To lose fat, should you track step count or do cardio?
What's the difference?
Here's how I define the difference.
Tracking step count is simply using a wearable device (Fitbit, apple watch, cheap fit tracker) to track and control your total daily step count.
Cardio is aerobic exercise while maintaining a certain heart rate range for a specific period.
When it comes to fat loss, it's all about maintaining a calorie deficit.
But there's a lot of nuance behind that.
One of them is energy expenditure.
There are two forms of energy expenditure: exercise and non-exercise.
Cardio is very easy for your body to adapt to when it comes to increasing energy expenditure to supplement your calorie deficit.
This means that if you add cardio to burn extra calories, the calories you burn doing the cardio will be canceled out in some other way throughout the rest of your day.
The easiest way for your body to do this is by lowering non-exercise activity.
Your body will also do this to consume fewer calories, but not to the same extent as it will in response to cardio.
So what's the takeaway here?
For most people, controlling non-exercise activity is all that's needed.
Warrior, The only way to do that is by controlling your step count.
And this is far less important than providing your muscles with adequate stimulus to grow (which increases your BMR) and controlling your calorie intake.
The key to a successful and permanent physique transformation is this:
Doing so in a way where minimum effort leads to maximum results.
Make sure to check it out!
-Coach Kirk