Is doing alternate days of cardio enough to lose weight?

Hi Chris,

Whether you’re doing enough cardiovascular exercise to facilitate weight loss right now really depends on what your workouts are like. I tell my patients that you don’t want to exercise 7 days/week; even God rested one day when he created the world, so you can too. But it is a good idea to get up and move every day.

Current guidelines recommend accumulating at least 150 min./week of moderate intensity exercise (i.e. exercise that feels like a brisk walk) or 75 min./week of vigorous, challenging exercise. So you should be aiming to at least meet guidelines.

If I were to ask you, how hard to you feel like you’re working when you’re exercising? Is it light? Somewhat hard? Or hard? If you feel like you’re being challenged (i.e. somewhat hard – hard), then engaging in this kind of activity on alternate days is OK, and you could do this kind of activity 30-40 min., up to 4 days a week without increasing your risk of overuse injuries. If the exercise intensity is light, consider increasing the intensity to facilitate improvements in your fitness and to increase the number of calories you’re using.

Has your instructor suggested that you try high intensity interval training (HIIT)? This is where, after warming up, you alternate between somewhat hard and hard intensity 1-2 min. bouts as tolerated for about 20-30 min. There is some very good data that this kind of training can help facilitate more weight loss than steady state cardio and some people, including myself, find these kinds of workouts a lot more fun to do.

One last thing; cardiovascular exercise gives you the best bang for your buck as far as caloric expenditure goes. You’ll burn approximately 100 calories for every mile you move. However, you won’t be successful at losing and maintaining your weight loss unless you’re also regularly making healthy diet choices and incorporating some weight training into your exercise regimen. Muscle is a metabolically active tissue, that is, it uses up calories while at rest thereby increasing the amount of calories you’re using up throughout the day and helping you lose additional weight.

Hi Chris,

Also, it is true that you will not achieve the look you want or optimum health without exercise but diet is more influential in causing fat loss than any other factor.