Can we do cardio everyday?

[nvedia]

I went to the instructor in the gym yesterday and he said I have the body fat% as 22. I think its normal but still I wanted to reduce the fat. Can someone tell if there is any harm in doing cardio first thing every morning in addition to the exercises on alternate days. I know weight exercise works on the muscles which need time to rest but is this the same with cardio?
I am open to do treadmill one day and cycle the other day etc

[Rhone]

How much time your muscles would need to rest depends largely on whether the cardio is aerobic or anaerobic. Anaerobic cardio will affect the muscles involved in much the same way as resistance training, and the muscles will need some time to rest.

If you're doing BFL-style cardio, the high points are very anaerobic. This is why Phillips specifically says not to do anymore than the 20-minutes, 3 days per week. If you do, you risk overtraining and sabotaging yourself.

You can, however, add in some extra light to moderate intensity aerobic exercise. Going by the BFL intensity levels, intensity levels 5-7, maybe 5-8 are okay, but don't go for high points... if you're becoming short of breath or feeling "the burn" in your muscles then the exercise you're doing is anaerobic.

As for whether or not you should do that, it's debatable... at this point, my opinion is that adding extra aerobic cardio on top of the BFL program can help you lose fat faster, but is also likely to inhibit muscle gain (and maybe even result in losing some muscle mass). And those things together could make it more likely that your metabolism slows down and you hit a plateau.

[yakubu]

Originally Posted by nvedia

I went to the instructor in the gym yesterday and he said I have the body fat% as 22. I think its normal but still I wanted to reduce the fat. Can someone tell if there is any harm in doing cardio first thing every morning in addition to the exercises on alternate days. I know weight exercise works on the muscles which need time to rest but is this the same with cardio?
I am open to do treadmill one day and cycle the other day etc

other people mite disagree with me on this one but i wudnt do more than 3 sessions a week. there are people who have holding a tremendous amount of fat but in the 12 weeks of body for life theyve got rid of it.

muscle burns fat. and to get muscle u need to rest. having sed that though if u did cardio in the morning and weights in the night mite be fine.

i dont know really, im not the best person to advise on this but i always thought that its best to rest as much as possible and not to overtrain

[Chris]

Yeah, didn't you say you are thin already? Despite the desire to lose some bf%, you still need to treat your body like you don't want to lose anything. This means feeding your body everything you burn. Stay in maintenance mode and don't try to run a deficit... this means don't do extra cardio for now... just my opinion.

[yakubu]

Originally Posted by nvedia

I went to the instructor in the gym yesterday and he said I have the body fat% as 22. I think its normal but still I wanted to reduce the fat. Can someone tell if there is any harm in doing cardio first thing every morning in addition to the exercises on alternate days. I know weight exercise works on the muscles which need time to rest but is this the same with cardio?
I am open to do treadmill one day and cycle the other day etc

Tom Archipley: "I did 20 minutes of aerobics every morning for the first 5 weeks of the challenge." Tom was doing weight training three times a week, so for three of those days, he was doubling up on high-intensity workouts. That's overtraining. He told me "At 5 weeks I realized that in order to lose fat I had to gain muscle, so I cut back my aerobics to 3 per week for 20 minutes. I think it's a temptation to do too much cardio and have that undermine the benefits of weight training. If you keep your intensity high enough, you shouldn't have enough left after your cardio to hit weights in the same day."