How much cardio?

wookiemouse

I currently do strength training for an hour 3x a week (mostly dropsets and trisets at 75% of 1RM). 2 days a week I do an hour of cardio, mostly intervals (especially kickboxing and tabata drills). I am happy with my current weight, stay at my cut value on calories (1875) daily regardless of what I do exercise-wise, and eat clean about 99% of the time.

I would love to be a little leaner (I have a solid 4 pk but no 6 pk yet!), and I know cardio burns fat. BUT....I also know that too much cardio burns muscle as well and I don't want that. So how do you determine how much and what type of cardio is best in this situation?

Stuz359

I always think the too much cardio is more for long distance runners. Try an interval routine on a stationary bike. Something like:

4min moderate pace warm up. Up the resistance or just sprint for 40 seconds, then go back to your original pace/resistance for 20 seconds. Repeat this 10 times. Next, sprint for 20 seconds followed by 10 seconds moderate pace, repeat 6 times. After that, do a 3 minute warm down, should take 20 minutes and give you a great workout.

Jynus

cardio burns calories, not fat. so the answer is you need as much as it takes to create a big enough deficit from your diet to lose fat. that can be as little as 0.

LaurnWhit

Bump

wookiemouse

So, in other words, if I'm doing a 20% cut from TDEE and don't see results in a few months, just start playing with increasing or decreasing my calories until I hit a sweet spot? Oh, that's not going to be a lot of fun.