Unlocking Cardio Joy: From Metcon to Sports, Find Your Fitness Passion
You can do different types of training methods inside and outside the gym. You can do resistance training, lifting weights or moving something that offers resistance, callisthenics, lifting and controlling your body through a range of movements, mobility, working on improving the range of motion available at joints, cardio, aiming to work at a higher heart rate zone and challenge the heart and lungs.
I have never been a big fan of cardio training in the gym space as I find it does not keep me engaged, and you may feel the same. However, there are different ways to get your cardio in and enjoy it to help improve your fitness.
What does it mean to be fit?
Being fit is described as being able to meet the demands of your environment. A sumo wrestler would be classed as fit for their sporting demands. However, with everyday people like yourself and me, our environments have different requirements.
You need to be able to perform everyday tasks comfortably, whether lifting heavy boxes, carrying the shopping from the car in one trip, walking up the stairs or to the train station, and not being out of breath.
Building muscle is great, but you need to have a system that will be able to cope with the increase in size and be able to supply blood, oxygen, and nutrients around the body without placing more stress on it, which emphasises the need for you to take part in some form of cardio within the week.
There are different types of cardio you can do.
Steady-state cardio
Interval training
Metabolic conditioning
Sports
Steady-State Cardio
Steady-state cardio can also be called endurance training, and it is most likely the first form of cardio you think of when you want to improve your fitness.
This type of cardio is focused on long durations of continuous work, usually a minimum time of 20 minutes. Some of the most common forms of steady-state cardio are done on a treadmill or an outdoor run like the couch to 5k initiative.
Steady-state cardio can be an excellent tool for improving their baseline health and fitness levels. It is easy to do and not too taxing on the body. The main focus should be to work consistently at a set pace/heart rate throughout the duration.
Examples:
20-40 min jog on treadmill @70-80% running speed
5-10k run outside
Bike ride in the gym, maintaining 90-110 RPM (depending on ability)
Interval Training
Interval training is much more demanding not only on the heart and lungs but also on the muscles. Interval training focuses on periods of intense work followed by rest. This is repeated for a specific amount of sets.
Interval training is an option I recommend for most of my online coaching clients as it is a good option for those who get bored quickly when doing cardio and offers various movements and training intensities. Interval training focuses on pushing the heart rate higher towards the max heart rate zone as you work for shorter periods than steady state.
If you participate in sport, either at a competitive or a recreational level, then interval training would be the best cardio option. Most sports follow a start-stop nature where you work hard for some time and then have another period of rest.
A key thing to remember with interval training is that the best way to make it effective is by focusing on the work: rest ratio. If you are new to interval training, then I recommend making the work: rest ratio equal, and as you progress, you can start to complete the work periods longer and the rest periods shorter.
When planning to structure your session, you should focus on keeping movement quality high. This is done by having rest periods. For example, if you have designed the session to be 30 seconds on and 30 seconds off for eight rounds, you should place a 90-second- 120-second rest period before you repeat the session. This gives you time to catch your breath and recover before going again.
Examples (Work: Rest) :
Metabolic Conditioning
Metabolic conditioning (metcon) shares a similar style to interval training. However, metcon can also focus on building your endurance capabilities. When delivering metcon sessions, I focus on resistance training, using light to moderately heavy weights to challenge the muscles and the cardiovascular system.
Metcon tends to have a full-body focus. Similar to interval training, the way to make the session more endurance or anaerobic (no oxygen, high heart rate) focus is by manipulating the timings of the sessions.
Centre the session around a piece of kit, whether a barbell, dumbbell, kettlebell, or body weight.
Examples
Complexes (barbell, dumbbell, kettlebell)
Chipper- a set of exercises that you complete in order. 50 squats, 50 push-ups, 100 two-foot skips, 70 med ball slams
EMOM- Every Minute On the Minute. Complete the movements before the minute ends and restart when the timer hits a minute. Repeat for your desired amount of time. Ten squat jumps, 10 star jumps x 6 mins
Sports
When I come across online coaching members who prefer to get their cardio training outside of the gym, the best way to do that is by participating in sports. You do not have to compete at a high level to reap the physical benefits.
Playing sports is a great way to improve your cardiac fitness because you are challenging the heart and lungs in a manner you enjoy, making it feel less like a task. From my experience, most people who participate in sports gain motivation to improve their cardio outside of the sport via the gym to perform better and last longer.
I mentioned earlier that playing sports has similar attributes to interval training due to the start-stop nature, and it can also share metcon characteristics as there is a full body element in most sports (excluding sports where you are seated).
It does not have to be anything intense; it could be as simple as going down to the park 1-2x a week to play a game of basketball, football, or tennis or heading down to your local leisure centre to use the facilities there. Along with the physical benefits, you also gain psychosocial benefits, but that is worth a whole article on its own.
Conclusion
There are many ways to improve your cardiac fitness; some people prefer one method over the other. As long as you do this as consistently as you can and look to improve your performance each time you do it, the benefits will be worthwhile.
The best means to help track your progress would be through using a heart rate monitor. With this, you can also track your resting heart rate, working heart rate, and recovery heart rate. You do not have to monitor all these metrics, but you can look at the following:
Decrease in resting heart rate
Duration in a specific heart rate zone or increase in max heart rate
How quickly your heart rate gets back to its resting state
Cardio does not have to be a task, and you should choose the method that you find most enjoyable, as that will mean you are more likely to stick to it in the long run.
Call To Action
Set yourself a goal out of the three listed above, as they can all be monitored through a heart rate monitor. Store the information either on an app or on a sheet and do this for eight weeks. After the eight weeks, look at the difference statistically and how you physically feel.
You can repeat this, but focus on a different set of metrics next time, and you can continue to do this going forward.
I hope this helped.
Till next time,
Myles
