hello i have a question... i have an elliptical and well...it really kicks my butt lol. is 30 mins 4-5 days a week ok for fat loss? i mean i sweat like crazy and my heart rate usually gets up to 173-6 beats a minute...or could i be over doing it. i put little resistance on it so it almost like intense jogging. thanks

As long as you are eating well to support the cardio on top of whatever other exercise you may be doing (i.e resistance training) I don't see any harm being done.

I got myself into a situation a few weeks ago where I was busting my butt with cardio and lifting pretty hard which resulted in sending myself into starvation mode as I wasn't eating enough to keep up with what I was doing.

I've since corrected that and everything is fine now. Instead of doing two cardio workouts a day, I brought it back down to one. The only time I have a double cardio day now is on my non-lifting days. Such days are done because it's habit versus a need due to bad diet.

most people will say that you have to be in a certain heart rate range to burn fat i.e 70% of your max HR. Some people do HIIT, some people do LISS, some do fasted, some do non-fasted, some walk, some jog, some bike...

my feelings are calorie-based...if you eat clean, weight-train and your elliptical is helping you burn more calories than you are taking in, then yes it is good for fat loss. If I remember correctly we already know that you eat clean and do some resistance training. You should have no problem burning the fat.

hello i have a question... i have an elliptical and well...it really kicks my butt lol. is 30 mins 4-5 days a week ok for fat loss? i mean i sweat like crazy and my heart rate usually gets up to 173-6 beats a minute...or could i be over doing it. i put little resistance on it so it almost like intense jogging. thanks


Does your hr stay that high? If so, that's about 85% of maximum, no? That's pretty high for 30 minutes. If you are averaging around 160 (spiking to 175), I'd say that's pretty normal for a great workout. Hard work indeed. Keep it up. As others said, be sure to eat enough to sustain that kind of activity, but that's great!

thanks for the replies!!! cardio has always been my weak point i could never keep myself doing it...but now that ive kept at it i find it easier, mostly a motivation issue... thank you :D

most people will say that you have to be in a certain heart rate range to burn fat i.e 70% of your max HR.

I hope most people by now realize that this is not true. You burn fat at all heart rate ranges.

If you search on "fat burning zone myth" you will get no shortage of hits explaining why you don't need to stay at low intensity to burn fat. Here is one good example:

http://www.pponline.co.uk/encyc/0895.htm

More important is the energy used after exercise (EPOC). All the EPOC calories come from fat.

http://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/epoc.html

Recent research shows that the amount of EPOC is proportional to the duration of the exercise. But it depends much more sharply on the intensity of the workout - low intensity workouts have almost no EPOC and high intensity workouts have a lot of EPOC. So high intensity workouts end up burning lots of fat calories when you count all the calories that get burned, and not just the ones that are burned when you do the exercise.

hello i have a question... i have an elliptical and well...it really kicks my butt lol. is 30 mins 4-5 days a week ok for fat loss? i mean i sweat like crazy and my heart rate usually gets up to 173-6 beats a minute...or could i be over doing it. i put little resistance on it so it almost like intense jogging. thanks

I don't know if you are overdoing it. Do you know what your maximum heart rate is? And no, do not use the age based formula. Those are awfully inaccurate.

Sweating like crazy is good, but It's hard to quantify how good.

How is your breathing? If you can sing a song while you are working, then it's below the ventilation threshold, but if you are huffing and puffing to the point where you can't easily talk, then that is over the ventilation threshold.

Unless you are above the ventilation threshold for a long time, it's not really that intense that you need to worry about "overdoing" it. You probably want to eat enough to keep the caloric deficit from getting too big.

Angel of Music,

I have found an important aspect of cardio is mixing it up. Eliptical, Stairs, running, going steady, doing intervals, etc. My sister in law did just tell me about an article that said elipticals are the best full body cardio workout, I wish I liked ours better, but I try to use that, mixing up my routines, and running and trying to force myself onto the stairs.:tu: