In a recent interview with E! Online, Dancing With the Stars vet Brooke Burke-Charvet offered her workout wisdom. "I think if you aren't sweating, you're not working out hard enough," she said. "I think you have to work to fatigue; I think you have to work to sweat, you gotta get your heart rate up to blast fat, that's for sure." Brooke is a mom of four in awesome shape—and a fitness trainer to boot. Clearly, whatever routine she does is working for her. But it begs the question: Is your sweat level a good gauge of how hard you're working and how many calories you’re burning?
The experts say no. "How much you sweat doesn't correlate with how fit you are," says Craig Ballantyne, certified trainer and author of Turbulence Training. "Sweat depends on a lot of factors, most notably genetics and ambient temperature. You could do 60 minutes of cardio and perspire a lot, but that doesn't mean you'll be fitter than if you did 10 minutes of less-sweaty interval training." If sweat level really meant something, then workouts that didn't leave you a drippy mess, such as Pilates and yoga, wouldn't be so effective at keeping you toned and fit. "Being in shape means improving health, endurance, and building core muscles, all of which you can do without sweating," says Ballantyne.
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As for the benefits of getting your heart rate up, Ballantyne says pulse-pumping cardio workouts actually don't torch as many calories as you'd think. "Cardio doesn't address strength, leads to overuse injuries, is highly over-rated for fat loss, and doesn't improve total body muscle endurance," he says. In other words, sweating buckets in cycling class or killing it on the treadmill can keep you fit, make you feel great, and burn a reasonable number of calories—but cardio isn't the be-all, end-all for fat burn that Brooke thinks it is.
MORE: Q&A: Which Burns More Calories: Running on the Treadmill or Running on the Elliptical?
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