Cardiac cardio (December 2007)
Make every second count
Blast the boredom of cardio and raise your fitness level with this heart-helping workout
Hitting the treadmill for hours doesn’t appeal to anyone. You need to be cardio-clever, and the best way to do this is to monitor your heart rate. By working with interval training, you can cut the amount of time you spend in the gym, and make every second of exercise count.
Super strategy
For peak cardiovascular benefit, do interval training three times a week. By mixing in sprints with rests, you perform true cardio training. Case in point: a study at the American College of Sports Medicine found intervals improve heart efficiency better than training at a steady, slow pace.
Know your levels
Use this three-day-a-week plan from personal trainer Nate Green. To start, subtract your age from 220. This is an estimate of your maximum heart rate. So if you’re 30, your max heart rate is 190 beats per minute (bpm). Next, calculate both 65 percent and 90 percent of that number – you’ll need to know these to follow the routine.
Attack your intervals
1. Warm up by exercising at an easy pace – about 30 percent of your best effort – for five minutes.
2. Sprint so your heart rate reaches 90 percent of your max heart rate, and maintain for 60 seconds.
3. Rest until your heart rate returns to 65 percent of your max heart rate.
4. Repeat steps two and three for a total of five sprints.
Monitor your slow downs
After your final sprint, time how long it takes your heart rate to drop 25bpm. The faster the better: a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that men whose heart rates took longer than 60 seconds to decrease 25 beats had a 2.2 times greater risk of sudden death from a heart attack.
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