The Best Cardio Exercises

There is a lot of debate about the best cardio exercises, and most experts typically recommend machines such as treadmills, stationary bikes, stairmasters, etc.

In fact, by definition, any low intensity activity that can elevate your pulse above 50% is considered cardio, and would supposedly provide benefits in terms of health and well being.

Most people wrongly believe that the best cardio exercises (in terms of cardiovascular conditioning) should be some steady state activity, which is partially true if we ignore any other form of exercise.

However, it should be noted that most studies don't even consider high intensity training, so their results are not relevant when considering the best cardio exercises – when your only tool is a hammer, the whole world becomes a nail.

Your cardiovascular system is always working whether you are sitting on your butt or sleeping. Your heart is beating, your blood is circulating, and your lungs are taking in air and expelling carbon dioxide 24/7.

So logically, any possible alteration occurs proportionally to the intensity of the stimulus applied.

When you go jogging, or have sex, or what have you, inevitably your cardiovascular system is stimulated because it has to provide more energy.

Consequently, oxygen intake increases, your pulse accelerates, and more blood has to be pumped in the muscles to sustain this effort.

As a result, regular training increases the number of capillaries, which deliver blood, oxygen and nutrients into the muscle.

Also, when the intensity is kept around the functional threshold, the activity of mitochondria is enhanced, and this will augment the capacity of your muscles to use fatty acids for fuel.

In other words, your skeletal muscles would adapt to that specific type of exercise by improving their capacity to use oxygen. However, this muscular adaptation is very specific, and seems to go away even when the movement pattern is slightly different.

As an example, if your favorite cardio exercise is running outdoors, you have developed a specific motor skill that cannot be transferred to any other similar activity such as cycling or even running on a treadmill.

If you don't believe me, make a minor change to your usual exercise or choose a different one, and see how you feel.

It's important to note that sedentary or moderately active people that you usually see at your local gym are limited aerobically because their cardiovascular system doesn't supply enough oxygen to their skeletal musculature.

Therefore, improvements in mitochondrial function in this population would be futile for improving endurance.

As a side note, for this reason many studies found that subjects engaged short term interval training improved notably their endurance markers.

However, up to date, there is no long term trial showing consistent adaptations with high intensity exercise done in a cardio mode. As Martin Gibala, a fervent proponent of interval training, said:

“Regardless of the group studied, the majority of low-volume studies have utilized relatively short intervention periods (i.e. lasting up to several weeks). Future work involving long-term (i.e. months to years) interventions in a variety of clinical cohorts (i.e. individuals with insulin resistance, obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease) are urgently needed to better understand how manipulating the exercise stimulus impacts on cardiovascular and musculoskeletal remodelling in these populations.” (Gibala et al., 2012)

So what are the best cardio exercises? 

My point is that your Average Joe/Jane should engage in some serious training instead of wasting his/her time on a treadmill all day long.

This will greatly improve their cardiovascular conditioning within a short time frame (3-6 weeks), which gives them plenty of bang for their buck.

However, by serious training I don't mean interval training because the same metabolic adaptations can be obtained far more effectively with proper strength training.

Furthermore, improving the overall strength will help you tremendously because, for any given activity, you will work up less your cardiovascular system.

In other words, any given physical effort will feel easier, and you won't feel like dying when climbing a flight of stairs, or having sex in a weird position.

Therefore, the best cardio exercises should involve as much muscle mass as possible because the above adaptations would develop on a bigger scale.

For this purpose, my recommendation is to include in your program exercises such as squatting or deadlifting if you haven't done so already.

Do 20 reps with a heavy weight, and tell me if your cardiovascular system was stimulated or not.

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