Another "Say No To Cardio" Blog Post

If you have spent 5 minutes on fitness sites out there....you are bound to come across at least one article/blog/banner/subliminal message stating that most cardio is almost useless and there are 1001 better ways to spend your time.

While Im no expert...i must agree 101% with the statement that you should just say "no to slow boring cardio". Its a waste of you time and energy...and these are things that most people dont have a lot of to waste. So whats the alternative? What should you be doing instead. Well thats what I wanted to discuss,

I must admit...in the past I LOVED CARDIO! Not for the "weight loss"...but more for the fact that it cleared my mind after a hard day in the office. And so for a long time...i would do 3-4 cardio sessions per week. 3-4 sessions of what most people classify as "slow boring cardio". Typically i would do a 6-8 run in about 30-40 minutes...with no incline.

But over time...i realised a couple of things:

1. I wasnt really toning up
2. I wasnt really improving in terms of distance/speed

So with a bit of a push from my trainer...i started to look at HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training). This was usually a session of 8 x 1minute hill sprints with 1 min recovery in between. After my first session...I felt like i was dead!  At that time I was still doing the "slow boring cardio" as well. But I kept at the HIIT...and you know what!? My cardio performances were improving...considerably! I was able to run faster for longer periods of time with more incline. I started looking into HIIT more and more...trying different workouts....and slowly my "slow boring" cardio sessions were replaced with either HIIT sessions or weights sessions.

Now at about this time...I started to really take a serious look at the workouts i was doing in the weight room and realised that there was also problems here too (but thats for another post). To cut the story short for now...I started to structure my weights session much better also.

Over a short period my body fat dropped...considerably. I found I was much more toned and performing better all over. At this point I started to seriously read up on why HIIT was so much better and why "slow boring" cardio gave such limited results. Suffice to say that when I started to read up on the two methods of cardio, and what effect they had on the body... I could plainly see that HIIT was definitely the way to go.

Basically a HIIT session is shorter than a regular cardio session...but in a HIIT session you will always have your heartrate up much higher than you ever would in a regular session. HIIT sessions will hurt, your mind will be constantly telling you to stop/slow down/go lie down in the change rooms...but you have to push on because its then you are getting the awesome results! The only negative to HIIT is you will probably get a few strange looks from the other people doing their boring cardio...but if thats all you need to worry about...then you will be fine!

When I was doing regular cardio, my body fat % was around 12%, after I was doing HIIT for a period of time, my body fat % was down to 9%

Im going to make this a two part post...here I have just talked about my experiences, but in the next post about cadio, I will drill more down in to the reasons why HIIT cardio is so beneficial from a scientific perspective!