Do you feel like you’ve gained some weight even after doing your routine of cardio workout?
If this hits a little close to home, then chances are, you might be committing some cardio mistakes that are making you gain weight, instead of losing those fats.
For some bizarre reason, people have it stuck in their minds that strength training is excellent for toning and shaping our bodies, but when you want to lose weight, your best bet would be to do more cardio.
With those in mind, here are four cardio mistakes that are most likely making you gain fat.
1. Doing long, sustained sessions of cardio
Many years ago, the ‘Fat Burning Zone’ was added as an option on workout machines.
The myth surrounding this fat-busting workout zone continued and has become one of the factors that led to our fixation with medium intensity cardio exercise.
Surprisingly though, completing a long period of low-to-medium intensity cardio actually results in muscle loss.
So, rather than using fat as fuel to burn calories, your body will go after it’s limited glucose stores and more on using lean muscle as fuel.
Eventually, your body will be left with more fat than muscles, which makes you feel like you’re gaining fat.
Overexercising
Too much and too intense exercise can lead to several repercussions.
For instance, not taking enough time to give your body the rest it needs won’t let it recover, and in doing so, you’ll see fewer results from your workout.
Moreover, overworking your body for long periods of time will drain your adrenal system, and one side effect of your depleted adrenal system is your inability to lose belly fat.
That is because your body releases more hormone cortisol due to the stress your body is in, thus, making it difficult to burn those excess fats.
Overestimating calorie needs
If you feel like you’re gaining weight even after having done many sessions of cardio exercises, you’re likely overestimating how many calories you need.
People have the tendency to overestimate the volume of calories they burn during their daily workouts and think that they need more calories than they really do.
As a result, it will cause them to eat too much, leading to gain weight.
In fact, according to a study, it was found out that people tend to believe that they burned 3-4 times the number of calories that they actually burned on their workout sessions.
And so, when they eat to compensate for the calories lost, they ate more than twice as the calories they’d burned.
Minimizing cardio exercises because of your belief that it’ll make you hungry
Avoiding working out or minimizing your cardio workouts as much as possible because you’re afraid that it’ll make you extremely ravenous driving you to eat more.
Actually, the opposite is true. In fact, regular trips to the gym help in making you stick to your diet.
Sure, intense sweat sessions can boost your appetite, but that is because you’ve burned lots of calories so you’re body is craving for tons of nutrients to recover.
But only a few of us train really hard regularly. So if you’re hungry all the time and you think you’re gaining some weight, blame your diet, not the gym.
Your body knows if you’re not feeding it with enough nutrients and when that happens, it’ll only make your body crave more food until it gets its enough fill.