Is Excessive Cardio Making You Fat?

This week I’ve spoken to you several times regarding excessive cardio sessions. Here's the point I wanted you understand:

You don't have to spend an hour trudging on a treadmill or pedaling on a stationary bike to burn a high number of calories. High-intensity exercise over a shorter period of time can fire up your metabolism for many hours after exercise. This is due to what is called EPOC -- excess post-exercise oxygen consumption -- in which your body uses fat and glucose as sources of fuel to repair muscle and bone damage, balance hormones, cool down your body and deliver nutrients to your cells.

EPOC can elevate your metabolism for anywhere from 15 minutes to 48 hours after exercise, depending on the training intensity, quality and duration. (In a 2011 study published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 10 men who performed 45 minutes of vigorous cycling sustained an elevated metabolism for 14 hours).

The moral of this story is -- keep doing your cardio sessions but be very careful that you don’t make the mistake that hundreds of people make by doing excessive cardio. You don’t want the lean muscle that you’ve worked so hard to gain to be lost because of excessive cardio.