Yes, a cardio 7 days a week fat loss program can help you lose weight. However, it depends on the intensity of the workouts. Surprisingly, a study published in the American Physiological Society Journal showed that a daily cardio program with lower intensity workouts was more effective than high-intensity workouts.
How much is ideal? A weekly day of rest is often advised when structuring a workout program, but sometimes you may feel the desire to work out every day. As long as you're not pushing yourself too hard or getting obsessive about it, working out every day is fine.
In fact, you can train the same muscle groups—and train them hard—three, five, or up to seven days a week if you want to. And doing so can bring the best muscle and strength gains of your life.
Benefits of Exercising Seven Days a Week
Daily structured exercise means greater fat-burning (yes, it will make a difference over time) and better fitness. The analogy: Think of practicing the violin only five or six days a week, versus seven. Over time, that seventh day will make a difference.
If your goal is build muscle…
Do not work the same muscles on consecutive days—allow them time to recover. Some people do well on a five to six day a week schedule, working only one muscle group each time. If you want to go the gym more often, you can...but don't work overwork tired muscles. They need the rest.
Short answer: yes. “Rest days are important to prevent overuse injuries, and to allow for muscles and body to recover from the exercise,” Debra explained. “You are creating small tears in the muscles as you work them, so it is important to give them rest.
Exercise alone often doesn't cause significant weight loss because it can increase appetite, causing you to eat back the calories you just burned. But new research found 300 minutes a week of exercise (40 minutes to an hour a day, six days a week) can burn fat and lead to weight loss.
Training four or five times a week is ideal, but most people find that unachievable due to time constraints, so Mans says it's best to aim for three: “This exposes your body to a large enough training stimulus throughout the week, which enables the body to adapt, get stronger, leaner and fitter.”
The question: "How many days should I work out a week" is easy to answer when you're a beginner. As a beginner, achieving 2-3 sets per muscle group per workout or 8-10 sets per muscle per week can easily be done with just 3 full-body workouts per week.
There is no recommended upper limit on the amount of cardio exercise you should do on a daily or weekly basis. However, if you push yourself hard with every workout, then skipping a day or two each week to rest may help you avoid injury and burnout.
If you are working out two times per day and 6-7 days per week, there is a very good chance you are overtraining. There is simply no real reason to have to train that much (unless you are an athlete or training for something very particular that requires such training methods).
But if you're used to multiple workout days a week, one day probably won't challenge your body enough to maintain your fitness or make progress. The breakdown varies depending on your specific goals, but in general, four to five days a week will do the trick if you're aiming to improve or maintain your fitness.
Calories Burned
It is important to choose the correct exercise to fit your needs. You need to burn 3,500 calories to lose one pound of body weight. Therefore, it is likely that you will lose between one-half and three-quarters of a pound in a week through exercising for 30 minutes each day.
Those who burned 400 calories per cardio session (5 times per week) lost 4.3% of their body weight, while those who burned 600 calories per session (also 5 times per week) lost a little more, at 5.7%. The control group, which didn't exercise, actually gained 0.5% of their body weight.
If you don't sleep well or long enough consistently for a few days, your reaction time, immunity, cognitive functions, and endurance will decrease, with compounds the symptoms of overtraining. Dr. Wickham says that two rest days in a row should be enough to reset the body back into a normal sleep schedule and cycle.
A rest day is a day in which a person takes a break from their regular workout routine. Rest days are an important part of any exercise program. They give the body a chance to repair and recover, and help to prevent injury. A person should plan to have at least one rest day every 7–10 days.
“However, following long periods of extensive exercise, the body's metabolic system may be stressed to its limit, therefore it is advised for anywhere from a minimum of 3-7 days of complete rest, hydration and sleep.
It turns out, exercise experts pretty much agree on the number of rest days people who are in good shape and exercising regularly should take: On average, you should be taking two days per week for rest and active recovery.
For the rest of us, doctors recommend 150 minutes of physical activity. However, even in those 150 minutes, you can overdo it and push yourself too hard. To know the effects of over-exercising, you should assess how it makes you feel physically and emotionally.
Exercising for more than 12 hours a week gives you the best chance of avoiding heart attacks, strokes, cancer and diabetes, experts claim. That is five times higher than the minimum activity suggested by the British Government and the World Health Organisation.