I should probably preface by saying that I’ve been brewing this for nearly 24 hours and I’m so in my head over it that what follows may be gibberish.
I’ve been using FitnessBlender since the start of the pandemic and have adopted a format of mostly strength training, with short HIIT 2-3 times a week, some Pilates, plus a short cardio session once a week. I generally use the lower-upper-core/HIIT-upper-lower schedule, plus the occasional total body-recovery-total body week.
My husband opted for Les Mills On Demand, plus kettlebells and his own strength routine. His workouts are a mixture of total body strength and cardio. He’s just acquired a new fitness tracker (a Whoop strap) and announced yesterday that it had apparently logged his BodyCombat workout as having burned 800 calories. I was a bit sceptical about this, but mostly just alarmed.
I’ve been trained to think that a cardio recovery workout is around half an hour and probably burns a couple of hundred calories at best, so the idea that he’s doing 55 minutes and burning three or four times that makes me panic, even allowing for the difference in our relative sizes and musculature.
All of this has thrown me completely. Am I not doing anything like enough cardio? Should I be aiming for 60 minutes of cardio on those recovery days? Is my mostly strength training approach skewed? I’ve started looking at other training plans and I’m seeing a lot of cardio days, which has completely undermined my faith in what I was doing.
Sorry for the ramble and mild hysteria. I’m very good at feeling inadequate about my workouts at the best of times, and I’ve now convinced myself that I’m a total slacker.
A different approach? Better approach?
I should probably preface by saying that I’ve been brewing this for nearly 24 hours and I’m so in my head over it that what follows may be gibberish.
I’ve been using FitnessBlender since the start of the pandemic and have adopted a format of mostly strength training, with short HIIT 2-3 times a week, some Pilates, plus a short cardio session once a week. I generally use the lower-upper-core/HIIT-upper-lower schedule, plus the occasional total body-recovery-total body week.
My husband opted for Les Mills On Demand, plus kettlebells and his own strength routine. His workouts are a mixture of total body strength and cardio. He’s just acquired a new fitness tracker (a Whoop strap) and announced yesterday that it had apparently logged his BodyCombat workout as having burned 800 calories. I was a bit sceptical about this, but mostly just alarmed.
I’ve been trained to think that a cardio recovery workout is around half an hour and probably burns a couple of hundred calories at best, so the idea that he’s doing 55 minutes and burning three or four times that makes me panic, even allowing for the difference in our relative sizes and musculature.
All of this has thrown me completely. Am I not doing anything like enough cardio? Should I be aiming for 60 minutes of cardio on those recovery days? Is my mostly strength training approach skewed? I’ve started looking at other training plans and I’m seeing a lot of cardio days, which has completely undermined my faith in what I was doing.
Sorry for the ramble and mild hysteria. I’m very good at feeling inadequate about my workouts at the best of times, and I’ve now convinced myself that I’m a total slacker.