Why You Need To Vary The Intensity During Your Cardio Training

By Author: Martin Roch
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Are you addicted to your cardio workouts? Most people seem to agree that "cardio" is the best way to shape up and lose belly fat. I'm going to show you in this article why I think they’re wrong!
It’s common to hear fitness professionals, doctors, and other health experts prescribe low intensity aerobic exercise (cardio) when people are trying to prevent heart disease or lose weight. Usually, the recommendations sound something like this:
"Perform 30-60 minutes of steady state, low intensity exercise 3 to 5 times per week, keeping your heart rate at a moderate level"
Before giving in to this popular belief and doing endless hours of boring aerobic exercise, I think you should think about some recent scientific studies that suggest steady state exercise isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Initially, understand that our bodies are designed to perform bursts of physical exertion, followed by rest. Recent research suggests that intensity variation is one of THE most important things to take into account when you’re exercising.

This activity pattern can be seen frequently in nature as ...
... most animals tend to demonstrate stop/start movements instead of steady state motion. In fact, humans are the only animals that try to do endurance type activities, such as running prolonged distances at the same speed the whole duration.
Most individual and team sports (with the exception of distance cycling, swimming and running) are also based on stop and start motion or short bouts of effort followed by varying recovery periods.
Looking at an example of the different effects of cardio training versus interval training, consider the physiques of distance runners versus sprinters. Sprinters typically exhibit a lean, muscular, and powerful looking physique, where as the typical long distance athlete is more often skinny and weak looking. Which one would you rather look like?
Another factor to consider, with regards to the benefits of intensity variation, is the intrinsic effect that various forms of exercise have on our body. Experts have known that excessive endurance training increases free radical production within the body, can damage joints, stresses the immune system, causes muscle hypotrophy, and can cause a pro-inflammatory reaction in the body that can sometimes lead to chronic diseases.

Highly variable cyclic training
An alternative to endurance style training is “highly variable cyclic training”, which has been associated with increased antioxidant production and an anti-inflammatory response and an increased metabolic rate (which can aid weight loss). On the other hand, highly variable cyclic training stimulates the heart to respond to, and recover from, a range of demands.
Consider this... Training that teaches your heart to rapidly increase and rapidly decrease will make it more capable of coping with everyday stress.

The crucial element of variable cyclic training, that makes it superior to endurance exercise, is the recovery period between bursts of exertion. This recovery period is very important for the body to produce a healthy response to an exercise stimulus. Another advantage of variable cyclic training is that it is less boring than long steady state cardio programmes and has lower drop-out rates.

In summary, just a few of the advantages of variable cyclic training over steady state exercise are as follows: improved cardiovascular health, reduced incidence of overuse injuries, improved immune function, less risk of joint degeneration, increased anti-oxidant protection, greater muscle hypertrophy, increased post exercise metabolic rate, and an increased ability of the heart to handle life’s every day stresses.

Sprinting and Sports Workouts
There are lots of ways you can benefit from variable intensity physical exercise. Nearly all competitive sports such as rugby, football, squash, basketball, volleyball, tennis, badminton, hockey, etc. are naturally involve a high degree of variable stop-and-go movement that trains the heart through a much wider heart rate range compared to just endurance based training.
Completing swimming sessions in a variable intensity style may also be more valuable than just swimming for a long time at the same pace. The same can be said for cycling, which is why mountain biking may also be more advantageous than just a long flat steady pace bike ride (due to the extreme ups and downs at various intensity levels).
One of the most supremely effective forms of interval training, that will massively reduce body fat and bring out severe muscular definition, is performing repeated sprints. These “wind” sprints can be done by sprinting at near max speed for up to 30 seconds, and then taking 60 seconds to walk for recovery before your next sprint. 6-12 total sprint repetitions are usually very challenging for most people.
Weight training also involves short bouts of exercise followed by rest periods. High intensity interval training can also be applied when using cardio equipment). For example, an interval training session on the rowing machine could look something like this:

Warm-up for 3-4 minutes at a gentle row
Interval 1 - row 500m in a target time of 110 seconds
Interval 2 - row 500m in a target time of 130 seconds
Interval 3 - row 300m in a target time of 1 minute
Interval 4 – Row 100m in a target time of 20 seconds

The actual times may vary according to your current level of fitness. Repeat those four intervals 3 to 4 times for a very intense, yet relatively short workout.
Also, don't forget other great variable intensity cardio training using a skipping rope, a treadmill, hill sprinting or even stair running.

The message from this article is to exercise at wide ranging intensity levels, for most of your training programme, to get the most beneficial response in terms of cardiac health, fat reduction, and muscular development/maintenance.
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Martin Roch has been working in the Physical Education sector for over 20 years. He has worked as a lecturer in sports science, taught physical education in high school and acted as a nutrition and exercise consultant for regional sports councils and major retail outlets.