Cardio
Good old cardio. I hate it. Always have. Personal trainers / coaches are divided as to how effective it is in helping one reach their goals with regards to shedding fat. Myself, I’ve always wanted to be of the opinion that you don’t need cardio to get your body into great shape.
See, my biased opinion was formed waaaay back when I was 10 years old, in the fifth grade. I had just moved from Canada to America at this point, and I ended up going to Longfellow Elementary School in Wheaton. One noticeable difference was P.E. class – we had to run on some days. Never really did that in Canada, and if I did, it was to sprint short distances.
So they tell me, look kid, you’re going to run the mile, and we’re going to time it, and I’m thinking, one mile is a lot, but I bet I can apply my sprinter’s mentality to this run and I should be fine. As you can see, I wasn’t too bright a kid. So on the first lap, I took off like a shot and left everyone in the dust, but then, I had to stop, and walk. And walk. And walk. 11 and a half minutes later, the mile was over, and I knew one thing for sure – I hated running, and I hated running long distances.
Did I ever get better? I did. In my sophomore year of high school, I ran the mile in 5:42. Don’t know how. Don’t know why. Never did it again after that.
Anyway, the moral of the story being, I’ve had a long bias against cardio, and I really hate running. Which is great, because I don’t need to run long distances to achieve my goals. What I need is intensity at a specific heart rate. So what I do here is, I jump on the treadmill, set it to my age, weight, and goals, and then tell the thing to keep it so that my heartrate is always 135 during the cardio workout, and I keep the speed at 4.0 miles / hour. This is a brisk pace, and the machine will increase or decrease the incline of the treadmill to either raise or lower my heart rate and keep it at 135.
It’s very awesome – I’ve doing 20 minutes on the treadmill after my lifting workouts, and on off days from lifting, I do one hour on the treadmill at a heart rate of 135 as well. On my off lifting days, I burn somewhere on the order of 550 – 700 calories which feels great. And, I can see the difference.
So yes, I’m now doing some form of cardio 6 days a week, but not the running kind. More like the fast walking kind, and it works.
I started slowly, with a heart rate of about 125 and then progressively increased until I got it to 135. Feels good everytime I get one of those cardio sessions done. So would I recommend it? Yes, but remember to start slowly and build up to higher levels, and find a way to increase the difficulty (add weights to your body, increase the distance, or the speed at which you go).
