How much cardio should I do a day and how much cardio per week should I do to stay fit, healthier, active or lose weight? This is the right question to ask if you don’t want “too much cardio” to ruin your gains and negatively impact your life. Although CDC recommends 150minutes a week(30minutes a day) for a base line healthy person, will 30 minutes daily cardio be enough to lose weight, burn calories and fats? How much cardio per day should you do?
Too much sitting at the office or at home can negatively affect your health and longevity. Not only that, the lack of enough exercises per day or per week can higher your risk of getting serious heart, circulatory and metabolic problems.
So what is the best recommended amount of daily physical activity, as a baseline, for healthy people and for athletes?
Some studies show that vigorous activity is as effective, in reducing risk of heart attack or stroke, in the same way as someone doing cardio exercise consistently but at a moderate amount everyday.
If you take just one or two lengthier fitness exercise sessions( you can make it light or sweaty) per week , it is enough to tremendously reduce health risks – cardiovascular disease , cancer, and more.
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benefits of cardio
Before we get into looking at what recommended amount of cardio exercise is best for you, let us review how useful cardio training is to you.
- Cardio helps to strengthen your muscles, especially those of the heart
- cardio workouts like running improve your heart and lung function – cardiorespiratory endurance.
- Including cardiovascular exercises into your fitness exercise regimen helps improve your blood flow or circulation
- Cardio also boost your mood and improves how you sleep each day
- More importantly, doing cardio everyweek lowers, (almost eliminates) your risk of suffering heart attacks, hypertension and diabetes(weight management)
What is it about cardio or aerobic activity?
Cardio exercises are also called aerobic exercise because your body muscles are going to need more oxygen while you train.
When you engage in cardio workout like swimming, running and walking, your heart and lungs muscles are well worked out.
These cardiorespiratory muscles become stronger, enabling your heart to beat faster, and endure longer. This results in an improved blood and oxygen circulation between your heart and lungs, and the rest of the body.
Cardio is not just a single type of exercise, it is a variety of exercises and activities, with a common impact on your heart rate and lungs performance.
The only little difference between all these activities is that some are easier, some are moderately intense and others are highly vigorous and hard to perform.
- Walking is done at a moderate pace, isn’t it?
- Running, uphill mountain biking , and swimming are very competitive exercises which can be done at a more intense pace.
Examples of cardio aerobic exercises include
- walking, jogging,
- running, dance classes
- soccer
- rowing
- basketball
- tenniskickboxing
- spin classes
- boot camp
- Zumba
Should I do cardio everyday?
According to Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP), 15 minutes of mildly intense cardio or aerobic exercises a day is highly beneficial to getting an improved cardiovascular health.
However, it depends on you, yourself and who you are – your motivation and physical state all matter. We understand that daily cardio activities greatly increases the chance for injury in the course of your workout, but it depends on how you are handling your training.
1.Why you should do cardio everyday
If you start cardiovascular exercises with the one single goal to win and you have correct gear(performance enhancement fitness socks and some high-performance apparel for running), you are very athletic.
Athletes can train for 7 days non-stop, in a week with “mildly” intense cardio workouts and 5 days with a comfortably hard aerobic exercise regimen. As a fitness enthusiasts, the more experience you get, the more added minutes of high-intensity aerobic exercises, you can endure.
Devoted Marathon runners go for more than 5 hours in a week, 1 hour per day and they still achieve the best benefits. Some of these tough runners take 7 hours weekly of continuous physical activity within their “safe zone” and they experience no major risk of injury.
If you know your upper limit of cardiovascular endurance, you will know when to stop. It is practically wiser to spread out your weekly hours into few minutes each day and you will still reap the same benefits.
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2. Why You Shouldn’t Do Cardio Every Day!
There are many benefits of doing cardio everyday but there are also reasons not to do it. If you want to lose weight doing cardio or have poor cardiovascular health, working out everyday is bad.
The one most important mistake of doing cardio everyday to lose several pounds of fats, is that the workout can turn out to be counterintuitive. Have you ever heard some people complain not losing few inches of weight, even after pounding on their home treadmill so hard?
If you want to lose lose weight, ( substantial weight), your intension is not to lose lean muscles mass. Too much cardio exercises everyday can workout against your goal, reducing your gains, and stretching your muscles and heart beyond recovery.
So if you want to cut down pounds of excess fats and achieve permanent weight loss, 3 to 5 days a week is enough, so that you have days of rest in between your weight loss cardio workouts. These rest days is to ensure your muscles recover.
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other reasons why you should not do cardio everyday are:
- High risk of chronic injuries, especially when exercising with ongoing pain and damaging or tired muscle tissues
- Daily cardio workout can turn out to be in excess, which can result to both the loss of muscle(reduce the amount of lean muscle ) and potential weight gain( bad for people who want to lose weight instead)
- overexertion of your muscles let to slow metabolism due to lack of lack of lean muscle in the body
when you start seeing bad these signs, take a rest. While your body needs diverse workouts to tone all muscle groups and keep fit, it also needs rest for muscle recovery and healing. Everyday cardio can further increase your fitness appetite, resulting in doing too much cardio which is devastating to your health.
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Cardio Every day? Who should and who shouldn’t do it?
Athletes or everyone? Everyone should do cardio everyday to improve health status. The intensity of any everyday cardio should vary according to individual fitness goals, and lifestyles.
Before we see how much cardio per day is healthy to lose fat and achieve weight loss, let’s figure out who are the right people to do cardio everyday.
1. who should do cardio exercises everyday?
Competitive and serious athletes should do cardio everyday, right?
If you are an athlete, you can engage in cardio everyday if you are motivated to strive and train for a competition(5ks or 10ks) , or to achieve a big fitness goal. Other people include marathon runners, physically healthy persons with good heart health, adults and seniors
You know, a serious competition, requires that you make constant practice to perform well and want to win. Everyday cardio creates some sort of conditioning to athletes and heart resistance( cardiovascular endurance).
This endurance is what keeps them in the higher capacity to compete at high levels. Isn’t that true for a competitive runner to keep working out several minutes per miles until that speed becomes effortless? Doing cardio everyday is a big risk that serious athletes go through, and they accept it.
2. who shouldn’t do cardio everyday?
Smokers, people with hypertension, Weight losers don’t have need to do cardio everyday. This is true for Health seeker( persons with generally poor health). It isn’t appropriate to be doing cardio everyday when looking to lose weight and maintain balance, shape and size or when you are a former smoker with higher risk of stroke or heart attack.
People with poor health are not recommended to do 300 minutes of it per week, of moderate intensity exercises. I thing 150 minute is the recommended for baseline healthy people.
Consider an obese woman weighing 200 pounds. If she want to burn around 2500 calories doing. She can achieve this by walking to work, or going to the gym 3 times per week and then do few days of cardio like running on treadmill( if it is her preferred form of cardio).
A 30-45 minute of the cardio can burn her 500 calories and the 5 days can burn a total of 2500 calories. You see, she does not need to do cardio everyday. just enough cardio can trigger weight loss.
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How much cardio should I do a day?
30 minutes cardio exercises each day is the basic minimum to a healthy lifestyle. Considering 5 – 7 days per week, at least 150 minutes is best amount of cardio for everyone.
The question of how much cardio per day, should an average adult make, can be traced back to the recommendation by US Department of health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) . They all recommend what I can term, the baseline for a healthy person, – a healthy adult, elderly and disabled person should get at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise, each week.
They also recommend mixing strength training into your weekly cardio exercise routine since strength training exercises work all your major muscle groups and keep them active. According to most fitness experts, strength training is good, at least two times a week . You can decide to use a weightlifting workout or any other strengthening exercise that will keep your resistance level heavy enough to tone your muscles in few sets and repetitions (10-15 is just right).
We understand that few sessions of cardio Aerobic exercises can tremendously reduce potential heart attack, prevent stroke, and almost eliminate some health issues. A greater amounts of exercise results in even greater health benefits but what is the right amount of fitness exercise to keep fit each passing day?
The good news is that you can do 150 minute moderate exercise in one session, or do it in two sessions of 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity, in a week. Too avoid the negative impact of too much cardio training in a single session, a better convenience on your cardiovascular performance, is to take 30 minute cardio everyday, continuously for 5 days in a week.
Planning how much cardio per day you should do
How much cardio per day for weight loss, should you do? How much cardio per day to lose belly fats is right for you?
You can carefully schedule the 30 minute cardio everyday workout, into short periods of sessions, depending on your goals and the needs to achieve a better active lifestyle according to CDC.
Your 30 minutes daily cardio workout routine could be done by performing your cardio in chunks of 10 minutes, three times a day.
For example, you can do 10 minutes in the morning, preferably before breakfast, 10 minutes during lunch or business break, and the last 10 minutes in the evening, preferably in after dinner or before bed time.
In another way, if the 10 minute fitness exercise session of doing cardio treadmill running three times per day, is too small, try out 15 minutes cardio training in the morning and 15 minutes of another cardio workout in the afternoon or evening.
In the similar way, if you choose 75 minutes of high intensity aerobic exercise weekly, then 25 minute of cardio daily workouts is an easy is a progressive way to stay fit and in shape.
The best healthier way to start up your workout effectively is to gradually and frequently build up the 150 minutes per week or the 30 minutes per day, in plenty of cardio training sessions. This strategy is best recommended too, for seniors, and beginners who are still in the entry level.
how much cardio should you do a week?
How often should you do cardio exercise every week? When it comes to strength training, athletes and fitness enthusiasts are recommended to rest one to two days between resistance workouts. The objective is to give room for muscles to heal and recover.
But what about cardiovascular exercises? Do you need rest days for cardio? We will find out soon. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends if you are over 18 years
- Do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity cardiovascular physical activity every week or
- You do at least 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity cardio workout sessions in each week . however, you can also combine the two.
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How much is a Moderate intensity exercise?
But what is a moderate intensity exercise? The level of a moderate intensity workout is not the same for everyone. It suffices that you should estimate what level of fitness exercise (cardio or strength training) is considered moderate for you. Texas.
The quickest way to estimate you maximum heart rate is to subtract your age from 220. so considering that you are a 40 year old adult, your maximum heart rate is 180 beats per minute(BPM).
A moderate exercise is a workout activity that would drive your heart rate to 50-60% of your maximum heart rate. So the right moderate exercise for the 40 adult is the workout that will cause his heart beat to hover near 108 BPM.
Exercise physiology lab will give you a more accurate reading, he says you can estimate your max heart rate by subtracting your age from 220.
So, for example, the average 38-year-old guy has a maximum heart rate of 182 beats per minute (BPM). Therefore, he’d want his heart rate to hover around 109 BPM during moderate exercise.
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How much cardio for weight loss Should I Do everyday?
When it comes to losing those belly fats, there are too many questions to ask on cardio.
Should you do cardio every day to lose weight?
Should I do cardio every day if I want to lose weight? Not necessarily. We all know that the calorie-burning effects of cardiovascular exercise can help to lose pounds of body weight.
Experience has shown that 30 minutes of brisk walking burns roughly 140-150 calories or an equivalence of about 980-1000 calories per week, if you are doing an everyday cardio.
In addition to cutting on calorie consumption, just taking a half hour of cardio exercise like running, could let you cut up to a pound(3500 calories) in a month.
But many people understand that frequent cardio exercises, and diatery lifestyle changes can produce more weight loss when your muscles gain efficiency to burning calories.
Does this mean doing cardio everyday is good for losing fats? Yes, but not all the time.
Why Daily Cardio Isn’t Helping You to lose weight
Losing weight entails you should burn more calories than you take in from foods. The truth is, cardio is very important but it won’t help you lose weight effectively and healthily, if you are doing the same cardio day in and day out.
Too much cardio to lose weight often turns out to be inefficient as compared mixing cardio workout and strength training – the best strategy to achieve weight loss according to this journal.
According to an expert in exercise physiology, more cardio burns more calories but strength training is a powerful component of weight loss. So if you are solely engaging in cardio workouts everyday, without including strengthening exercises, your weight loss approach won’t help.
People with weight-loss goals should work on the combination of cardio and resistance training exercises like weightlifting. The mixed workouts would quickly help in the reduction of body fat, than everyday cardio.
How much cardio per day to lose weight?
What is really how much cardio per day for weight loss? How often should I do cardio each day to lose belly fats?
Here is the amount of exercise mix to do each day, if you want to lose weight. Do 30 to 45 minutes weight lifting session or full body resistance training to help you rapidly build strength, improve muscle metabolism and endurance. Then do 30 minutes of cardio inbetween resistance days.
How much cardio per week for weight loss should you do then? Considering a total of 5 days cardio and 2 days strength exercises, you would need at least 150 minutes of high intensity cardio exercises and about 60 minutes tougher strengthening exercises, to lose belly fats.
Cardio with strength training should be included in your weight loss weekly routine. But you can do cardio and strength on the same day, which is optional.
The best recommended mix is to split cardio up for few days and schedule strength training for endurance, between cardio days.
- Monday: Strength exercise
- Tuesday: Cardio workout
- Wednesday: Cardio workout
- Thursday: Strength exercise
- Friday: Cardio again
- Saturday: Resting day for muscle recovery
- Sunday: Strength exercise
If you combine cardio and resistance training with a healthy diet like taking in nutrient-rich foods(proteins, whole grains), you can reach your weight-loss goals faster.
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Is 30 minutes of cardio a day, enough for you?
As mentioned earlier, 30 minutes cardio everyday or 150 minutes cardio every week is the bottom line for an actively healthy individual adult and seniors.
To improve your athletic performance say in soccer or basketball, boxing, and may to lose few pounds of weight, 30 minute low impact to moderate cardio everyday isn’t enough. You would need to workout more intensely and frequently. Most tough and professional fitness gym goers can take more than 500 minutes every week, perhaps 2 hours each day.
Longer hours of high intensity exercises can achieve more health benefits, work out alot of muscles and burn thousands of calories even in a single session but if you do it the wrong way, you can suffer muscle tear, and serious health drawbacks.
While cardio aerobic exercises does burn calories and helps aid in weight loss, including 2 days per week of strength training workouts is a sure way to quickly increase the rate you want to lose weight. There are so many ways How to Lose Weight with Cardiovascular Exercise. The baseline is to choose the workout session and plan a workout routine in a week that would help you create a calorie deficit.
How much pounds of weight you can lose depends on the amount of cardio and strength exercise you dedicate to perform over week, but at least 300 minutes is enough or 1 hour each day is whee to get started.
The 500 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise or about 300 minutes of HIIT vigorous aerobic activity, and muscle strengthening, can create a 3,500-calorie deficit in a day.
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a 154-pound person can burn averagely around 200 calories in 30 minutes doing cardiovascular exercise. If you want more than that, you will see that taking up to 2 hours per day is a better option if you have a better physique and are capable.
The rule is to do High-intensity interval training (HIIT) or short bursts of intense exercises in a shorter period than the moderate cardio workout.
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is it safe to do cardio everyday?
According to this study , a 60 minutes of cardio exercise daily is safer, especially if you want to lose weight. Despite the plenty benefits, cardio has some kind of risk when you are exercising intensely.
Wrong cardio is too risky. But how much cardio exercise is safe depending on your experience in fitness, your overall health and other health conditions.
You would likely observe these signs when your cardio is not safer.
- injuries and painful joints
- muscle soreness that lingers
- easier cardio exercises become more difficult to perform
- lost of interest or enthusiasm to keep on exercising
- very poor pattern of sleep
Safety tips when doing cardio everyday
1 First and foremost, check your fitness level and decide which fitness workout you want to include in your program.
2. You should be doing cardio every day if you love it and are willing to do it the right way, with the right intensity.
3. Just be careful not push yourself so hard (beyond what your heart can perform) and get injured.
4. People like elders, with sedentary lifestyles, as well as beginners should do short workout and cardio of low intensity.
5. Again, when mixing the exercises, don’t skimp on resistance training to favor cardio. Don’t forget that strength exercises helps improve your metabolism.
6. Take a variety. Run, swim, or elliptical are all cardio, so make sure you include the right diverse workout including weightlifting or resistance training. Strike a balance for exercise variation to create more fun, make it manageable and get an interesting workout experience.
7. Skip a day or two each week for resting, after pushing yourself too hard in a cardio exercise. While you have a mix of steady-state sessions, include intervals of rest or workout
8. Visit you doctor or physiotherapist to check how safe it is to start your daily or weekly cardio routine. Medical experts will advice if heart disease, respiratory problems, and arthritis would likely affect your cardio training.
9. Don’t start any cardio workout program when you are recovering from an injury or illness.
10. If you want to go running or jogging , wear running sucks and avoid uneven road terrain that could increase impact on your feet or leg joints and risk injuring your ankle or taking a hard fall.
Before starting each daily cardio session:
- Make a warm up exercise for a few minutes, a brisk walk is OK
- Take in more fluid before, during and after your everyday cardio session
- Pause or stop immediately, if you feel a sharp pain or shortness of breath
