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There seem to be two major mistakes that people make when it comes to cardio.
The first group of people views cardio as simply a way to burn calories and facilitate weight loss. They take an overly simplistic, reductionist view of cardio.
These are generally the type of people who go to a gym, hop on a treadmill or elliptical to work up a sweat (or join a Zumba or spinning class), and never venture into the weight training section.
The second group of people thinks that cardio is unnecessary because their main goal is to build as much muscle or strength as possible.
These are the stereotypical “meatheads” who think that getting their heart rate up on a set of 5 squats counts as cardio.
Over the course of the last 6 years or so, I’ve been on both sides of the equation.
Side note: I think this is what makes me effective as a health coach - if you’ve made a mistake, I’ve probably already made it!
When I first started consciously seeking to improve my health, I was a cardio bunny.
I gravitated towards those sweaty, intense, 1000-calorie workouts. My daily workout routine consisted of putting on a Fitness Blender workout, huffing and puffing my way through it, and making a “sweat angel” in the lake of perspiration I created.
Not surprisingly, I burned out on this approach within months, and I had to find another approach to exercise.
What I found was the “meathead” camp - just lift weights, they told me, and don’t worry about cardio - it’s not only a waste of time, but it will “kill your gains” and “eat away your muscle.”
In the past year, though, I’ve come to understand that, as with most topics, there is a sensible middle ground between these two extremes.
There is huge value in doing cardio…but its greatest value is NOT the calorie burn.
Peter Attia puts it well in his recent book, Outlive:
“I…consider exercise to be the most potent longevity ‘drug’ in our arsenal, in terms of lifespan and healthspan. The data are unambiguous: exercise not only delays actual death but also prevents both cognitive and physical decline, better than any other intervention.”
I recently interviewed Ryan Baxter, a fellow health coach whom I’ve known for several years, to better understand the many benefits of cardio, and how to implement it in a sustainable way.
The unique benefits of cardio
There are benefits to aerobic training that can’t be attained anywhere else.
This key point is missed by both groups I mentioned at the beginning of the article.
The "cardio bunnies" miss it because they're fixated on burning as many calories as possible. The "meatheads" miss it because they're fixated on strength and muscle mass.
As Ryan put it in our conversation,
“It doesn’t matter what your goal is - your cardiovascular fitness will help you reach that goal.”
If your goal is to put on as much muscle mass as possible, your progress is going to be limited by your work capacity and recovery capacity…which are both dictated by your aerobic fitness.
If your primary goal is simply to age gracefully and be able to meet the demands of daily life, you’re still going to reap huge benefits from doing some cardio. How tired you get from the activities of a typical day is dependent on your aerobic fitness.
If you want to be able to walk your dog, play with your kids or grandkids, take the stairs, or run for a flight…all the more reason to work on your aerobic fitness.
The point is not calorie burn - this is usually negligible, despite what your smartwatch says.
The point is performance…even if your “sport” is life.
Ryan lists several more benefits of cardio:
Getting outside (if you do your cardio outdoors)
Social connections (if you do your cardio with a partner)
Improved sleep
Improved blood pressure and respiratory health
Improved metabolic health markers
Low barrier to entry (making it accessible for even the most sedentary person)
Aerobic training is a type of training that produces many effects over many different systems in the body - something known as a "pleiotropic" intervention. In other words, it provides a huge return on your investment of time and energy.
Types of aerobic training
I’ve already mentioned Peter Attia. These days, his name is virtually synonymous with longevity and exercise.
He’s a huge proponent of cardiovascular training. But if you’ve ever heard him talk about it, you may have come away thinking that you’ll have to quit your day job just to have the time required to follow his protocols.
Attia is great, especially for someone who already has an exercise habit and has lots of time to devote to their training.
But I much prefer Ryan’s approach, especially for someone who is new to training - it’s much more accessible for the average person who has a life outside of their stationary bike.
According to Ryan, there are two types of aerobic training that you need to understand:
Low-intensity/long-duration
High-intensity/short-duration
“Intensity” in this context refers to your level of exertion during the workout.
Low-intensity/long-duration goes by many names: zone 2, LISS (low-intensity steady state), cardiac output. This is doing an activity at a relatively comfortable level of effort - you could still carry on a conversation during the workout.
*Hint: The average person you see going for a jog or doing a Zumba class is well past this level of effort.
The vast majority of your aerobic training - regardless of your fitness level - is going to be in this low-intensity zone.
High-intensity/short-duration is also known as HIIT (high-intensity interval training). With this type of training, you ramp up the intensity level for brief intervals, implementing rest periods between work intervals to allow yourself to recover.
When you’re just starting out, you don’t need to even think about HIIT. When you’re at a point in your training when you can start implementing it, you’ll still do very little of it - remember, this is high-intensity, typically done for short durations (except in special cases, such as training for an obstacle course).
Getting started: establishing a baseline
Ryan suggests testing your initial aerobic fitness level to establish a baseline, in order to gauge your progress.
He likes to put his clients through two separate tests:
the MAF test (to evaluate the “low-intensity” side of the equation)
a V02 max test (to evaluate the “high-intensity” capabilities)
Attia has a helpful analogy here. As he puts it, your fitness level can be thought of as a pyramid.
The base of the pyramid is your capability to sustain low-intensity effort (known as your “aerobic base”). The wider the base, the more stable the pyramid is.
The peak of the pyramid is your V02 max - how well you can hit those higher intensities.
Ryan’s two tests allow you to evaluate how wide the base of the pyramid is, as well as how high your peak is, and your training will allow you to build a more resilient and formidable pyramid that allows you to perform well in whatever activities your life or sport requires of you.
Here’s how to do them:
MAF (Maximum Aerobic Function) test
Choose the modality that you prefer and that suits your current fitness level (might be brisk walking, running, biking, swimming, rowing, cardio machine, etc.)
Find a way to measure your heart rate during the test.
A heart rate monitor with a chest strap will be most accurate here.
Calculate your heart rate threshold using the classic Maffetone formula: 180-[your age]. This is your upper limit - don’t let your heart rate exceed that limit for the duration of the test.
Example: If you're 40 years old, your upper limit will be 140bpm.
For the test, see how far you can go/how much work you can do in 20 minutes without letting your heart rate exceed your threshold.
Example: See how far you can run or bike in 20 minutes while keeping your heart rate under 140 bpm.
You can re-test this every month or two to keep tabs on how your aerobic capacity is improving.
Ryan has a free downloadable guide if you’d like more details on the MAF test.
V02 max test
If you’re just starting with exercise, skip this test and just do the MAF test.
Choose a modality that you feel comfortable going hard with for several minutes.
The main idea is to do anywhere from 8-12 minutes of all-out effort without stopping, and measuring how much work you can do/how far you can go during that time.
Some helpful protocols here are the Cooper run test and the 2K row test.
Low-intensity, long-duration training
The results of these two tests will guide your approach to improving both the width and height of your fitness pyramid.
If you’ve been sedentary or have neglected aerobic training for a long period of time, you’ll be doing solely low-intensity work for a while.
For a beginner to aerobic training, Ryan recommends starting with a single 20-minute session of low-intensity work per week.
You can find time for that, can't you?!
It should be noted that if you have been very sedentary and are a true beginner, it's very possible that all you will need to do is walk. If you find that running, biking, rowing, etc. consistently raises your heart rate over your aerobic threshold, just stick with walking for a while.
As your fitness improves, you’ll gradually add volume (either extending the duration of the workout or adding more workouts throughout the week).
Tracking your heart rate during these sessions is the best way to ensure that you’re staying in a purely aerobic zone and not going too hard. Just like you did during the MAF test, your goal will be to keep your heart rate below your target.
Reminder: The Maffetone formula to find the upper limit of your aerobic threshold is:
180-your age
You can also check in with how you’re feeling post-workout. Low-intensity sessions should leave you feeling fairly fresh and invigorated after the workout. You shouldn’t be anywhere near exhaustion - definitely not “sweat angel” level!
As you progress over time, you should be able to do more work - run farther, walk faster, pedal harder, etc. - while keeping your heart rate in that purely aerobic zone.
But from day to day, depending on your recovery, stress levels, and sleep quality/quantity, you may need to tone down your intensity to keep your heart rate in the appropriate zone.
Ryan made a recent Instagram post that explains this well:
“The key to zone 2 workouts is just accept what your body gives you on that day. Stay true to the limit on intensity, don’t try to come up with reasons to go over your threshold, keep it easy, the reason for the lower intensity is to RELIEVE stress not add more of it.”
As long as you’re feeling good and your fitness is still improving, you can keep adding more low-intensity work until you run out of time during your training week. It’s very difficult to overdo this type of work, assuming you’re keeping the intensity appropriately low.
When to implement high-intensity training
In the cardio world, high-intensity gets all the glory.
So where does HIIT fit into Ryan's training philosophy?
Here are some signs that you're ready to start incorporating HIIT:
You've been doing LISS for a while and your MAF test isn't improving much anymore
You've been consistently adding volume to your LISS training for a while, and you're running into time constraints (because you're not Peter Attia)
Your recovery practices (sleep, stress management, nutrition, etc.) are generally on point
Once you’re ready to add HIIT, keep the work intervals brief and intense, and alternate them with longer rest intervals.
Here's one of Ryan's go-to HIIT protocols when just starting to incorporate it:
Pick a modality that you feel safe and comfortable performing an all-out effort with (sprinting, hard pedaling on a bike, sprint on a rower or airbike, etc.)
Go all-out for 20 seconds, then rest or actively recover for 40-60 seconds
Repeat 3 or 4 times at first, then increase once your fitness improves
You want these sessions to leave you challenged tired, but not exhausted. You're stopping the workout before you get to that point, especially at the beginning.
Once your ability to handle higher intensities improves, you can make your work intervals shorter or longer, adding more intervals to the workout, or adding an extra day of high intensity to your training week.
The key here is not to overdo it. The secret to improving your fitness for the long haul is to do enough work to stimulate adaptation, but not to exceed your capacity to recover.
Intensity is a powerful weapon. Small doses go a long way.
Conclusion
If you care about your performance - whether in sport or in life - the benefits of aerobic training are too powerful to leave on the table.
If you’re not currently doing any type of exercise, just do something. Anything you do will bring improvements - even just going on a walk!
If you’re currently focused on strength training, consider adding low-intensity cardio to the mix, and watch your work capacity, overall energy levels, and recovery from training improve.
Personally, I’ve been including more low-intensity cardio in my training plan for over a year now.
I have an old-school Schwinn Airdyne bike in my garage that I use as my primary cardio method.
3 or 4 mornings per week (before my daughter wakes up), I put on my heart rate monitor and do 20-30 minutes of low-intensity work on the bike.
This is pretty boring (which is why I've never liked doing cardio), but the biggest "hack" I've followed to stay consistent with this is to pair LISS with learning - something I love doing and need to make more time for anyway.
This gets me anywhere from 60-120 minutes of LISS every single week.
If nerding out on fitness or philosophy podcasts doesn't appeal to you, use that time to read a book or watch a show on Netflix. The point is simply to build consistency and turn LISS into an activity you look forward to.
Once I built a consistent LISS habit, I started incorporating HIIT.
One morning per week, I warm up on the Airdyne, then do intervals of 30 seconds of work, followed by 60 seconds of active recovery. I'm currently doing 4-5 intervals, and will add more as my fitness improves.
I use the Morpheus training system to give me targets for the week and track my heart rate during the workouts. It also allows me to measure HRV and resting heart rate - two proxies for aerobic fitness.
Note: Morpheus uses colored zones to indicate intensity levels - blue is low intensity, green is moderate intensity, and red is high intensity.
My resting heart rate (measured by Morpheus) has gone down over time and my HRV has increased over time, indicating that my aerobic fitness is improving. I’ve also noticed better recovery from my strength training workouts - they don’t deplete me as much as they used to. I attribute that at least partly to improved work capacity.
Take it from me (a former cardio bunny-turned-meathead): aerobic training can change your life.
Strength training combined with proper aerobic training is a powerful tool - they provide synergistic benefits that complement one another perfectly.
Ryan is a great resource for learning how to improve your health without losing yourself in a sea of meaningless information. Check out his website, Instagram account, and email newsletter for more.
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