What is the Best Form of Cardio? - Part II
- Scott Marion
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
In part I of this series, I laid out 5 questions to compare the various forms of aerobic and cardiovascular training. Based on that criteria, swimming, dance, rowing, and similar activities all stood out as ideal with rowing being what I deemed the most likely overall best.
Unfortunately, it's more complicated than just crowning a winner and telling everyone to start rowing. The first problem arises the moment someone sits down on the rower to begin exercising:
What do I do now?
How you perform the various types of cardio, whatever they may be, can dramatically change the results you get from them.
For the majority of people, I've determined the best modalities can be further divided into three methods:
Best for Longevity
Best for Fat Loss
Best for Sport/Athletic Performance
Although rowing is likely one of the best forms for the general population, it may not be ideal for everyone in every situation.
What is best for a mixed martial artist is certainly not best for a bodybuilder and neither of those may be ideal for a 75-year-old retired accountant.
Best for Overall Health and Longevity
Improving your health span is arguably one of the best reasons to train. Lifespan refers to how long a person is alive from birth until death, but health span measures the amount of quality years an individual lives, typically without significant disease or disability.
If you pass away at age 90 but spend the last 10 years unable to walk or perform activities of daily living without assistance, your health span is closer to 80 years.
A 2018 study of over 122,000 participants showed an inverse relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness and the risk of disease and death, and there was no clear indication that it was possible to achieve too much fitness.
So to maximize overall health and longevity, the ideal mode of training would be whatever method induced the greatest improvement in cardiorespiratory fitness, often measured by VO2 max or maximal aerobic capacity.
In simple terms, VO2 max is a measure of how efficient your body is at utilizing oxygen. More oxygen utilization during exercise means the exercise can be done at a higher intensity, for longer, and with less effort.
The style of cardio that objectively seems to improve VO2 max the most is some form of interval training, characterized by a burst of high-intensity effort, followed by a lower-intensity recovery, and repeated for several rounds.
The general recommendation is between 1 and 3 high-intensity-interval-training (H.I.I.T.) sessions weekly, done in any common H.I.I.T. variation such as a Norwegian 4x4, the Tabata Protocol, or the Gibaldi Method.
High-intensity aerobics shouldn’t be the only exercise someone gets, but it will likely yield the biggest improvements. Most H.I.I.T. workouts last less than 30 minutes so if beginners are only performing 1 or 2 of those workouts every week, the remaining 90+ minutes of suggested aerobics should be done at a lower-intensity.
A Warning
Firstly, if you're not currently exercising (haven't performed cardio or aerobics more than 12 times in the last 3-6+ months), doing any form of aerobic training at nearly any intensity can improve your VO2 max. Intervals might be one of the best ways, but certainly not the only way.
Second, H.I.I.T. is often overrated and, when done correctly, exceptionally difficult.
Beginners should always start slowly and build their way up to high intensity efforts and would benefit from hands-on help and advice from a coach to perform safely.
Because of the reasons outlined above, it is one of the best forms of cardio for improving health and longevity, but that certainly doesn’t indicate every other method of exercise can be foregone. If it is determined that the best food a human can eat is some obscure plant, that doesn’t eliminate the benefit of eating other foods but should instead simply shift the thinking, approach, and priority of how we eat.
H.I.I.T. is not a magic pill that cures all health ailments but is one component of a balanced exercise “diet” and should be thought of as such.
Summary
If you're looking to try a H.I.I.T. workout for the first time, this is my simple beginner recommendation that can be done on many of the most popular pieces of cardio equipment:
5-10 minutes of low-intensity warm-up (attempting to elevate heart rate to 180-age).
30 seconds of high-intensity effort - as hard as you can safely manage.
60 seconds of low-intensity recovery - this can be easy activity or you can stop entirely.
Repeat for 2-4 rounds.
5-10 minutes of low-intensity cool-down (attempting to drop heart rate to 180-age or lower).
As your fitness and skill improves, you can increase the number of rounds you complete, increase the duration of the work interval (from 30 seconds to 45, 60, or 90 seconds), or shorten the rest interval (from 60 to 45, 30, or even 15 seconds).
To keep this discussion as simple as possible, I've ultimately decided to cover the remaining methods of cardio and aerobic training in subsequent posts.
The next part of this series covers the best forms of cardio specifically for fat loss. Some form of H.I.I.T. cardio balanced well with L.I.S.S. seems to be ideal for health and longevity, but does that maximize the rate of fat loss? Is cardio even helpful for losing body fat?
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