Q: I decided to take your advice and stop cardio all together while I weight train almost on a daily basis. I noticed that while I was weightraining and doing cardio my muscles were not getting stronger and on some days actually weakened. after I stopped doing cardio my muscles have becomed stronger and I have even lost some fat . I havent lost fat for the last 6 months when I was doing only cardio! I was stuck at a body composition of 20% at 200 pounds. cardio works for me only if I weigh more than 200,I dont know why. I came to the conclusion that since I am eating around what my bmr is the cardio that I was doing (Up to 800 calories a day) was burning all the food that I needed to feed my muscles and maybe more. Since I dont have a big appetite I rather stop cardio than eat like a pig.Had I known this before I would have saved 6 months of wasted effort.So my advice to everyone is ,do cardio up to the point where you reach a plateau,after that just do weight training.thanks for the advice.

A: You are welcome and I am very glad my advice is helping you!

What has happened to you is very common because of the general perception that cardio is the only way to lose fat. And cardio will work reasonably well in the beginning for an untrained overweight person because their body will have large deposits of fat to burn off. However as they start losing the fat, the bias will shift towards burning more muscle and less fat and they will reach a plateau like the one you described. Unfortunately what most people do at that point is increase their cardio far too much, often coupling it with a near-starvation diet. Their bodies respond by burning even more muscle and even less fat because the body perceives this as a life-threatening situation and tries to hang on to its primary energy reserves (fat) while shedding the unnecessary for survival active metabolic tissue (muscle). The result of that is lack of progress at best and destroyed metabolism, severe muscle loss, injuries, and health problems at worst. After some time the person can no longer take it and abandons the program going back to their old routine and diet. However since their metabolism is very low after the exhaustive muscle-wasting cardio regimen, they end up putting on fat very quickly once they resume their regular eating habits. This in turn returns them to their starting point in their fight to lose fat or even sets them back. And of course it all could have been prevented by focusing on a good fat-burning diet and weight training instead of going crazy on cardio.

Good luck with your new approach, I am sure you will find it very effective. If you are aiming to lose fat, I would recommend undereating by maybe 300-500 calories per day which should result in weight loss of around one pound per week. Combined with weight training, almost all of that weight loss will be fat. Once you hit a point during this weight loss where you are comfortable with your body composition you can then just go back to your regular maintenance calories. Also, don't stress your body by daily weight-training. Do it 3-5 days per week, no more than 1 hour at a time and focus on the big compound exercises like the squat, deadlift, bench press, pullup/pulldown, row, shoulder press.

Again, I'm very happy to have helped you and good luck!