Let’s Make Cardio Fun

The scale doesn't have to be the only way you assess your progress with fitness.

In honor of my fifth half marathon this weekend in Chicago, here’s me in Brooklyn last year.

Good Morning!

If there’s anything I will constantly hammer home as a health and fitness writer, you shouldn’t fall in love with your scale or how much you weigh.

It’s very easy to use the number on your scale to assess progress, but your scale might not tell you things like…

• How much muscle you’ve gained recently

• Your body fat percentage

• How much water weight you’re holding onto

• Your lean muscle mass

These metrics tell a bigger and more complete story of what’s going on in your body and what effect your training is having.

In the past, I’ve talked about the importance of cardio to increase your body’s ability to do work (NOT to burn calories).

But Fran! Most cardio is boring as hell! I hate running, the stairs are dumb, and I’m not buying a peloton.

Okay, fair enough. But if you have access to a gym, you can row, ski, climb a Jacob’s Ladder, or slam the hell out of a medicine ball continuously (it’s more fun than you think, I promise).

All of this stuff is super effective in changing how you look and feel.

But it can be hard to gauge the effectiveness, so you might ask:

“How do I know my cardio is effective?”

When strength training and cardio work together nicely, you undoubtedly add years to your life.

But it might also be hard to tell how much progress you make with cardio if you don’t have a wearable watch or chest strap.

Today I’ll give you some ways to up the ante with your training to help you foolproof your activity and ensure you’re not spinning your wheels.

Nontraditional ways of measuring progress

As excellent as it is, strength training doesn’t have to be incredibly complex.

Train hard, add weight to your lifts every 2-3 weeks, back off when you’re feeling low, and keep 4-5 of your favorite lifts in every routine, regardless of what changes you make.

That’s pretty much it.

But cardio has so many different tools to assess.

What speed should I set the treadmill at?

How do I know when to cycle further?

What walking distance will legitimately improve my health?

These are the amorphous pieces of training that you shouldn't just be winging it on if you want to know you’re actually making progress with your fitness routine.

Proper cardio training increases the size of your blood vessels and the efficiency with which your heart pumps blood, allowing for better oxygen uptake.

In layman’s terms, it ensures your cardiovascular dysfunction risk is low.

While still pumping relatively faster during strength training, your heart isn’t getting the full benefit from the weights. It’s like hair getting shampooed and not conditioned. It’s like a stained rug getting a wet rag but not the stain remover.

It needs cardio.

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Why Should I Do This?

Simply put, you will want to assess your cardio training to progress it as you’d progress with your weight training.

Your body adapts to everything you give to it, so eventually, that 1-mile jog will need to become a 2-mile jog.

That’s not to say that by the end of your life, you will be going for daily 100-mile jogs.

But you’re going to have to be able to have cardio training on a gradient similar to your strength training for the best chance at progress. One day, you’ll cycle 3 miles. Two days later, you’ll walk the Stairmaster for 30 minutes on the “slow” setting.

If you can effectively do this, you’ll better understand how hard it is to push your body.

If you’ve ever had that training session (I’m pretty sure we all have) where everything is so sore you can’t move the next day, it’s likely because you overstepped your boundaries and overtrained.

Good cardio training assures that overtraining never happens and allows for a slow and steady progression to elite health.

Okay, Now How Do I Do this?

The simplest and most repeatable way to assess how difficult your cardio training is and how much it’s improving is how well you do on the Talk Test.

The Talk Test is a tool employed by coaches everywhere that focuses on how effectively someone can hold a conversation before losing their breath during training.

If you have a training partner, you could start a conversation with them on the treadmill or cardio machine of your choice on cardio day and talk until it becomes hard to form words around your breathing.

Keep track of how long this takes and at what intensities you lose the ability to talk. Most decently fit people can speak for the first few minutes of a jog before focusing exclusively on their breath, so the goal would be to push it marginally (about 30-60 seconds) forward until you can talk for a long time.

Another way would be to employ the strength training protocol of RPE, or Rate of Perceived Exertion, to cardio. Using a scale of 1-10, one being incredibly easy and ten painstakingly hard, you can assess how effectively cardio works.

A level 5 intensity on the elliptical might last long or be set to a specific resistance. If that same resistance or time frame over time starts to feel more like a four or even a three on the difficult scale, you can increase intensity accordingly.

RPE can be fickle, though, since it can be hard to assess it when you lack proper sleep, are underfed, or are going through a menstrual cycle.

Other more concrete ways would be to look at your heart rate on a wearable device like a watch or heart rate monitor or pay attention to your mental acuity throughout the day after a workout.

If you really want to make cardio FUN, make it a game: Try to time your intervals around the BPM of your favorite song, or keep track of your best times on a certain machine and aim to beat those times in the next session.

Using certain heart rate thresholds (120-140 beats per minute is the sweet-spot range) to achieve a sweat is the best way to ensure you’re getting the most out of cardio.

Also, cognitive ability tends to increase after good cardio sessions. By seeing how quickly you accomplish tasks at work or even solve puzzles on your phone, you can gauge the effectiveness of your sweat sessions.