Whether you are running, walking, jogging, cycling or climbing stairs, you are doing great cardio-vascular exercises that will improve your conditioning. They will improve your conditioning no matter what time of the day you do them. However, if you want to get the most out of your cardio workout, it is best to do your routine in the morning when you first wake up.
Get up early
This type of exercise is best performed before you put any food in your stomach. You may not be a morning athlete or a morning person in general, but when you are doing cardio exercises it is worth it to change your regular routine.
Burning fat
If you have eaten dinner at 7 pm and you eat breakfast at 7 am, you are going 12 hours between meals. Without taking in food, your glucose levels will slip. As a result, you will have lower glycogen and blood sugar levels when you start your cardio exercise, and that's the ideal environment for burning fat.
Fat burning
Carbohydrates are your body's primary energy source. In the morning, those carbohydrates are in short supply in your body. As a result, once those carbohydrates have been burned, your body goes into its next fuel source and that's fat. You will burn significantly less fat if you do your cardio workout after eating than if you do it on an empty stomach.
Alternative time
You may not be able to do your cardio routine first thing in the morning. Perhaps your work responsibilities do not give you that option or you have children that take up your early morning time. If you can't do your cardio first thing in the morning, then you should try to do it after a weightlifting routine. Lifting weights will burn carbohydrates, and then heading into a cardio workout will allow your body to get into its fat source to fuel the run. It doesn't necessarily matter what time of day you are doing the cardio routine if it is not first thing in the morning as long as it comes after a weight-lifting workout that burns carbohhydrates.
Added benefit
If you are doing your cardio routine the first thing in the morning, you will continue to burn fat well after your routine has been completed. A high-energy cardio session will speed up your metabolism and help you burn fat as you complete the rest of your day's activities. If you do a cardio routine at night shortly before you go to sleep, you won't get this benefit because your body's metabolism drops greatly after you are sleeping.
Tags: your cardio, your body, cardio routine, first thing, first thing morning, thing morning, cardio routine first