Cardio workouts for women often tend to be the long duration, low-intensity cardiovascular exercise that everyone dreads.

Cardio workouts that take up half your day and bore you to tears should be a thing of the past. That is, unless you like spending hours barely sweating and being bored silly.

Think about this: if you’re looking to achieve maximal benefit from the time you put into your workouts, long duration boring cardio is NOT the way to go, and for many reasons.

1. Minimal calories burned — You will burn calories WHILE exercising doing long slow boring cardio, for example: 45 minutes on the treadmill may burn 300 calories. This is actually the equivalent of ONE TENTH of a pound of fat so in order to burn a pound of fat, you’d need to exercise ten hours a week at this pace. In addition, once you stop exercising, the increase caloric burn ends too.

2. Way too much time involved — Who has hours to spend on low intensity cardio? If you want effective cardio workouts for women, you need short bursts of high intensity work. That’s ALL you need.

3. BORING = Quitting – Low intensity cardio workouts for women are about as exciting as watching paint dry. (In fact, that’s what you could do as you sit for hours on a stationary bike for example.) In addition to boring, you’re likely to quit since it’s SO boring. Adherence to an exercise program is less likely when you hate what you’re doing.

4. No prolonged metabolic benefit — Did you know that with higher intensity exercise it is possible to continue to burn calories for up to 48 hours post workout? It’s true. As well, long duration, low intensity cardio provides virtually NO prolonged elevation in metabolism. In fact, with slow-go cardio, metabolism returns to baseline almost IMMEDIATELY following the exercise session.

5. Minimal fat loss — There is a minimal amount of calories burned during a low intensity cardio session and virtually no additional calories burned afterward. This results in minimal fat loss.  Most folks are all about the fat loss if ‘cardio’ is their gig.

So what’s the best cardio workouts for women?

HIIT – Short duration, high-intensity exercise.  This means less time with faster results. That’s a winning combination on three counts: less time, fast results, reduction in the boredom factor.

You may say that you’re not ready for high intensity cardio workouts. Anyone is actually. What’s a high intensity for Jill may be low intensity for Jane, it’s all relative to your fitness level.

Effective cardio workouts for women are totally scalable to the individual, check out my program for a ton of ideas on fat burning cardio workouts for women.

So what about you? Are you stuck doing slow-go cardio or have you embraced the benefit of much shorter, higher intensity sessions?

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This entry was posted on September 27, 2011 at 4:14 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Posted in Workouts by Shawna 2 Comments