A Guide to Cardio

 

The last blog post introduced the idea of weight training and how to structure your workouts to achieve your goals. Weight training’s primary purpose is to maintain or increase muscle mass, however the subject of today’s blog will cover cardiovascular training which will serve to aide in weight loss by increasing your caloric needs.

            Note: From now on I’ll refer to cardiovascular training as “cardio” for the readers’ sake.

Aside from assisting in weight loss, cardio is a great tool to maintain overall bodily health as well as improving your ability to move around without exerting as much effort. For me, If I can climb a couple flights of stairs without being out of breath, I’m winning.

Like every other topic we’ve covered so far, your cardio frequency and intensity will depend on your goals and preferences. If you want to gain weight, cardio will be counterproductive as it will require you to eat more, so I’d recommend doing no more than 20-30 minutes per week so that you can stay in shape without burning too many calories.

If your goal is to reduce your body weight, cardio is a great tool to assist your diet. It’s smart to remember that no matter how much cardio you do, you can still gain weight if you eat too much.

With that being said, generally we want to preform cardio at what I like to call a conversational intensity. This is when you could have a conversation while you’re preforming the activity.) The reason cardio is preformed at this intensity is because it imparts little stress on your body, and can be done for long periods of time with multiple sessions per week.

 

Now that we’ve covered how difficult your cardio should be, we can now talk about how much you should preform with weight loss in mind. This really comes down to how much cardio you’re comfortable with, however, I’d recommend getting no less than 30 minutes in per week.

(I also wouldn’t recommend anything extreme like, five hours)

Finally, lets talk about how to do your cardio. My preferred method is walking on a treadmill set to a high incline because it’s easy on the joints and burns more calories than walking on a flat surface. Walking is still a great option because it can be done anywhere, anytime and you can spend time outside! Other great options are things like the Stairmaster and stationary bike. I’d be cautious of running since some trainees can accumulate joint pain with enough running.

 

Next session we will continue our discussion by talking about supplementation.