Cardio exercises are a must when it comes to being fit or shedding fat, but that does not mean you do not have options. Cardio does a lot for your health in general, it increases your metabolism, burns fat, makes your heart and blood vessels healthier, decreases your blood pressure, increases your stamina, improves your sex life and the list goes on.
With all that I have stated doing the same thing day in
day out might bore you so much that you could forget the benefits of cardio, so I'm going to give you other alternative ways to do your cardio that are not the traditional, steady pace jogging or cycling that everyone associates with cardio.
What most people think is that the longer you do an activity such as jogging the more you will get out of the workout, which is not true but may be true if you are talking about steady pace cardio. Doing something like jogging for a long distance is also time consuming and if you do too much cardio or too long of a distance you might find that it holds you back in terms of muscle gain, if that is what you are after.
How to get creative with your cardio:
First thing you can try is to change your traditional cardio workouts into more fast paced, interval sessions. What I mean is you can train in short intense intervals by timing yourself on a bike or treadmill and increasing the intensity in each interval. This would not require a lot of time and you would have one hell of a workout. In fact you will be burning calories long after you have worked out, but your time spent working out would be less than if you did the traditional steady pace stuff.
You could try doing sprints which is another form of interval training, running between cones. Taking short breaks and doing it again and increasing the distance and trying to run as fast as possible, short break again increasing the distance a little and go at it hard again, you get the idea. This would be a short intense and fun workout, obviously its short because it takes more effort and we can't sprint for long distances or long periods of time. The cool thing with sprints is that you get the benefits of traditional cardio and you built lean muscular legs, you have noticed that sprinters are jacked compared to long distance runners.
Other cardio exercises you could try includes martial art such as MMA, Kick boxing, karate etc. You could also play sports if you have time such as soccer, tennis, hockey or any other high activity sport. You could try swimming if you love the water; swimming is one of the better forms of cardio since it has less impact on your body and joints because the water supports your body weight.
There are a lot of alternatives to traditional cardio, it's up to you to find the ones that you like best, most of them are just fun and most people do not even know they are doing a cardio exercise. Just think of dancers they do cardio and have fun the same time. So go out there and find what works for you, no more excuses and no more boring cardio sessions.
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