Cardio Tips

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Here are a few tips for getting the most out of your cardio. We are going to talk about the three most common pieces of cardio gear, the bike, treadmill and elliptical trainer.

The exercise bike is a great tool for helping you loose weight, and has great long term weight loss benifits because it helps to build lean muscle mass in your legs! When using the bike, adjust the seat so that one of your legs can extend strait down when the pedals are at the bottom of the rotation. When you select your program on the bike choose random or hill. Doing a manual or flat program will not get you results as fast. Random and hill have the benifits of being similar to real life terrain. I personally prefer random for this reason.

Using a treadmill is also good, and you don't even have to run! Good treadmills will let you set an incline, where the fron of the treadmill will lift up simulating walking up a hill. 30 minutes of this at a brisk pace is a good workout. You also want to choose an interval program that will vary the height and the speed. But pay attention to the display, you don't want to be watching TV and fall off.

The elliptical trainer is fairly new to the cardio world and is not as respected by personal trainers as the bike or treadmil. This is due in part to the elliptical trainer not simulating a real world enviroment. And thus considering it useless. I still think you can get a good workout from one. Set the elliptical to an random or hill program and go nuts.

With a cardio program, you need to keep changing it up. You can do this by adding a minute to your time everyday or add another level of difficulty (resistance) every week or so.