How to do cardio:
There are two ways to do cardio depending on the goal
you wish to achieve. If you wish to strengthen your heart and increase
your aerobic capacity you have to do very high intensity cardio for short
bursts. If you with to lose weight you must do medium intensity cardio for
longer periods.
We could go into the physiology of why this is the case,
but most people reading this don't care why this is true, they just want to lose
weight. So since we like to keep fitness straightforward and easy to
understand, we will just say that it is better for most people to do medium
intensity cardio for longer periods of time.
Intensity:
What do we mean by medium intensity? Well we could tell you how to find your heart rate and have you measure intensity that way, but that is complicated. In the interest of simplicty we recomend that you determine for yourself what constitutes medium intensity. As a rule of thumb, if you can talk to the person next to you comfortably you are probably not pushing yourself hard enough, and if you are gasping for breath you are probably working too hard. The best way is to find something in between.
Duration:
How long should you do cardio workouts? Well the simple anwser is that anything is better than nothing. 10 minutes of light walking beats 10 hours of watching TV. Still, in order to see results you must give your body something it is not used to, and 10 minutes of walking will not accomplish that. We recomend 20 to 30 minutes of medium intensity cardio three times per week. Do cardio on the days you do NOT lift weights. So if you lift weights Monday - Wednesday - Friday, you would do cardio Tuesday - Thursday - Sunday. For a comprehensive free weightlifting program, visit our sister site at www.naturalsizeandstrength.com.