With that in mind, I'm finding that my cardio workouts have sort of taken a back seat to weight training. This trend is actually sort of surprising to me- I usually hate weight training. But I guess now I'm paying more attention to it and realizing that, suddenly, I've spent an hour on legs and hips and I'm hungry and my cat is getting very lonely at home alone and I should probably go now.
I think my weight training time will start to go down a little as I get more comfortable with the levers and pulleys and incline benches and the meatheads perpetually attached to them, so maybe I'll be able to squeeze in some more cardio in the near future. Also, once the weather warms up, I can definitely do some morning track workouts like I did with Quisty last year.
BUT- all this to say that I'm still having trouble planning weekly cardio. I have access to everything I could possibly need at this point, but I'm just not sure how to make efficient use of my time. So I'm curious as to what others are doing/would recommend in terms of what to do, how often to do it, for how long, etc. I know Erin was sort of looking at the following after meeting with her trainer:
Do cardio 3-4 times a week – 2-3 times do intervals before or after strength, plus 1 long run/other cross-training activity such as running, jump ropes (3 sets of 100, 1-leg 2 sets of 50), spin class, racquetball. Make sure that you have at least 4-7 intervals of whatever intensity/speed you are doing.
What do you guys consider "long"? Longer than 30 minutes? Longer than an hour? Do you really think the jumping program is enough cardio (whatever that means)? I have questions! Who has answers?
2 comments:
I'm about to start doing some cardio. I'm going to do it after resistance training, up to 3 times a week. I'm going to do different intervals than the ones we did before. I read about it on some blog, 30 seconds on, 60 seconds off. Repeat 4-12 times (depending on fitness level). It doesn't take very long and you can do it on a stationary bike easily. I, personally, won't be doing any sustained cardio for longer than 15 minutes because you're not working your fast twitch muscles and I can work on speed and endurance at the same time with intervals, and it takes way less time than long runs. I also worry about long runs converting fast twitch to slow twitch fibers which rob you of power and speed. Once a week probably isn't that big a deal if it's not too long, but I don't really see the point. Everything I've read indicates that intervals are better than long cardio sessions in pretty much every way.
I'll move to the tabata intervals later on.
I've been planning my workouts around travel and a marathon training schedule... so I tend to do a really long run on Sun, weights if anything on Mon, a 3 to 6 mile run at about 10 minutes/mile on the treadmill on Tues and Wed plus weights, nothing on Thurs, another run on Fri, and women's league and team workouts on Sat. I'm slowly incorporating plyo work by doing a few sets of 100 jump ropes at the end of weight sessions. I'm not sure if Wood would say I'm doing the perfect ultimate workout, but my plan is to really build strength and endurance until the marathon (end of March) and then transition into more interval/plyo/explosiveness based work as the season grows closer.
My trick to actually getting in all that cardio (besides being out of town and having not much to do half the week) is doing it first and using free weights for the majority of my weight training - less waiting in line makes for a much quicker workout.
Wood can feel free to critique my technique, but that's the schedule I've been trying to stick to at least.
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