Is there a thing as too much cardio?

Lots of cardio is fine as long as your are fuelling yourself. If you're eating a large calorie deficit then you may burn out somewhere down the line and/or risk injuries if your body does not have adequate food for recovery.

I had a trainer at the gym start telling me that my 2 hours on the running machine wasn't good for me and that I should be doing more strength work.
He didn't even enquire as to why I was running for that long, just piped up with some advice. I pointed out that I was training for a 100k and 2 hours on the running machine is pretty much my shortest "long" run.
Ignore what people say unless they know 100% what your goals and targets are and even then they better have some evidence to back up what they are saying and not just "bro-science"

There is such a thing as too much cardio. It's called overuse injury. If you do too much too soon of one thing you may get injured because you body needs time to catch up and adapt to an increase in intensity and/or time spent. That's the only way I can think of where cardio can be too much.

There is also contextual "too much cardio", like a person who is focused on strength and such.

Bottomline: no, cardio is not bad even if done for an extended time, provided you are well adapted for it.

srosenbloom06 wrote: »

First a bit about me.. I don't have too much weight to lose, I just want to burn fat and tone up! So I normally start off with resistance machines/weights for either legs, back, core or arms and then either do a class such as spinning/Zumba or rowing/other cardio machines! I do that 4/5 times a week and occasionally an extra spin class on a morning!

Ive been told I'm doing too much cardio- is that a thing?

As long as your soft tissue is getting proper rest and recovery between sessions, and especially between the intensity sessions - it comes down to goals and what/why you are training. Typical endurance athlete's don't even blink at doing 8 - 15+ hours a week of cardio (cyclists, runners, tri-athletes, etc...). However, endurance athletes train at different heart rate zones so that not all of those hours are at the same intensity. And there is a law of diminishing returns, so endurance athletes focus on levels of intensity within their structured training and avoid "junk miles" because periodized training is specifically building up for an event(s) - races. If one has the time in their daily schedule/career/lifestyle, hours of cardio per week is a very effective training tool that will attack the fat you want to burn as long as the CICO equation is in favor of a deficit.

So yes, cardio certainly can be used to burn calories. Weight is lost in the kitchen (CICO), but you can greatly enhance the number of calories you burn to help accomplish your goal of fat burn using cardio. Again, the question becomes the level of intensity and your ability to recover from it. So 1-2+ hours daily of HR Zone 1/2 cardio is easy to recover from, yet burns a lot of calories. A session of shorter duration, but with higher intensity via intervals, can also burn a lot of calories, but needs more time to recover from making it really feasible to do 2, maybe 3 of those sessions per week.

That, combined with the resistance training you are doing certainly is the basic recipe to get lean and mean (burn fat and tone up as you call it). I would not consider 4 - 6 hours of cardio per week as "doing too much" by any stretch of the imagination with proper rest and recovery (including active recovery), as well as variance in HR zones so all of those hours are not just high intensity, or low intensity, or mid level intensity (you need a nice mix).

I do what I like. I like to run. I've hit maintenance now, so my goals have switched to increasing speed and time. I lost all my 50lbs and mainly ran and walked, with a little strength thrown in.

With that said, I hate strength training. Loathe it. So I don't do it much. I however love running and doing what you enjoy is a way you will more than likely stick with it.