Get creative with your cardio at home or at the gym

Get creative with your cardio at home or at the gym

Cardio exercise is a must when it comes to getting fit or losing fat, but that doesn't mean you don't have options. Cardio does a lot for your health in general, it increases your metabolism, burns fat, makes your heart and blood vessels healthier, lowers your blood pressure, increases your endurance, improves your sex life and the list goes on.

With everything I've said, you might get so bored doing the same thing day after day that you might forget about the benefits of cardio. That's why I'm going to give you other alternative ways to do your cardio that aren't the traditional, steady pace jogging or cycling that everyone associates with cardio.

What most people think is that the longer you do an activity like jogging, the more you get out of the workout, which isn't true, but can be true when you're talking about constant pace cardio. Doing something like jogging over a long distance is also time consuming. If you do too much cardio or too long a distance, you may find that it holds you back in terms of building muscle if that's what you're looking for.

Here's how to get creative with your cardio:

The first thing you can try is converting your traditional cardio workouts into faster interval sessions. I mean, you can train in short, intense intervals by competing on a bike or treadmill and increasing the intensity in each interval. This wouldn't take much time and you'd have a damn good workout. In fact, you will burn calories long after you have exercised, but your time spent exercising would be less than if you had done the traditional stuff at a steady pace.

You could try doing sprints, another form of interval training between bowling pins. Take short breaks and do it again and increase the distance and try to run as fast as possible. Take a short break, increase the distance a little and try again. You have the idea. This would be a short intense and fun workout, obviously it is short because it requires more effort and we cannot sprint for long distances or long periods of time. The cool thing about sprints is that you reap the benefits of traditional cardio and build lean, muscular legs. They found that sprinters are jacked compared to distance runners.

Other cardio exercises you can try are martial arts like MMA, kickboxing, karate, etc. You can also do sports if you have time like 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 because it has less impact on your body and joints since the water supports your body weight.

There are many alternatives to traditional cardio. It's up to you to find the ones you like the most. Most are just fun and most people don't even know they are doing cardio exercises. Just think of dancers doing cardio and having fun at the same time. So get out there and find what works for you, no more excuses and no more boring cardio sessions.

Inspired by Eugene Madondo