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People respond to various types of routines differently but a large part of losing weight has to do with the person’s diet. Understanding that up front, I would say it really doesn’t matter if you break your cardio up into two separate sessions. Ultimately, it depends on your goals. How much weight do you want to lose? What is your current body fat percentage? If you’re short for time and have to break your cardio up into two separate sessions I would recommend you exercise for more than 20 minutes; it takes your body a few minutes to get warmed up and into a fat burning mode, so-to-speak. 30 minutes should be the minimum for effectiveness.

You’ll also hear there are two separate zones to perform cardio in: 1) fat burning and 2) cardio. I’ll try to explain this in terms that are easy to understand. Let’s say you perform cardio in the fat burning zone one day for 30 minutes. In those 30 minutes you burn a total of 200 calories. Approximately 50% of those calories will be from fat, approximately 100 calories. Let’s say the next day you perform cardio in the cardio zone for 30 minutes. In those 30 minutes you burn 400 calories. In the cardio zone approximately 40% of those calories will be from fat so in this case it will be approximately 160 calories. Therefore, more calories will have been burned from fat in the cardio zone than in the fat burning zone. It makes more sense to perform cardio in the cardio zone for maximum fat burning and cardiovascular health.

In the fat burning zone there is a larger percentage of fat burned relative to the total calories. The cardio zone burns more total calories thus burning more fat.