Why do cardio? I have Reasons:
1. It improves mood. Seriously. My spin bike is actually called The Magic Mood-Fixing Machine. Science says that you will feel better after.
2. It makes your brain work better.
3. It burns calories.
4. It reduces stress. Remember this when your house is full of contentious relatives. Going for a walk is way better than ending up in jail for assault.
So: yesterday we took a look at where we are in our cardio fitness. If we’re not quite where we’d like to be, I have good news: we can make a good amount of progress by the end of the year.
Of course, all good news has a dark side. You have to do stuff. I’m going to use walking as my example, but this system works for whatever kind of cardio we happen to like. Walking is just accessible to most folks and doesn’t require any stuff besides good shoes.
When we start, we want to build consistency more than anything else. Cardio is a habit. It thrives on daily or near-daily feeding. In the first week, you want to make a stupid-easy goal that you can do for six days in a row. Depending on where we’re starting from, this can mean anything from walking around the block slowly one time to spending half an hour walking. The key thing is that we have to do it six days in a row. That last day, we get a rest.
The second week, we just add a little more: one interval. If our first week was a five minute walk, our second week is two minutes of walking at regular pace, one minute going faster, and two minutes of walking at regular pace. Or, if we’re going around the block, the first two sides are at regular pace, the third side is faster, and the last side is back to regular.
After that, we add a little more time or distance or another interval each week. (It’s easier to add intervals when we’ve already built up a little more time or distance.) The overarching goal remains consistency. This has to feel manageable.
What if it isn’t? I got you. Let’s say you miss a day. OK: restart the clock. You need six days in a row.
Let’s say that week one goes great and week two is OK, but week three is suddenly harder than you could possibly imagine. Hang out at the week two level until you are ready to progress. No one is watching. You can take as much time as you need.
Tomorrow: some motivation for the process.
News flash from Captain Obvious: it’s December and that means we’re coming up on the end of the year. That means we have an opportunity to reflect on where we are and what we’ve done over the last year and maybe also an opportunity to choose some gifts for ourselves for 2026. Over the course of the month, I’ll talk about a bunch of different things we might want to evaluate and celebrate. This first week, I’m going to talk about cardio.
Cardio exercise is not the main focus of my work with my clients for the very good reason that it’s dumb to pay me to watch cardio. Of course, the kind of workouts I design do get people’s heart rates up and clients will be getting some cardio intervals built in to their weight workout. It’s just not the main goal.
Ideally, the time my clients spend with me working out is not the entirety of their workout time. I sincerely hope they are getting in some cardio and maybe more weights when they’re on their own.
Cardio fitness is one of the things that first pops into mind when folks think about what being fit means to them. We all know what it’s like to get to the top of a long hill feeling out of breath and unclear on our reason for continuing to live and it’s not a good feeling. We all like to feel like our hearts and lungs are up to whatever it is we have in mind.
There are actual assessments of cardio fitness. (If you want one, let’s talk.) But most of us know when we’re at the level we’d like to be. Take a minute or two and think: are you where you want to be?
If so: good on you. If not, I have some suggestions tomorrow.
This workout is a flexible one. Folks who want more challenge can add the back lunge to the step ups or swap renegade rows for the regular ones. If jumping is not appropriate, folks can still get their rotational work done with curtsies. And plain lateral raises are always available for those who don’t want to be on hands and knees. Whatever folks choose, aim for three rounds.
step ups | 30 |
rows | 20 |
kickbacks | 10 |
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suitcase swings | 30 |
bench press | 20 |
quadruped lateral raise | 10 |
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skater jump/curtsy | 30 |
flies | 20 |
pretty princesses | 10 |
Things I am grateful for, for real.
1. Awesome family and friends.
2. Eggs.
3. Murder mysteries.
4. Cardio exercise, especially spin and swimming.
5. Sweaters.
Obviously not an exhaustive list. What’s on yours?
I have a Secret Weapon that helps with gratitude practice. I learned it from the amazing and talented Bronwyn Emery of Live. Write. Be.
(This is a plug for Bronwyn and her coaching services. She is an awesome and talented person with a gift for drawing good work out of people who write. Check out what she has to offer here.)
If gratitude practice in the classical sense doesn’t work, may I recommend What Went Well and Why. Here’s how it works. Every day, you notice three things that went well and you write them down and then you also write down why they went well. The trick is that you have to say what you did to make that thing go well.
Let me give an example. Let’s say you notice that you had a fabulous workout. That went well. When it comes to why, you don’t get to say it was because your trainer is amazing. You need to look at what you did and maybe you’ll write that it went well because you actually showed up instead of crawling back in bed or because you have finally figured out how to breathe and do pushups at the same time or because you didn’t let how mad you were at your boss derail you, but in fact used the rage as power.
What I like about this practice is that not only does it train us to notice the good stuff like gratitude does, but it also builds a sense of agency in us. Things went well and it wasn’t all blind luck or other people being fabulous, but rather because we did stuff.
Try it!
For Reasons, I tend to resist gratitude practice.
By Reasons, I mean that gratitude practice doesn’t play particularly well with my depression. The Monster gets gleeful when I look around at my life and all the many blessings I have because he gets to point out that I have all that and I am still a depressive and that’s just messed up on a whole different level. I mention this in case anybody else has a similar Monster.
My experience notwithstanding, there is research that says that practicing gratitude is good for us.
In point of fact, even I benefit from it at the times when the Monster is under the bed or wherever he goes when he’s not actively sitting on my chest.
It doesn’t have to be complicated. I can be grateful that there are dogs sleeping under the tables on the patio at the café where I like to write blog posts, or that there is a moon in the sky when I get up in the dark, or that it is not actually possible to stab annoying people through my computer screen when they say irritating things in Zoom meetings. There aren’t rules, really. I can be snarky and grateful at the same time!
The point of the practice is that we notice. We have, evolutionarily, a negativity bias. Times being what they are, it is not surprising that many of us conclude that everything is terrible.
That might even be mostly true. But, again, there is sunlight on raindrops and hot cocoa and the sound of little kids laughing.
Let it transform us.
There is a fair amount of weight-bearing on the arms in this workout. That’s all right: the hamstring curls will distract us. (Or, as always, we can choose to modify. We are adults and can make our own good decisions.) The short circuit means—you guessed it—four rounds.
1 min cardio | |
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mountain climbers | 30 |
renegade row | 20 |
hamstring curls | 10 |
burpees | 10 |
flies | 20 |
plank to pike | 10 |
Experiments to try:
1. Eat a new food. This can be as simple as trying a veggie you’ve never had or as complicated as taking a trip to the library to check out a cookbook for some kind of cuisine that is new to you.
2. Have a movement snack. You know that time in the afternoon when you think about having a cookie or another cup of coffee just to get through whatever the afternoon holds? Try taking a five minute walk, or doing a minute of squats, or a few stretches instead.
3. Turn off the extras. This one can be hard. Instead of jumping on the treadmill or bike or elliptical or whatever and plugging in to the music or TV, just go. Even better, take the workout outside and do it without the distractions. You might learn stuff about the content of your head or about how your body works or other things I haven’t thought of yet.
As I mentioned yesterday, I like experiments. Probably because I like learning things. There is one important prerequisite to experiments, though. I have to remain unattached to the outcome. Or, in other words, I have to be willing to fail.
This is not easy. We live in a world of picture-perfect everything. Social media could give us the impression that everyone in the entire universe is well-groomed, acne-free, and stylish. Spoiler alert: I live in the blooper reel as well as the highlight tape.
I suspect that everybody does, but some of us hide it better than others.
Experiments, like practice, require that we do things we’re not familiar with and maybe not good at. We can’t control the outcome. We might get sweaty or messy. We might even cry a little.
But we might also discover something beautiful or useful or amazing. There was a time before I tried sushi, for example. My first experience was not entirely successful, but I was willing to try again and now I will eat it any chance I get.
Similarly, the first time I went skiing, it was mostly about crashing, but there was something there that kept me coming back.
What would you like to try? What’s worth failing at for a while?
Recently, I did a little experiment on myself. (OK, that’s almost always true. I like to experiment.) For a long time now, I have routinely worked out as one of the first things I do in the morning. However, what with the dark mornings and various other stuff going on, getting up early enough to get the workout in before work and the rest of my responsibilities was proving challenging. So I tried sleeping in a bit and doing the workout in the afternoon.
The thing about experiments is that no matter how they turn out, we learn stuff. What I learned is that working out in the afternoon doesn’t work for me. It just doesn’t. I have ideas about why, but that really doesn’t make much difference. The point is that I learned that I have the habits I do for the very good reason that they work, most of the time.
Changing the workout time was not the solution I was looking for. But I would not have known that had I not tried.
What might you want to experiment with this week?
This workout has some options built in. Want to make it more challenging? Add a back lunge to the step ups. Need things a little easier? Sub in plain pushups for the shoulder tap ones. Three rounds.
step ups | 30 |
deadlifts | 20 |
skullcrushers | 10 |
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suitcase swings | 30 |
rows | 20 |
shoulder tap pushups | 10 |
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woodchoppers | 30 |
bench press | 20 |
V sit press | 20 |
Need to troubleshoot? Here are some good questions to ask. (Alternatively, I am a wellness coach and you can hire me to help figure stuff out!)
1. How is my sleep? If we’re not sleeping, we can’t really expect anything else to go super well. Both our bodies and our brains need sleep for proper function.
2. What am I eating and drinking? Despite my high school experience, it is not sustainable to run on Coke and donuts. If our most frequent vegetable is French fries and we drink coffee by the pot, we might have an obvious culprit. Even if we do generally eat pretty well, we may find that we’re not getting enough protein or we’re hitting the afternoon cookies a little too hard.
3. What am I doing about my stress? Yep: I am assuming we have stress. But if we have nurturing relationships, good practices like meditation, and time to relax, stress can be mitigated. (Bonus points for activities that will help to dismantle the systemic sources of much of our stress. Smashing the white supremacist cis-hetero imperialist capitalist patriarchy is good exercise, too.)
4. Am I giving my body a break? In addition to sleep, our bodies need recovery time. We need rest days between workouts. We need restorative practices like massage. Yoga helps.
5. When did I last have some fun? Sometimes we just need to do something frivolous to restore our energy.
So if we are still stuck after we’ve checked that we are, in fact, doing what we say we are doing, we have to take a closer look at our routines to see how to adjust them to get back to making progress.
This is where all those wellness categories come into play because we are not just exercise machines, but human beings. And, because we are humans and complicated, it might take a little while and a few experiments to figure out what is going to work. (Yep: we’re exercising our patience again, unfortunately.)
When I notice a client having a hard time with a workout, I start with two questions: how are you sleeping? and did you eat today? Usually the answer to those questions reveals the issue.
It takes a bit of time to go through what’s happening in our sleep and diet and recovery and mental health, but it’s worth it. That’s how we figure out how to make stuff better.
Sometimes we get stuck. We have our healthy routines and we are ticking our boxes and yet we are not making the progress we think we should be making. I’m going to talk about troubleshooting this kind of thing today and tomorrow.
Today we’re going to look at our performance with a slightly critical eye. (Critical, in this instance, doesn’t mean that we’re going to be mean to ourselves—that never helps—but rather that we are going to evaluate what we are actually doing.)
Often when we stop making progress, it turns out that we’re not doing what we think we are doing. We may have cut a few corners on our workouts or skimped on our sleep. We may have declared that we needed a treat more often than we thought we were.
Sometimes all we need to do to reboot our progress is to notice what we are doing and align it more with what we think we are doing. We might be losing because we’re cheating. That’s okay. We can fix it.
This is a great workout for back strength. Both the kettlebell swings and the good mornings work the whole back of the body. The tap backs are not far behind (heh). We need our back strength for the renegade rows and lateral raises as well! Three rounds.
jacks | 30 |
renegade row | 20 |
lateral raise | 10 |
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kb alternate arm swing | 30 |
kb hammer curl | 20 |
kb halo | 10 |
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tap backs | 30 |
good mornings | 20 |
brains | 20 |
Here are more ways to build in intervals in our workouts:
1. Add hills. These can be real hills if we are walking/running/hiking/biking outside or pretend ones on the treadmill.
2. Mix in a minute of cardio when weight training every so often. This can be something as simple as jumping jacks or we can hop on the treadmill and run for a minute.
3. Make it complicated. We can amp up our usual lunges, say, by adding a bicep curl to overhead press. Squats can acquire an extra leg lift to the side each time.
4. Change the tempo. Do most of the workout at an even tempo, but every few exercises make it faster before returning to normal.
