Running has never been my thing. Cardio has always been particularly difficult for me. I love to lift, but doing sustained cardiorespiratory conditioning for any length of time has been particularly torturous to me. The good news is, in personal training circles, there is a movement that states long, extended bouts of cardio are not the best or most efficient way to lose fat and may even be detrimental to your joints, connective tissues, and ability to build and maintain lean body mass (i.e., muscle). I have researched this thoroughly over the past 4 or so years, and it makes sound scientific sense. Instead of marathon cardio sessions, the research suggests that shorter, more intense bouts of cardio done interval style elicit more fat loss and are just as effective for cardiovascular conditioning. High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is the process of cycling your cadence from, say, a brisk walking pace to a jog or run for an interval of 30-90 seconds. Then, you bring it back down to the walking pace. You do this for a period of no longer than 20 minutes.
Since I have such an aversion to cardio (probably more psychological than anything), for the first 2 months or so of my training, I only did very short cardio sessions, non-interval style to let both my body and brain get acclimated.
So, I was doing a short cardio session the other day, and I cranked up the speed and ran for a few minutes. I didn’t HIIT verbatim, but it was a start for me. I’m going to look to become more vigilant about doing my cardio in true HIIT fashion, and I should begin to see the fat melting off.
Slow and steady wins the race.
