Low-impact, low-intensity cardio exercises like rowing, incline walking, and biking or HIIT workouts are done in short doses like kickboxing, interval training, and weight training are the greatest types of cardio to help you lose weight.
Cardio is the third most significant factor throughout a weight reduction phase, it is crucial to highlight. The great thing you must know about cardio is that you don’t have to work out for more than 60 mins to get the full benefits. Here is a reference article. The two most crucial factors are, first eating with a moderate calorie deficit and lifting weights to boost metabolism and prevent muscle loss.
Is Cardio Essential for Losing Weight?
No, engaging in cardio does not help you lose weight. By far the most efficient way to lose weight, being in a calorie deficit (mostly through nutrition) is a requirement of a weight loss plan.
Check out our weight loss nutrition guide. Your weight won’t go down if you exercise using cardio equipment while eating enough calories to put your body in a calorie surplus.
You might discover that you can eat properly, exercise, lose weight, and build muscle (especially for beginners or individuals who have more body fat). However, losing weight requires having a calorie deficit.
Since dieting is harsh on muscle tissue, there is a higher possibility that you will lose weight mostly through muscle loss if you are aggressively dieting and not doing out with weights (and some fat).
Of course, this is not ideal because the more muscle you lose, the softer and untoned your appearance will be, and the slower your metabolism will be as a result of the muscle loss (making long-term weight loss and keeping the lost weight off, increasingly more difficult).
List of 10 best types of cardio
1. Incline Walking
This is most likely one of the greatest solutions for people who enjoy running but want to minimize the stress on their bodies. Inclined walking can enhance running form and increase muscle endurance while burning just as many calories as running, if not more.
Your leg drive will be boosted as a result of the incline, which might help you avoid overextending your stride (which can happen during running and result in knee pain).
If you want to achieve very similar training effects, if not more, than just going for a run, you can even jog up a hill or perform short bursts of high-intensity interval training. Moreover, you can burn an average number of calories of 224-310 calories, in 1 hour of brick incline walking.
2. Stair climber
A low-impact aerobic exercise like stair climbing can be a fantastic approach to increasing the strength and stamina of the legs, glutes, and calves.
This can also be a great technique to improve strength endurance for people who are overweight or wear weighted vests. As a result of exercising on the stair climber, your leg endurance will increase, which will make walking and hiking more fun.
Moreover, you can burn an average number of calories of 360-520 calories, in 1 hour of brick stair walking.
3. Running
Generally, running has a great impact on weight loss plans. Running has a high impact and may cause more muscle loss, particularly in the lower body.
Last but not least, when you standardize the intensity at which they are performed, running is no more effective at burning calories than any other of these types above.
The amount of calories used while running, rowing, or bicycling is relatively similar if your heart rate reaches 160. (however, the risk of muscle loss and stress to the body is much higher in running due to the high-impact nature of running).
An hour of running can result in an average calorie burn of up to 557 if you keep your speed at six miles per hour.
4. Assault Bike
For lifters of all skill levels, this low-impact, variable-intensity style of cardio is a fantastic choice. This exercise is ideal for beginners and people with knee or lowers back problems due to its low-impact nature.
If you do a moderate rate of assault cycling, You can burn an average amount of 20-30 calories per minute.
It’s also a terrific strategy to prevent muscle atrophy that could be brought on by more impactful exercises (when done in volumes that impede recovery and weight training progressions).
To burn more calories in less time, raise the power output of your legs, and improve the strength and endurance of your arms and lower body muscles, you can either engage in long, moderate steady state exercises or integrate HIIT (shoulders and chest).
5. Rowing
Rowing is a low-impact, high-intensity cardio exercise that can improve pulling power and leg endurance. Unlike other cardio exercises, rowing has the unique advantage of allowing rows to be performed with the upper body, making it a total-body cardio exercise that targets the muscles in the legs, core, and back (and some biceps).
Even though it doesn’t increase muscle mass like lifting weights, it can increase your muscle endurance if that’s what you’re going for. Between 420 and 623 calories are typically burned during an hour of brisk rowing.
6. Boxing
Boxing is a terrific approach to losing weight, building core, shoulder, and back strength, and minimizing stress on the lower body.
Additionally, if you find sitting on a bike or jogging to be insurmountable, this is a more engaging cardio workout than treadmill running. In a one-hour high-intensity boxing class, an average of 600–800 calories is burned.
7. Weight training
Weight loss requires resistance exercise, which increases the possibility that the weight you lose is mostly body fat (as opposed to muscle loss). By adding muscle through weight training, you can speed up your metabolism, which will allow you to eat more food while dieting and lose weight (as opposed to not weight training).
An hour of weight training typically results in the burning of 360–504 calories.
8. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu
Depending on the level at which you are practicing, BJJ can be either low-intensity or high-intensity.
This can be a wonderful way to increase movement, aid with fundamental conditioning, and can be a good way to get “cardio” in while simultaneously learning a new ability for many newbies who start practicing BJJ. BJJ has other advantages beyond just burning a ton of calories, such as improved strength (through grappling) and body control.
In a typical BJJ class, 706 calories are burned on average, provided there is continual movement and no technical training.
9. Kickboxing
This is a fantastic method of whole-body, high-impact, high-intensity cardiovascular exercise. Similar to boxing, this can help you build core strength and muscle endurance in your shoulders, legs, backs, and core.
It can also help you produce more power when throwing with maximum or nearly maximal effort.
This is a multiplanar exercise that can improve athleticism and mobility in addition to serving as an excellent self-defense exercise. A high-intensity kickboxing class lasting an hour typically burns between 600 and 800 calories.
10. Increase Daily Steps count
Although it might seem simple, this is one of the best ways to raise calorie expenditure.
You can improve your daily calorie expenditure without spending as much time sweating it out in the gym by increasing your non-exercise activities (walking more, using the stairs, riding bikes, and raising daily step counts).
This is something that anyone can do, won’t make you sweat, won’t make you eat more (unlike strenuous exercise), and can help you feel better (unlike hard workouts).
Most people burn 30–40 calories for every 1,000 steps they take, thus 10,000 steps will result in a 300–400 calorie burn.
Final Consideration
Recognizing the importance of cardio in the weight loss equation is crucial while trying to reduce weight. When losing weight and burning fat is the goal, you must start a healthy eating plan that places you in a slight calorie deficit throughout 6 to 12 weeks.
To ensure that muscle loss is kept to a minimum, this deficit should be combined with a weight-training regimen that works the majority of muscle groups twice per week.
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