FITNESS
BY JUSTIN GRINNELL
What’s the best cardio? The answer is simple: It’s up to you!
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here are many ways to improve your cardiovascular fitness. While there is a great debate among fitness professionals on which method works best, the simple answer is, they all work. It really comes down to each person’s individual goals. When training for a certain sport, there will be specific ways that you should perform certain cardiovascular conditioning routines. For instance, if you are a soccer player, you will need an ample amount of endurance to stay strong during the entire match. So, it makes sense that you would primarily train for endurance. However, soccer players will also benefit from higher intensity bouts of cardiovascular training such as sprints and high intensity interval training (HIIT). There are many times throughout the match when a soccer player will need to sprint hard and fast. In sports that require you to work hard for 5-15 second bouts, such as tennis, you will need to have a fast and powerful output for a brief period of time. However, as a tennis player, you will also need to be able to perform this over and over again for the entire match. So, ample endurance work will also be beneficial to be able to stay fresh and strong for a long-lasting match, along with HIIT-type training methods. In this article, I am going to focus more on the general fitness enthusiast looking to improve their overall fitness and body composition. While many general fitness enthusiasts focus on HIIT type workouts, they should also focus on two other types of workouts to improve overall fitness and fat loss. One thing to note on fat loss: there is not a definite answer to what works best. Some studies show that HIIT works best for fat loss while some studies show that steady-state cardio (low intensity, long duration) works best at burning fat and preserving muscle tissue. Some people will respond to one better than the other but there is no one-way to do it. The best fat loss program is the one you stick with, and those who blend various types of cardiovascular routines into their program will most likely see more sustained and There’s more! See cardio on page 18
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