There’s nothing wrong with doing cardio, but if you want to lose weight, it’s shouldn’t be at the top of your list. Are you putting in the effort, but not seeing the results? There’s a lot of reasons why that can occur. If you’re only doing cardio and omitting the other forms of fitness, strength, flexibility and balance, you won’t be doing yourself any favors. You’ll probably be able to run a mile, but may break an arm from a fall or hurt your back trying to lift a light package to “run” to the post office. These are reasons you need more than just cardio, but how else is chronic cardio a waste of time.

You won’t get the best results from doing chronic cardio if you want to lose weight.

Not only will you not get the best results, you might even sabotage yourself and make it harder. Think about the physique of a distance runner. It’s slim and not very muscular. That’s because cardio burns calories, but it doesn’t discriminate the type of tissue it uses to do that. After approximately forty-five minutes, it burns lean muscle tissue for fuel, rather than fat tissue. By contrast, strength-building exercises also burns a huge amount of calories, but it also builds muscle tissue rather than decreases it like cardio does. The more muscle tissue you have, the higher your metabolism, so you’ll burn more calories 24-7.

Use your time exercising more wisely.

While you might go crazy doing cardio for hours every day, most people simply don’t love it that much. In fact, most people don’t have that much time to dedicate to working out. You can keep some cardio in your workout, but changing it from straight running types of cardio, to a cardio workout with kettlebells will do you more good. You’ll get strength-building, endurance (cardio), flexibility and balance from that type of workout, plus burn a huge amount of calories. HIIT and circuit training are also types of exercise that can combine cardio with other types of exercise. You get more bang for your exercise time.

Going crazy with cardio only can create boredom and leave you vulnerable.

Think about doing just cardio like eating just Lima beans. Even if you love lima beans, after a while you start hating them when you eat them too many times. It’s hard enough to stick to a workout schedule if you are doing something you love, but sticking with it after you’ve had your fill can be almost impossible. Even worse, if you’re trying to shed weight, you’ll not get the rapid results as you might with strength building workouts.

• If you love running or other form of cardio, there’s no reason to give it up forever. Just alternate with other types of workouts to get maximum results and burn more calories.
• You can turn any type of exercise into a high intensity interval training—HIIT—workout by varying your level of intensity. Even ordinary walking and running can become a HIIT workout by varying your speed between top speed and recovery.
• Cardio, especially distance running, can create stress on your body. If you’re feeling dragged out or exhausted or find you pick up every germ that comes along, it’s could be from that stress, especially if you do more than a half hour a day.
• For weight loss, remember, you can’t out exercise a bad diet. You have to eat healthy AND exercise to get the results you want.