Recently, I've been hearing a lot of people who are concerned that they will lose muscle if they perform cardio exercises with the purpose of losing fat.
They obviously want to maximize their fat loss while minimizing their muscle loss.
People tend to lose muscle when doing cardio because they have the wrong approach.
You see, most people have a long cardio session with moderate intensity.
The problem with this strategy is that your muscles are not engaged during this type of exercise, since you need very little force to do it.
In order to minimize muscle loss you need three things: Weight Lifting Yes, you need to lift some weights so your body constantly needs to supply your body with all the appropriate substances it needs in order to recover.
You are less likely to lose muscle this way, since your body's priority will be to fix the damage, and not use the muscle for energy.
It's important to lift weights that are challenging to you.
If your body can handle the load comfortably, then it doesn't have a reason to improve its condition.
High Intensity Cardio After your weight lifting session, you need to add some high intensity cardio.
This type of cardio consists of mixing periods of time sprinting with periods of time jogging.
So as an example you could do 30 seconds running and 1 minute jogging.
The total time should be around 20 minutes.
The reason high intensity cardio will minimize muscle loss is that your muscles are engaged each time you start sprinting.
Since you are really using your muscles, then your body will not exchange them for energy.
The other thing is that your muscles were worked already during your weight lifting session, so it's not a good choice to use them for energy.
Post-workout Meal This is perhaps the most important element of the three.
Your post-workout meal will make sure your body has the substances it needs to make sure your muscles recover promptly.
A good post-workout meal can be a whey protein shake, mixed with some fruit juice.
The protein is essential to recovery, but it's very important to have the fruit juice because it'll give your body the glucose it needs really fast, since the juice can be processed a lot faster than a whole piece of fruit.
The post-workout meal should be had just after you finish your workout.
If you combine these three elements, I can guarantee you will maintain and even build muscle, while also losing all the extra fat that you don't want in your body.