Cardiovascular fitness activities like Cardio Tennis more rapidly burn calories, decreasing your likelihood of storing excess fat and helping you look and feel great.

When it comes to calories, it’s a very simple equation. If you don’t burn off as many calories as you are consuming, you will gain weight.

Yet it’s an equation that many Australians are not heeding. As a nation we’re heavier than we’ve ever been, a combination of consuming more high-energy foods and drinks, soaring food portions, and increasingly sedentary lifestyles.

One way to begin burning those calories and get on the path to a healthier lifestyle is to make some dietary changes – cutting out the junk food and fizzy drinks and watching how much you eat is a good start. Another option is exercise.

Nathan Martin of Energise Health Management says certain types of physical activity will be more effective at burning calories than others.

“If someone was to sprint as fast as they could for 100 metres they would use a different energy system which is a different source of fuel, but the intensity that most people would be working at through cardio fitness exercise, they will be burning calories as a source of fuel,” he says.

“I think Cardio Tennis would burn a lot of calories compared with other workouts.”

Martin has worked as a trainer for Australian tennis stars Lleyton Hewitt and Casey Dellacqua and WTA champions Martina Navratilova and Svetlana Kuznetsova. He says that ideally, you should be looking to take part in two to three Cardio Tennis sessions per week for maximum benefit, and that the balanced nature of Cardio Tennis – a strong focus on cardiovascular fitness while also including elements such as strength exercises – helps it to be an effective calorie-burning activity.

“You need to always balance things out,” he says.

“If you get stronger you’re going to gain a little bit of lean muscle mass which is also going to help increase your metabolism, which is basically what’s burning calories at the end of the day.”

Even if you’re just starting out on the exercise front and are not as fit as you might like, there are always options for building up your fitness to the point where you get the maximum calorie-burning effect.

“If you’ve got someone who is 10 to 15 kilos overweight, you would normally start them off doing more low-intensity exercise until they can develop the correct movement pattern … and then you can start to increase the intensity,” Martin says.

“Higher intensity exercise will generally go for a shorter period of time … (with) 30 minutes of higher intensity exercise you can potentially burn off more calories than you would in walking for an hour.”

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