Friday, November 6, 2009

To Cardio or not to Cardio

I never liked cardio. When I was in school I never liked running. I loved my Taekwondo, I loved whatever bit of hockey I played but I balked when it came to running. Then when I started going to the gym I hated the treadmill. My trainer at the time put me on a treadmill and I didn't enjoy it at all. However, I got used to the routine of doing 20-minutes worth of 'intense cardio' before hitting the weights machines.

There have been many times that I've wondered what good does this 'cardio' do to me? I mean, I hit the cross-trainer (the ski thingamajig) for some high speed 'swinging' for 20 minutes and apparently I only burn 150 calories. The equivalent of an ikan bilis bun. Luckily for me, my goal is to gain weight. Can you imagine how disheartening it is for those who slave on the cardio machines for hours on end only to burn a minuscule amount of calories?

And come on, let's be honest here. Raise your hands for those who LOVE their cardio? No? No one? I thought so. There must be a better way of doing cardio (which I guess means the conditioning of your heart) that'll burn off fat as well. And indeed there are ways to do it, without ever having to step on another treadmill or any other kind of cardio machines ever again.

Yup, you guessed it. It's through turbulence training. Check out Craig Ballantyne's article and a sample workout here. And I think you can picture how his brand of cardio provides more variety and burns even more calories than slugging it on the treadmill.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

never enjoy cardio, am bored on that treadmill, i can fall asleep on there, lol, but i have to, or else..go swimming then. I prefer swimming..for cardio.