How Much Cardio Should Your Workout Include?

The amount of cardio you should include in your workout depends entirely on one thing: what you are trying to achieve?

First of all, what is cardio exercise? Cardio exercise is any sort of exercise that raises your heartbeat and gets your body moving. For example, this could be jogging, swimming or cycling.

(Weights and the use of such things as dumbbells are not cardio exercises, since they don’t get your whole body moving, and they only exercise specific parts of the body.)

So, consider the goal of your exercise. Are you trying to gain muscle, or are you trying to lose fat? Cardio is the best sort of exercise for you to lose fat. It works your whole body, and burns calories more efficiently than weights – the more calories you burn, the faster your weight drops. To lose fat, it’s good to start with about three cardio sessions a week, 20 to 30 minutes.

For muscle gain, you should focus more on things such as weights for the specific muscle group you want to develop. To make sure that you’re still keeping healthy and to maintain your cardiovascular health, you should still do one or two cardio sessions a week – enough to keep good cardiovascular health, while not being enough to interfere with your muscle training.

As a rule, cardio shouldn’t be too intensive; if you can easily hold a conversation while exercising, then it’s too easy. If you can’t speak at all, it’s too hard.

Generally, it’s much easier and more effective to work on either muscle training or losing fat one at a time – not both at once. This is because the processes to get to these two goals are completely different – in fact, they actually contradict each other and doing both at once is counterproductive.

In terms of training for a sport, the kind of exercise depends on the type of sport. If you’re training for a marathon, then obviously, your training will consist of heaps of cardio training, whereas if you’re a high jumper or such, exercises geared towards strengthening your legs would probably be what you would do.

In conclusion, the number of cardio exercises you do in a week are completely dependent on you, and what you want to get from your exercise. Ultimately, you should do about one or two cardio sessions a week to keep up your cardiovascular health. Anything more is all up to you.

Happy exercising!

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