Cardio, or cardiovascular training, is an important aspect of a balanced fitness plan. It can improve your endurance and help you burn calories. But far too many of us make mistakes when sweating it out on a cardio machine and end up frustrated when the scale doesn’t budge.
Let’s go over these 3 cardio mistakes that might be holding you back from achieving your goals:
- Sticking to the same routine: Your body craves a challenge and makes changes when you progress your training program. So if you’re always doing the same cardio routine, your body might sense this and go on autopilot. Once you get used to a workout, your body becomes efficient and conditioned, so things get easier! This can mean burning fewer calories and wasting more time.
- Focusing on quantity or time: If your goal is to run an hour every day, congrats to you for choosing to be active. But if you want to make significant changes to your body, it can be a huge cardio mistake to focus simply on time over intensity and variation. Instead, focus on cardio exercise that adds strength and speed to the mix. You can spend far less time with quick sprint sessions on a treadmill or spin bike. This will slash more calories in the long run and create quicker change to your body than hour-long steady-state cardio sessions.
- Overtraining: You also could be doing too much cardio. This is probably one of the biggest cardio mistakes of all time. When you spend too much time doing cardio, you could be breaking down muscle and not allowing your body to repair. Overtraining also leads to hormonal disruption and weight loss plateaus, not to mention possible injuries.