The Worst Five Common Cardio Mistakes Everyone Makes for Fat Loss (Avoid These)
The Truth About Cardio for Fat Loss
So in this article, I’m going to lay out the five most common cardio mistakes that people make when trying to lose fat. Now let me start by saying that while this article will focus on the biggest pitfalls of cardio, I am still a big fan of cardio in the right context and when done the right way. Also, I’m not a fitness expert/coach; this article was done based on my strong observation and research.
So contrary to what some gym bros might tell you, cardio does have some serious benefits and plays a role in achieving fitness goals when approached correctly.
Cardio’s Vital Role in Health and Fitness
Cardiorespiratory fitness, which is basically your body’s ability to give your muscles oxygen when they need it, is a major predictor of all-cause mortality, coronary heart disease, and cardiovascular disease, but it isn’t just about health.
Having better cardio can also help with your training goals by improving overall work capacity and recovery in between sets. Just think about how much harder three sets of eight on the squat feel when your cardio is lacking; you might need to rest all day long between those sets.
If you’ve been skipping cardio, you might even struggle to get all the volume in, but when your cardio is on point, you can get all that work done much more efficiently.
It's also worth mentioning that physical activity is an important factor for long-term weight maintenance. Research shows that individuals who are more active tend to be more successful in keeping the weight off after a period of dieting.
However, there is still a lot of misinformation around cardio and fat loss so with these upsides in mind, let’s dig into some of the biggest mistakes that I see people make and then lay out some practical recommendations at the end.
Mistake 1: Overestimating Cardio’s Impact on Fat Loss
Okay, so the first mistake is simply thinking that cardio is as effective for fat loss as diet is, which definitely isn’t true. Even though being physically active is uncontroversially important for health, cardio isn’t required for fat loss.
This is because, at the most fundamental level, fat loss ultimately comes down to the difference between the number of calories you consume and the number of calories you expend. And the number of calories you expend in a typical cardio session is pretty depressing.
For example, if you weigh 170 pounds or 77 kilos, it would take you roughly three hours of brisk walking to burn a thousand calories but you could eat a thousand calories in less than a minute.
So it's definitely much easier to eat calories than it is to burn calories but it’s actually worse than that because new research shows that when you do the math, weight loss from cardio still only amounts to 20 to 50 percent of the weight loss you’d expect to see from the number of calories burned alone, in other words, if you burned 2500 calories over the course of a week through cardio.
So if you did something like five-hour-long walks on the treadmill and did nothing with your diet, you’d expect to lose about 0.7 pounds based on the math but would only actually lose 0.14 to 0.36 pounds, or about a quarter to a half of what you’d expect.
Now, there are two possible reasons for this. The most likely is compensatory overeating. Basically, when people are told to just do cardio but don’t do anything with their diet, they’ll often subconsciously start eating more.
“Remember, a well-balanced diet is the foundation for fat loss, and cardio is just one piece of the puzzle.”
The second reason is that your body is smart and when it notices that you’re burning more calories through cardio, it tries to preserve more energy by burning fewer calories through the other metabolic components.
Now, it isn’t perfectly clear exactly which component of metabolism is most responsible for this but some evidence points toward it being due to reductions in meat or non-exercise activity thermogenesis.
So basically, your regular daily activities that aren’t formal cardio stuff like fidgeting, moving around at your desk, bringing in groceries, and so on. It could be that as you increase the number of calories that you burn through exercise, your body subconsciously starts moving around less, resulting in fewer calories burned through meat and less weight loss than you’d expect.
Now, to be clear, even though you could theoretically completely offset your cardio through compensatory overeating, that’s not very likely to happen if you’re actually making an honest effort to regulate your diet as well.
You’ll certainly never see so much compensatory meat reduction that you start gaining weight as a result of cardio but my simple point is that the more and more you rely on cardio for fat loss, the more and more diminishing its returns become as your body compensates and adapts.
and I’m putting this mistake in the number one spot not because I think cardio isn’t any good but rather because I can help prevent people from setting unrealistic expectations about what cardio can do on its own. From a fat loss standpoint, I think cardio should be used as a supplemental tool that assists your diet rather than the engine of fat loss itself.
Mistake 2: Poorly Timing Cardio around Weight Training
The second mistake is poorly timing cardio around weight training. One of the most important things to consider with cardio is whether or not it’s likely to impair your weight-training performance.
something referred to as the dreaded interference effect in the literature. This interference effect is the reason why there are so many memes that cardio is killing your gains and while I do think the idea has been overblown by bodybuilders who just don’t like doing cardio, there is still some truth to it.
There is a well-established conflict between the aerobic endurance pathway and the muscle-building pathway and there are clearly smart things you can do to help squash that interference.
Perhaps the simplest way is just by doing your weight training. First, I will do a 5 to 10-minute warm-up on the Stairmaster or whatever machine you like, as this has been shown to improve subsequent weight training performance. but doing a formal cardio session that takes longer than 10 minutes or so should be done either after weights or at a separate time altogether.
Studies found that placing cardio exercises immediately before weights resulted in significantly worse improvements in one-rep max strength and that strength training is compromised for at least six to eight hours following endurance training.
Obviously, the extent of that compromise depends on how long and intense the endurance training is, but still, these authors suggest that separating endurance and resistance exercise by 24 hours when realistic could be a useful strategy to optimize concurrent training adaptations and avoid acute interference.
I should also say that the interference effect is more of a concern for at least six to eight hours following endurance training. Obviously, the extent of that compromise depends on how long and intense the endurance training is.
but still, these authors suggest that separating endurance and resistance exercise by 24 hours when realistic could be a useful strategy to optimize concurrent training adaptations and avoid acute interference I should also say that the interference effect is more of a concern for advanced trainees than it is for beginners
A new 2021 meta-analysis found that concurrent cardio and weight training had no impact on strength for untrained and moderately trained individuals.
but did significantly impair strength in more well-trained individuals so the bottom line is that if you really want to knock out your cardio and weights in the same session for convenience, you should do your cardio last, and the more advanced you get, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to create more separation between your cardio and weight training, whether that means by doing them on separate days or by doing one in the morning and the other in the evening.
“To maximize the benefits of both cardio and weight training, consider doing cardio after weight training or at a separate time altogether.”
Mistake 3: Falling into the High-Intensity Trap
mistake number three is falling into what I’m going to call the high-intensity trap now Just so we’re all on the same page, coaches tend to break up cardio into one of two categories. There’s low-intensity steady-state cardio, often abbreviated as liss or miss if it’s moderate intensity and that’s when you do cardio at a steady pace like walking on an incline treadmill or Stairmaster.
High-intensity interval training or HIIT, is when you go all out at a high exertion for 20–30 seconds or so, then go at a light pace for two to three minutes, and then repeat that for usually five or six intervals.
Now, a lot of people seem to think that HIIT is more effective at burning fat because of the so-called caloric afterburn effect. While the afterburn effect certainly is real—you will burn more calories after high-intensity exercise and after low-intensity exercise—I still think its practical relevance for fat loss has been overblown.
A study showed that even after 80 minutes of high-intensity cardio at 80 percent max heart rate, only an additional 80 calories were burned from the afterburn effect and a more recent systematic review stated that the afterburn effect is unlikely to account for any apparent greater fat loss potential.
But even if we put the afterburn idea aside, HIIT still has the appeal of being more time-efficient since you can burn the same number of calories in as much as 40 percent of the time commitment.
Another upside of HIIT is that some people do find it to be less boring and I do think that’s a perfectly sensible reason to use it. However, while the time efficiency and enjoyability of HIIT can count as upsides, the biggest downside is that it does tend to interfere with weight training more and takes longer to recover from.
You could also argue that it is more redundant since weight training and HIIT are actually quite similar physiologically. With typical moderate-to-high rep weight training, you go at a high exertion for 20 to 30 seconds, rest for two or three minutes at a high exertion again for another 20 to 30 seconds, and repeat.
So some experts have said that you already get most of the benefits of HIIT through weight training. I’m not sure, but I completely agree with that. In my experience, HIIT does increase heart rate more and presents a greater cardiovascular challenge than typical weight training.
but it does still knock the unique value of HIIT down a few notches so if you are going to use HIIT, you should use it more sparingly.
“HIIT may not be the ‘magic bullet’ for fat loss. It’s important to find the right balance between intensity and recovery.”
Mistake 4: Excessive Cardio Volume
Mistake number four is doing too much cardio. Overall, even if we do everything else right in terms of timing and intensity, it is still possible to do too much cardio to give us some idea on this.
The NSCA meta-analysis on the interference effect said that when it came to cardio frequency, they noticed a drop-off in hypertrophy around the three- to four-day per-week zone.
To be clear, the correlation wasn’t that strong, so while this is a trend to be aware of, it isn’t like your muscles are going to melt away if you do cardio more than three or four times a week.
They also showed negative correlations between hypertrophy strength and power and the length of endurance exercise per day, with more interference seen the higher you get above 30 minutes per day.
Still, we shouldn’t look at this frequency and volume data in a vacuum because taking your dog for a walk isn’t comparable to running suicide sprints and so what I recommend for cardio will be highly individual and depend on the type of cardio you’re doing. a
“More is not always better when it comes to cardio. Find a balance that supports your goals without sacrificing other aspects of your fitness journey.”
Mistake 5: Banking on Fasted Cardio for Extra Fat Loss
Now the bottom line with fasted cardio is that just because you burn more fat during the session itself doesn’t mean that you’ll lose more fat overall.
In fact, a 2011 study found that when you burn more fat during a cardio session, you burn less fat over the next 24 hours and this systematic review found that performing exercise in a fasted state did not influence weight loss or changes in lean and fat mass and that a meaningful caloric deficit is more important than exercising in fasted or fed states.
However, recently, a review paper from Escalante and Bearcat looked at the research on fasted cardio in the context of competitive physique athletes.
So people are trying to get very low levels of body fat and while they once again acknowledge that there is no conclusive evidence on the superiority of fasted cardio, they do point out that research on physique competitors hasn’t been performed and leave the question of whether or not it might be beneficial in the final stages of fat loss open.
They also suggest that protein-enhanced cardio, where you consume about 25 grams of protein beforehand, might have a slight edge in some advanced cases Still, I think that for the most part, you should simply do your cardio at a time when you can stick to it the best, whether that means you’re doing it fasted or fed
“Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that fasted cardio is a must. Focus on maintaining a consistent caloric deficit through a well-rounded approach.”
Practical Recommendations
Here are some practical recommendations to help you avoid these common cardio mistakes:
Volume
- Tailor cardio volume to support desired fat loss goals, typically within the range of 0.5 to 1% of body weight per week.
Timing
- For concurrent training, do cardio after weight training or at a separate time. Advanced individuals may benefit from greater separation between cardio and weight training.
Intensity
- Limit HIIT sessions to 1–2 per week, keeping sessions between 15–30 minutes.
Mode
- Prefer lower-impact cardio (walking, cycling, swimming) to minimize interference unless higher-impact options are preferred.
“Remember, the key is to find a cardio routine that you enjoy and can sustain in the long run.”
Conclusion
In conclusion, cardio is a valuable tool for fat loss when integrated appropriately with diet and weight training. Avoiding these common mistakes ensures a balanced approach to achieving sustainable results.
“Keep in mind that the journey to fat loss involves multiple factors, and cardio is just one piece of the puzzle. Stay consistent, make informed choices, and listen to your body along the way.”
With these insights and recommendations, you can optimize your cardio routine and set yourself on the path to achieving your fat loss goals. Remember, it’s not about perfection, but about progress and finding what works best for you.
So, get out there, enjoy your cardio sessions, and strive for a healthier, stronger you!