Want to learn how burn more calories without cardio? I’ve got you covered with this guide to losing weight without adding more cardio to your schedule.

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Let’s face it, cardio sucks. It’s boring. It takes a long time. And (at least for me), I never get that vaunted “runner’s high” that they talk about in the magazines.

It’s just not for me. But, that’s okay.

If you are into cardio, that’s fantastic and I’m not here to demonize it at all.

In fact, cardiovascular health is something we should never ignore. It can be a great companion in our quest to burn more calories, lose fat, and feel great.

However it is not, nor should not, be the primary driver of your fat loss exercise approach. To maximize a more efficient fat loss journey, the priority lies with your diet, your strength training approach and general mindset. Cardio is just part of that process.

That said, I do think there are better options to burn calories and assist in weight loss than just lacing up the sneakers and hitting the treadmill for hours of boring steady-state jogging.

In this article, I’m going to break down 5 ways to burn more calories without more cardio. I’ll explain:

• Why cardio doesn’t burn as many calories as you think
• How your diet could be canceling out your hard-earned exercise
• The NEAT way to burn more calories without cardio
• 5 simple strategies to help lose weight without more cardio

Let’s get into it.

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Cardio doesn’t burn as many calories as you think

I want to be clear: There is a time and a place for cardio. I am not one of those coaches that’s going to cardio-shame everyone and preach that “You can get ripped abs and look great without any cardio, bruh.”

Truth is: Some people can do that, it’s true. But that doesn’t necessarily make you the healthiest, most well-conditioned human in the pack.

My coaching programming emphasizes hitting your calories and protein, then lifting heavy things a few times per week. But, I always leave room for two forms of cardio. A little bit of HIIT in the form of intervals or sprints for a few bouts every week. And a lot of LISS or steady state, low intensity cardio in the form of walking.

There’s a reason for this, and it is simple: cardio is not the end-all, be-all champion of calorie burning.

I’ve pointed out how emphasizing a calorie deficit plus strength training is the best method for losing weight for good. Your cardio bunny approach to pounding out hours on the treadmill is simply not efficient.

The number of calories you burn in exercises like jogging, cycling and rowing is not nearly as many as you think.

Take a look at this graphic courtesy of the University of Rochester Medical Center. It provides a breakdown of total calories burned per hour of exercise.

So as you can see, here’s the deal: the average calories burned for about an hour of purposeful movement and exercise is only about 350-400 calories. That’s right, those “calories burned” trackers on your FitBit and Apple Watch and other smart devices are lying to you.

Which leads to a friendly public service announcement that you absolutely should not (never … ever, ever, ever) add back those estimated burned calories into your daily eating allotment. Ever.

You’ll push yourself out of a deficit and into maintenance or even a surplus. Which leads to the next point …

Your diet could be canceling out your hard-earned exercise

The most effective way to lose weight is by managing the number of reps of that fork going to your face hole. Eating in a calorie deficit is the key to losing weight. Exercise is the supplementary tool, not the main driver of the journey.

Let’s play this out with an easy example. Take a 30-40 minute jogging session, for instance. According to the graphic above, a 200-pound individual would burn about 200-220 calories for that half hour of work.

I hate to break it to you, but the two tablespoons of peanut butter that you tossed in your healthy smoothie are 200 calories. You’ve already canceled out your exercise with something that takes less than two minutes to scarf down.

Let’s say that you are accounting for the calories found in every single bite of food. And you are in a calorie deficit.

Or so you think.

One of the biggest culprits preventing you from losing weight (despite the cardio and the workouts and the calorie/macro tracking) could rest with your over-abundance of … well … actual rest.

When you crank out intense routines or cardio-heavy training plans, it takes a toll on your body. You feel accomplished. But, you likely also feel washed. So you overcompensate by parking your keister on the couch for the rest of the day.

Remember, that half hour jog only accounted for 200ish calories. In other words, it’s simply not enough to carry your fat loss potential.

This is why it is so important to understand the role that a calorie deficit plays in your quest to maximize that metabolism and eventually lose weight.

The NEAT way to burn more calories without cardio

I’ve pointed out before how the metabolism works, so I’ll point you to this article for a more in-depth breakdown to determine how to improve your metabolism for more meaningful weight loss.

But, as a basic primer, here are the four major keys that make up metabolism

BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) –– calories burned at rest; this is the minimum amount of energy it takes to keep your body actually functioning; this is the energy you burn before any exercise and it accounts for about 70% of the calories you burn on any given day.

TEF (Thermic Effect of Food) –– calories your body uses to digest food when you eat that steak and potatoes at your favorite restaurant, the body needs to digest the meal and needs fuel to actually break it all down. So basically, you are in fact burning calories when you are eating calories. This makes up close to 10% of your daily caloric burn.

Planned Activity –– this is purposeful movement in the form of strength training and cardio. While we’ve been programmed to believe that exercise is the biggest factor or weight loss, the simple truth is that purposeful activity might only lead to about 5-10% of the daily calorie burn.

NEAT (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis) –– these are the calories burned through random, non-exercise related movements; like when you’re fidgeting or tapping your feet or fingers. It takes calories to fuel these movements. It’s cousin NEPA, or Non-Exercise Physical Activity like walking, taking the stairs, etc. is often included in this same category. Together, NEAT (and NEPA) can account for almost 10-20% of your daily calorie burn. Going forward, we’re going to include both as just NEAT.

For the purpose of our extra calorie burn efforts, we are going to focus on NEAT. While calculating the exact calories burned from NEAT, you can get a general clue by answering the following questions for yourself. Do you …

• Feel sluggish after a big meal?
• Feel exhausted the rest of the day after a tough workout?
• Engage in any activity outside of the gym?
• Work a sedentary job?
• Average at or below the American standard of 5,000 steps per day?

If you answered “yes” to one or more of these questions, you are likely in need of some modifications in your day to increase your NEAT. Doing so will greatly improve your ability to burn more calories without more cardio.

Here are five ways to burn more calories without adding more cardio to your routine

1. Walk like you’re a nomad

As we addressed earlier in the article in the section about metabolism, the calories that you burn from purposeful exercise are not nearly as many as you think.

That grueling SoulCylce class or OrgangeTheory session or 45 minutes of torture from F45 only burn about 200-300 calories. That’s it. Seriously.

Our workouts only account for about 5-10 percent of our metabolism. The real calorie burn comes from the daily movement outside of the gym. Instead, it’s all of the stuff that falls under Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (or NEAT) that really takes things to the next level.

NEAT includes things like fidgeting, tapping your toes under your desk, waiving your hands while you talk.

It’s a bit difficult to manage how much of that you do throughout your day. So instead,I encourage you to manage the one NEAT activity that you do have control over: walking.

That’s right. Walking.

The cheapest (free), most accessible form of movement for the vast majority of the population should also be one of the most important factors of daily exercise you perform.

I want to be clear about this. Walking is simply that … just walking. It’s not a brisk power walk in an attempt to beat Olympic records. It’s not a light jog. It’s walking. Unless it’s a thousand degrees outside, you shouldn’t break much of a sweat doing it.

And it does not mean you have permission to skip your strength training sessions in the name of a walk-a-thon. As I’ve pointed out time and time again, strengthening your muscles through resistance training is still of the utmost importance.

Find time for both.

If you’ve been struggling to lose weight, increasing movement through more walking could be the awesomesauce to get you losing again.

But let’s not just stop there. You can also include some additional movement that helps bolster your strength training, too.

2. Activity breaks throughout your day

This is where you’ve got to be really honest with yourself. If you spend your time locked down at your desk in front of a computer and the most movement you do throughout your work day is to meander over to the water cooler or that occasional trip to the bathroom, it means you are completely sedentary.

Time to change that behavior. And it is possible to burn more calories without cardio despite a super sedentary lifestyle. You’ve just got to make an action plan and execute.

I’m a big fan of the scheduled action breaks throughout your day.

Set a timer for 50-55 minutes. When it goes off, you must stand up from your desk. Take your eyes off of your computer and move.

A few ideas for inspiration:

• It can be walking or marching in place.
• Perform 5-10 minutes of yoga poses or mobility work.
• Drop down and knock out 10-20 push-ups followed by 10-20 squats.
• Take a walk around the block or the building if you’ve got the space to do so.
• Smash a quick microworkout to focus on greasing the groove of a particular exercise.

Or do a combination of all of the above by cycling through the various activities to really mix things up. Your choice.

It’s imperative that you break up the monotony of non-stop sitting to include some more movement during the work hours. But, this commitment to more movement doesn’t just stop when you clock out.

You’ve got homework, too.

3. Leave some wiggle room to stand up more

Standing can burn up to 50 more calories per hour than sitting.

If you’ve got a standing desk option at the office, it can not only go a long way to help burn more calories without more cardio, but standing more will help improve poor posture that we develop from being fixated on our ass for eight hours per day (or more).

If you can’t stand more, no worries. Just do what you can and maybe implement one of the activity breaks in the previous point.

Just be sure to try and wiggle around more at your desk. Seriously. All movement counts. Tapping your toes, stomping your feet, embracing your inner Italian and starting to talk with your hands more … all of these things require energy.

And energy burns calories to promote movement.

4. Don’t be so lazy

What a time to be alive. Just about anything you can possibly think of is available to you on-demand and in an instant.

If you’re plugged in, you can have everything from groceries, to dinner, to even condoms delivered right to your doorstep without ever having to step foot outside, or really even get up from the couch.

As a result, we’ve become lazy as fuck. Yeah, I said it.

You’ve got to break it up. Remember, all movement counts.

So find more time to get up and move purposefully with a few of these ideas:

• Take the stairs instead of the elevator (if you’ve got a ton of stairs to climb, break it up in half or thirds or whatever makes sense)
• Park farther away in the parking lot
• Bike or walk to work when possible
• Opt to step out to go purchase your lunch instead of having it delivered to the office
• Take a conference call or even a meeting during a walk instead of tying yourself to your desk
• Stand up while taking public transit instead of sitting down (the elderly and pregnant folks will thank you)

5. Increase that step count

Activity trackers are mostly garbage. The stats and “info” they provide are mostly bloated numbers that lead to more harm than good.

It’s been proven that some of those “calories burned” measurements are as much as 40-50 percent off. Which is a major cause for confusion since so many people take that as factual and eat back those “calories burned” factors.

Please, don’t ever eat back the “calories burned” no matter how much or how little your app of choice has provided. It’s simply not accurate.

Okay … rant over.

There is one function that is almost worth the price of the hardware along, and that’s the step counter or pedometer.

Most Americans average about 4,000 steps per day

Sedentary office workers are in this ballpark. If you can manage to double your average step count, you can burn an additional 250-350 calories per day. Sometimes more.

So, go invest in a FitBit, or any other reliable step tracker. Not because it’s magical, but because it holds you accountable.

I’ve already highlighted the importance of walking more. Now it’s up to you to take action.

Grab your activity tracker and get moving. Chart how many steps you average both on a weekday and on the weekends (depending on your lifestyle, these can vary quite a bit). Once you’ve got a decent average, aim to increase your steps over time. Start small, especially if you’re new to this.

Maybe set a goal of walking 2-3,000 more steps per day the following week or two.

Eventually, you’d like to average out at about 8,000 to 10,000 steps per day. There’s nothing necessarily magical about that specific 10,000 step number. But, it’s a nice round target to hit and will be more than enough calorie burn for what you’re looking to achieve.

This is a look at my average steps throughout an entire week.

Alright, so that’s an average of 15,600+ steps per day for me.

I’m not here to “step shame” you. Promise. I’m just letting you know that your friendly, neighborhood health and fitness coach practices what he preaches.

Keep in mind, I live in Brooklyn, NY, where walking is my major form of transportation. I also spend most of my day managing the exploits of my young Intern (my son) while splitting the pick up/drop off duties for my Senior Intern (my daughter) to/from her school.

Your goal is to find more opportunities in your day to be more active and to walk more often throughout your day. Do that, and the calorie burn will increase so you can be well on your way to long term health and success.

Follow a well-rounded plan and build accountability to reach your weight loss goals

Cardio alone is simply not an effective driver of weight loss. It’s just one piece of a larger puzzle. To achieve fat loss success, you need to be sound in all phases of the game:

• Lead an active lifestyle every day (with the options I pointed out in this article)
• Establish a calorie deficit and follow a solid nutrition plan
• Workout strategically to assist in fat loss 
• Toss in a dose of consistency and patience and effort over time.

If one of these pieces is missing, it’ll be pretty tough to finally realize that body transformation.

That’s where my online coaching program comes in …

I will be your personal coach and teammate in nutrition, exercise and mindset. By applying to work with me, you’ll gain a personalized approach with the guidance and accountability to succeed.

Fitness isn’t just about the diet and working out. If it was that easy, we could all pick up the latest health magazine or watch a bunch of YouTube videos and find our six-pack abs by summer. But, we need more than that to be successful and I will work with you to develop a lifestyle change that achieves long-lasting results.

Work exclusively with me to get:

• The body you’ve always wanted catered to your own lifestyle through personalized workouts and nutrition plan
• Proven fat loss systems tailored to fit your body and your goals – no more second-guessing and hoping the latest magazine fad will work
• Ongoing accountability with an exclusive one-on-one support system
• Instant knowledge of scientifically-proven methods for success and how it applies to your progress

As your trainer and coach, it is my intention to provide the tools you need to be successful for the long-term: How to eat properly; how to exercise efficiently; and how to be healthy and happy for life.

If you’re ready to get started, then click through and fill out a coaching application and we’ll set up a 100% FREE phone call to go over your goals and see if you’re a fit for my programming.

Lead Featured Image by composita from Pixabay 

Let me help you learn how to burn more calories without cardio … 

I’m here to help you out. 

If you have any questions, reach out. I answer all of my emails at pete [at] petecataldo [.] com … Hit me up with the subject line “Burn more calories without cardio” and I’ll answer any questions you have to make this work for you.

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