You’ve overcome the weakness of ordinary people long time ago. You haven’t had any sweets, fries or donuts for months now. You follow your diet instructions strictly, you train hard – but you still can’t get the results you are looking for. Your six-pack is still not visible.
The gyms around the world are full of people running on treadmills, biking, and spinning on elliptical machines. What are they up to? Probably trying to lose weight – while in fact they’re just wasting time.
The standing myth is that cardio exercises are the best way to lose weight. The truth is they are not even necessary. And here’s the part most people never hear: doing too much cardio can actually work against you.
Too Much Cardio Causes Fat Gain, Not Fat Loss
A little known fact is that overdoing cardio in some cases can lead to subcutaneous fat gain instead of fat loss – especially if the exercise isn’t intense enough or it lasts too long. This happens because improper training and recovery enhances the catabolic processes, causing loss of muscle cells, which in turn slows down the metabolism.
On the other hand, lifting weights speeds up the metabolism – especially if your diet is correct. Having more muscle means a faster metabolism, leading to more fat burned and a more toned body. And crucially, that calorie burning continues long after the workout is done, even when you are watching TV in bed.
One of the biggest misconceptions among fitness fans is that weight lifting will make them massive and aerobics will make them slim. As a result, people often put cardio at the center of their fitness program and completely abandon weights. Both will help you reduce body fat – but too much cardio, done wrong, will cost you the muscle that keeps your metabolism running.
Related: Does Cardio Burn Muscle? The Complete Guide
How Much Cardio Is Too Much?
People often think that more is better. If 30-60 minutes of cardio is healthy and helps you lose weight, then 2-3 hours will help you lose twice as much, right? Actually, no.
Too much cardio puts you in catabolism – you start losing muscle mass, and at one point your metabolism slows down. The excess cortisol your body produces will suppress your immune system and can cause health issues. There is no exact answer to how much is too much – it depends on your recovery ability, the food you eat, and the calories you consume. But if you are not an endurance athlete like a marathon runner or competitive cyclist, anything longer than 60-80 minutes per day will probably be too much.
Signs you’re doing too much cardio:
- Feeling tired all the time
- Feeling sore constantly
- Pain in your joints
- Not sleeping well at night
- Getting sick a bit too often
- You are losing weight, but your muscles are disappearing as well
“If you want to know what kind of body you will build using just aerobic exercise, just look at some pictures of long-distance runners or other sports where endurance is the main concern. Yes, they are very slim – but who has a better six-pack, a sprinter or a marathon runner?” says Charles Staley. He states that toning the abdominal muscles does not exclude cardio – but exercises like the stepper and treadmill should be minimized and replaced with higher intensity work. “The best solution is interval training, since it burns a lot of calories and builds muscle at the same time.”
Long Cardio at Steady Intensity Makes You Fatter Over Time
When you run at a steady pace you are moving the resting metabolic rate reference point downward – which decreases the number of calories burned in a resting state. The end result is a skinny person with a belly, frustrated about the fat they cannot shift. And if they start eating normally afterward, they will immediately regain all the weight they were trying to lose.
Those who are new to fitness generally assume that jogging or long-distance running is the solution to weight loss. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. For overweight people especially, running for hours on end is entirely counterproductive – their bodies use the muscles’ glycogen stores for energy and begin to keep fat as a survival measure. This makes them more metabolically inefficient, not less.
If we had to list them from top to bottom in priority: proper diet is at the top, then comes weightlifting, and at the bottom, very little cardio – and even that should be done in short intense bursts, not long steady sessions.
4 Cardio Myths That Are Destroying Your Fat-Loss Efforts
Myth #1: Skip Strength Training and Focus on Cardio to Lose Fat Faster
Focusing only on cardio and skipping strength training isn’t just boring – it may cause you to burn fewer calories overall. “Strength training builds lean muscle mass, which both increases your metabolism and decreases fat,” says celebrity trainer Elizabeth Hendrix Burwell, co-owner of High Performance Gym. “The more muscle you build, the more calories you burn on a day-to-day basis.”
Kettlebell exercises alone can burn up to 20 calories a minute – the equivalent of running a 6-minute mile, according to an American Council on Exercise study. Maximise your fat-loss results by incorporating up to four non-consecutive days of resistance-based exercise: kettlebells, TRX, weight lifting.
Related: 10 Kettlebell Exercises for a Total Body Workout
Myth #2: Do Cardio First, Then Hit the Weights
If you hit the treadmill for an intense cardio session and then plan to lift weights afterward, you’ll have little left in the tank to make your resistance training count. For a full high-intensity cardio session and a complete resistance training workout, perform each on separate days so you can give both your all. When they must happen on the same day, weights first, cardio after – that way your glycogen is available for the lifts that build muscle, and the cardio taps into fat stores directly afterward.
Related: How Much Cardio Do You Need to Lose Fat and Build Muscle?
Myth #3: You Should Burn at Least 500 Calories Per Cardio Session
Hitting the treadmill to reach a magic calorie number is a waste of time – machines can only roughly estimate your metabolic rate. Ignore the numbers on the console and focus on intensity instead. If you work harder in shorter bursts, you’ll burn more calories even after the workout is over. Use a heart rate monitor and aim to stay between 75 and 85% of your maximum heart rate.
Myth #4: Stay in the “Fat-Burning Zone” to Lose Fat
Your body does burn fat as fuel during lower-intensity workouts – but that’s not what matters most for fat loss. What counts is your overall calorie burn, not the fuel source. “The higher the intensity of your workout, the more total calories you will burn,” says Marta Montenegro, a certified strength and conditioning coach at Florida International University.
That burn lasts up to 24 hours after your last rep. But don’t cancel all steady-state cardio for maximum-intensity sessions – injury and overtraining fatigue are real risks. Alternate between low- and high-intensity workouts to give your body time to recover.
The Right Approach: Keep Cardio Short and Keep Lifting
The wrong workout: 60 minutes of slow jogging as your primary fat-loss strategy, replacing or shortchanging your weight training.
The right workout: weights first, cardio after – and keep the cardio session short. A review published in the Journal of Exercise and Nutrition confirmed that both exercise intensity and duration are the main factors driving cortisol production – meaning short sessions of any type produce significantly less cortisol than long ones, regardless of pace. A 20-30 minute cardio session after your weights workout, at whatever intensity suits you that day – brisk walking, cycling, a light jog, or intervals – is perfectly fine and will not trigger the catabolic response that extended sessions do.
The key distinction is not low intensity vs. high intensity. It’s short vs. long. A Wake Forest University study of 249 adults found that participants who combined diet with weight training lost significantly less muscle than those who combined diet with cardio – while achieving similar total fat loss. The cardio group lost approximately 4 lbs of muscle mass compared to around 2 lbs in the weights group. This wasn’t because cardio is inherently bad. It’s because cardio was their primary tool – and it isn’t the right one.
Strength training is the correct primary tool. It improves your muscle cells’ response to insulin, directs nutrients toward muscle tissue rather than fat storage, and raises your resting metabolic rate – so you burn more calories around the clock, not just during a session. A systematic review in Nutrients found that both HIIT and moderate-intensity continuous cardio are effective for fat loss – but that the primary driver of results was resistance training for muscle preservation across all age groups. Cardio supports the process. It doesn’t drive it.
If you want to do cardio for fat loss, the formula is simple: lift weights first, then do 20-30 minutes of whatever cardio you enjoy. That could be intervals, a steady jog, the bike, a brisk walk – the type matters far less than the duration. Keep it under 45 minutes, do it after your weights session rather than before, and rely on your diet and your lifting to carry the fat loss. The cardio is a supplement to that process, not the process itself.
Related: 5 Things You Need to Do to Get Shredded Without Cardio
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