Fasted morning cardio is the very effective to burn fat. When you do cardio in the morning without having breakfast, you burn upto 20 % more fat than usual. Let us understand the mechanism, how it burns more fat? There are basically 2 sources of energy, our body utilizes to function properly. One is the sources from carbohydrates and the other is through fats. Fat is the secondary source of energy, meaning when the body is in shortage of carbs or when there is no more carbs available in the body. Our body starts tapping the secondary storage which is fat.
So when we sleep and fast overnight, our body is in shortage of carbs and now the only source of energy available is fat. So if you do cardio in the morning without having breakfast. It burns more fat compared to having breakfast and doing cardio. But the story doesn’t end here. When your goal is to build muscle, this is not an effective solution. Since our body breaks the stored amino acids in our muscles and convert them in to glucose as a fuel. So fasted morning cardio burns fat along with loss of muscle as well. So to overcome this problem, you need to take fast digesting protein such as whey protein before and after your workout to save your hard earned muscles.
HIIT(High intensity interval cardio)
From the above evidence, we can’t say that fasted morning cardio alone won’t be able to burn more fat. It depends on the type of cardio you are doing. If it is low intensity cardio, where your aim is only to burn more calories, it won’t be much effective. Where as if you opt for high intensity interval cardio, it is much effective since it burns your fat even when you are not doing anything for the rest of your day. Studies show that fasted morning HIIT cardio burns almost twice the calories as that of slow and steady state cardio.
How to perform HIIT?
If you don’t know how to perform HIIT cardio, follow the below steps:
- Start the treadmill, keep the speed upto 6 kms depending on your walking speed.
- Do walking or a slow jogging for 1 min.
- Now switch the speed upto 16 kms or depending on your max run speed.
- Run for about a minute and switch back again to the previous mode, that is slow mode.
- Keep sprinting and jogging by alternating the speed at regular intervals till you complete your daily running schedule for about 20 to 30 minutes.
- This is the best way to burn fat even during your sleep. You can even follow the same steps with any kind of cardio you like such as cycling, aerobics etc.