Cardio stinks. Let’s just put that out there. It’s just no fun. You’ll have the occasional guru/ freak/ torture fan that will enjoy climbing on the treadmill for hours, but let’s face it; he must be a few grams shorts of a full protein shake… if you catch my drift. Cardio is hard, boring, tiring, and generally, not something most of us enjoy. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

One hour a week. That’s all it takes to get great cardio results. And this isn’t some stale commercial about a product you can buy for “just 3 easy payments of…” This is legitimate, very hard, yet very rewarding cardio training. It takes three days a week you do your cardio. Eighteen minutes each time. That’s a total of 54 minutes a week. And it will give you the cardiovascular benefits of three 45-minute routines. Take a breath…

When you do a 45-minute cardio session, you do not run full speed for 45 minutes. You’ll likely ramp up with ten minutes of walking, followed by twenty minutes of “real” hard cardio. You’ll follow it up with five minutes of super-intense cardio, and then end the session with a nice 10-minute gradual cool down. It’s the normal treadmill/elliptical cycle, and you see it every day in every gym in America.

The problem is, your body’s heartbeat is only accelerated to levels where you gain the most cardiovascular and fat-burning benefits, for the middle 25 minutes of that cardio routine, if that. You cannot go “all out” – and have heart doing max pumping capacity – for the entire 45 minutes. So, you waste time prancing around it, before taking the bull by the horns and knocking out the hard work.

Why not handle cardio the same way you handle weight training, plus all other things in life – in the most effective and efficient way possible? Ladies and gentleman, I give you, “interval training”.

It’s simple. And once you try it, you’ll never look back to “old cardio” again. Get on the treadmill. Set that timer so you can watch the seconds tick down, and so you can increase the speed easily. You are going to alternate slow walking minutes, with fast running minutes, for the next 18 minutes. That’s it. Your heart, lungs, and the rest of your body will be tricked into believing you’re doing a full routine because your heart rate and breathing will never have a change to return to normal levels. Let’s get started.

Minute 1 (:00 thru: 59) – You walk slowly, at around 2 mph.
Minute 2 (1:00 thru 1:59) – You increase the speed to 5 mph.
Minute 3 (2:00 thru 2:59) – You walk slowly again, at around 2 mph
Minute 5 (3:00 thru 3:59) – You increase the speed to 5 mph.

This continues until you have completed minute 18. This will be nine slow walks, alternated with nine fast runs. Your heart rate will remain constantly high the entire time, and you’ll fulfill your maximum cardio goals for the day with minimum effort. Give it a shot!