More Cardio = Less Calories Burned 🫨

21 Aug 2025 · 1 min

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1:03

In this short explanatory video, Eric Roberts explains that repeatedly performing the same cardio workout leads the body to adapt, making the activity more efficient and thereby reducing the number of calories burned over time. He illustrates this with a treadmill example: 30 minutes at a speed of 2.5 burns about 300 calories initially, but after a month of daily repetition the body becomes better at the task, so it burns fewer calories. To continue burning the same or more calories, Roberts recommends progressively challenging the body by increasing workout duration, raising the speed, or adding incline. The video’s purpose is to inform viewers that improved cardio fitness can paradoxically lower calorie expenditure unless the workout intensity is systematically increased.

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The more cardio you do, the less calories you burn. And here's why. Let's say you're on the treadmill for 30 minutes at a 2.5 speed. And let's say right now you burn 300 calories doing that. If you kept doing that every single day for a month, your body is going to get better at doing that cardio. So when it gets better, it means it doesn't have to work as hard, which means you end up burning less calories. So it's actually a good thing that you're improving, but you end up burning less calories. So what would you have to do? Well, you would either have to increase the time to say 40 minutes, you would have to increase the speed to say 3 instead of 2.5, Or you would have to add an incline to keep challenging your body so you don't just end up burning less and less calories as time goes on.