run on the treadmill for 30 minutes everyday.
Not to mention, the amount of wear and tear that you’ll get on your joints and connective tissue by running that often is pretty ridiculous.
I don’t want to be limping around when I’m older just because I thought I needed to do high impact cardio on a daily basis just to lose weight. Again, high impact forms of cardio aren’t at all inherently bad, they’re just better to do less often because of how taxing they are on the body.
For most people, just eating a bit less is a much easier and more sustainable way to achieve that calorie deficit than doing intense cardio on a regular basis. Just my two cents.
Health and Weight Loss Are Not The Same Thing
At this point in the article it may sound like I’m anti-cardio. That couldn’t be any further from the truth.
The reason I’m saying cardio isn’t necessary for weight loss is because it isn’t necessary for weight loss specially. However, it is necessary for maintaining good overall health outcomes.
There’s a huge difference between saying “I want to start doing cardio to improve my overall health” vs. saying “I need to start doing cardio to lose as much weight as I can as quickly as I can.”
Cardio should be done with the goal of improving cardiovascular fitness, not for burning as many calories as possible.
Because as I mentioned earlier, cardio doesn’t really burn that many calories anyway. So if you’re doing it exclusively for weight loss, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons.
So, Why Would We Do Cardio At All For Weight Loss?
Even though cardio isn’t necessary for weight loss, it can used as a tool for weight loss.
Let me explain.
As you start losing fat consistently and get closer to your goal weight, your metabolism will start slowing down a bit.
This is 1000% normal and it happens to literally everyone when they lose weight.
It’s called metabolic adaptation, and to put it simply, it’s when your body starts burning fewer calories at rest because you’re now quite literally a smaller person. There’s less of you now. So, as a result, your body doesn’t need as many calories to fuel your day to day life.
Let’s go back to the example I gave above about the woman who burns 2,000 calories a day at the beginning of her fat loss journey.
Let’s say after 12 weeks of being in a consistent calorie deficit she lost 12lbs of fat. That’s amazing progress. She’s gone from 150lbs to 138lbs in 3 months. Incredible.
Anyway, because she now weighs 12lbs less than she did just 12 weeks ago, her body doesn’t need as many calories each day to maintain her weight. As a result, she no longer burns 2,000 calories a day at rest. She now burns 1,800 calories a day at rest (Like I mentioned earlier, these numbers are just estimates).
Once again, this is completely normal and it happens to everyone when they lose fat.
Here’s the thing. Now that she burns less calories a day at rest, she needs to eat a couple hundred calories less each day to keep making the same amount of progress.
Or does she?
This is where introducing cardio into your routine can help. A lot.
Instead of eating 200 fewer calories each day, she could just burn 200 calories more each day via cardio (later in the article I’ll explain exactly what type of cardio I’d recommend for doing this and how much to do as well).
Now you might be thinking,”Dylan, I though you literally just said cardio doesn’t burn that many calories. Aren’t you completely contradicting yourself?”
Not really. Here’s why. Burning 200 calories in a cardio session is very doable, especially when you choose a form of cardio that is sustainable for you (like walking on an incline on the treadmill).
The point I was making earlier is that burning 500, 600, 700+ calories in a cardio session isn’t feasible for 99.9% of people. Once again, even if your apple watch is saying you burned that many calories in 30-60 minutes of cardio, you really didn’t.
So to sum this up, cardio can really help with fat loss once progress has slowed and/or “plateaued.” Essentially, cardio becomes more and more valuable as you get further into a fat loss phase.
One more important thing to add here is that cardio can be very important for weight maintenance once you’ve reached your goal weight.
It makes a ton of sense. Once you’ve finished a fat loss phase, you’ll bring your calories up slightly. And when you do this, implementing some cardio on a regular basis can allow you to eat a couple hundred more calories each day without gaining weight.
Why Cardio Can Hurt Fat Loss, Especially When Doing Too Much Of It And Not Enough Weight Training
Now that we’ve established that cardio definitely isn’t necessary for fat loss (although it can help in certain cases), let’s discuss how high intensity forms of cardio as well as too much cardio overall can hinder your fat loss progress.
HIIT Cardio. High Intensity Interval Training. We all know someone who swears by it and thinks it’s the end all be all form of exercise.
Here’s the thing, It definitely has a time and a place. But a lot of people are misinformed about not only the benefits of it, but also the potential downsides of implementing it, especially from a weight loss perspective.
If you want to lose weight, what you’re really saying is that you want to lose fat and maintain while possibly even building lean muscle at the same time to get that “toned” and “defined” look.
The fact of the matter is that you’re only going to achieve that look through lifting weights 3-5 days a week while being in a calorie deficit for fat loss and prioritizing protein in your diet.
Doing tons of high intensity cardio workouts isn’t going to get you that look you’re going after. And, as a side note, it’s okay to want to improve your physique while losing fat.
Now here’s why HIIT workouts specifically can backfire from a fat loss perspective. You may have heard that HIIT workouts burn more calories during the session than lower intensity forms of cardio. That’s true.
Here’s the problem with that. You actually end up burning fewer calories later in the day as a result. It’s your body’s way of trying to preserve energy so that you’re not constantly burning tons and tons of calories and start whittling away.
But that’s not all. You also end up getting much hungrier later in the day because your body wants to refuel and get those calories back. And, as you very well know, the hungrier you get the harder it is to stick to your calories and eat in a calorie deficit. This is bad news from a fat loss perspective.
This is just another example of how burning as many calories as possible isn’t always a good thing. If going all out during HIIT workouts causes you to eat back more calories later in the day because of how hungry you are, was the workout even worth it?
One more thing to mention here is that HIIT workouts take a while to recover from. So, if you’re lifting 3-4 days a week plus doing another few HIIT workouts, that’s a lot for your body to recover from on a regular basis. Just food for thought.
The Best Type Of Cardio To Do And How To Implement It
Earlier I talked about how even though cardio isn’t necessary for weight loss, cardio can come in handy as a tool to enhance fat loss once progress has slowed down or even plateaued.
I also promised that I’d tell you the best type of cardio to do and how much you should be doing. So here we go.
If you’re using cardio as a tool to burn a couple hundred more calories a day for weight loss (while improving your overall health), doing low intensity cardio more often is a great strategy.
Now, if you don’t already have a cardio routine in place, the absolute best place to start is getting your daily step count up. You may have heard that 10,000 steps a day is ideal, and while that is a great number to aim for, there’s no set number that needs to be reached on a daily basis.
Because let’s be honest, if you’re like most people and you work a sedentary job where you’re sitting at a desk behind a computer all day, you’re probably only getting maybe 3,000-5,000 steps on average on a daily basis.
So, in that case, aiming for 7,000-8,000 steps a day might be a great place to start in terms of increasing activity level and, as a result, burning a few hundred more calories each day to make fat loss a bit easier.
Increasing your step count is not only a great way to increase your caloric burn, but it’s also very low impact on the body and has some amazing health benefits.
Higher step counts have actually been linked to a longer lifespan. Pretty crazy right?
If you want to make these steps more challenging all you have to do is walk on a treadmill at a higher speed and on an incline.
I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a much more sustainable form of cardio than a ton of high intensity work.
At the end of the day, sustainable habits will not only get you better results, but they’ll allow you to actually maintain those results over time.
Always remember this: If you want the results to be sustainable, make sure the methods are sustainable too.
