Understanding Cardio Programming

Cardio programming isn’t actually too complicated or hard to understand, however, there is some nuance to it. It can be difficult for people who are new to programming cardio into their training programs, as they may simply not know where to start. Most people are introduced to cardio by virtue of sports when they were younger, and this doesn’t necessarily translate into an understanding of how to actually program cardio.

Most people simply think of cardio as “going for a run”, and very often, they just try to run as hard and/or fast as they can for this. This is not good cardio programming. Understanding a little bit more about how to think about cardio programming will allow you to design an effective cardio program that actually accomplishes your goals.

If you haven’t already, it would be incredibly helpful to also read our articles on why exercise is important, the goals of exercise, the types of exercise we have available to us, and to have a rough idea of the general exercise guidelines. It would also be very beneficial to read Why Do Cardio Training? as it helps to frame the discussion of cardio programming in this article.

You can also visit our exercise hub for more content on exercise, and you can find the resistance training article there too.

Before we get stuck in, I would just like to remind you that we offer comprehensive online coaching. So if you need help with your own exercise program or nutrition, don’t hesitate to reach out. If you are a coach (or aspiring coach) and want to learn how to coach nutrition, then consider signing up to our Nutrition Coach Certification course. We do also have an exercise program design course in the works, if you are a coach who wants to learn more about effective program design and how to coach it. We do have other courses available too.

Now, with all that out of the way, we can actually get stuck into understanding cardio programming!

Understanding Cardio Programming

When we look to program cardio training, it is a good idea to start by comparing your plan of action to the general exercise guidelines. The guidelines suggest 150-300 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise (what most fitness professionals would call low-intensity cardio) per week or half that for vigorous exercise (what most fitness professionals would call moderate to high-intensity cardio). It is generally also recommended to do at least 2 days of resistance training, strengthening the major muscle groups of the body.

This is a pretty good starting point, and something you can use as a bit of a guide for your initial programming. This is certainly not the type of training that is going to lead to the most impressive physiques, healthiest people, or star athletes, but it serves as a very rough starting point.

Cardiovascular training is a difficult one to give some general guidelines for, as the adaptations are so broad, and each of you reading this is likely coming from very diverse backgrounds. Cardio is a very broad category, as it really can be anything that raises your heart rate and challenges your cardio-respiratory system.

If you are someone who is very unfit and has been sedentary for a long time, you may find walking for 5 minutes to be sufficiently challenging to your cardio-respiratory system. However, if you are someone who has been engaging in a lot of cardiovascular training, you may find that your heart rate barely elevates walking for 5 minutes, and you would not see it as being something anyone would call cardiovascular training. So there is a degree of individual specificity here, and that does make programming a little bit harder, as it depends on what you have been doing previously.

So where should we start?

Informal Exercise/Daily Activity 

Before we even consider adding in formal cardio, we must actually ensure that baseline activity levels are in a good place. Otherwise, most people will just spontaneously reduce their daily activity to compensate for the extra calories burned during formal exercise. This is often referred to as the constrained model of energy expenditure.

So, we don’t want to increase our formal exercise at the expense of our daily activity level. Beyond this fact, it is generally a good idea to move more, and sit less throughout the day. Movement for health is not just about formal exercise; it is about your average activity levels day to day, week to week, month to month, and so on. This layer of the cake is one that so many forget (even very fit people). 

While spending an hour at the gym in the morning is a very good health behaviour, sitting for the remainder of the day is not so good. Conversely, while not formally exercising isn’t the best, you are still making a positive contribution to your health by having an active job, walking regularly, taking the stairs, etc. Being more active throughout the day is not just about avoiding those diseases that people talk about when they get old (never going to be you, right?); it’s also an important behaviour for those interested in body composition outcomes, which, of course, is linked with overall health. 

One of the most significant contributors to total daily energy expenditure (calories burned throughout the day) is this low-level activity (non-exercise activity thermogenesis, NEAT). Whether it’s a walk at lunch, taking the stairs, tapping your foot, or standing for a while, all of this counts toward your total energy expenditure.

When people are trying to lose weight, and start adding in more cardio, they often begin to reduce these behaviours, which can lead to less weight loss than expected based on how much they are eating (remember, there are two parts to the energy balance equation, calorie expenditure and calorie intake). So, if you are trying to lose body fat, then this is a very important aspect to focus on. 

You are probably wondering what exactly you should do for this informal exercise. Well, we tend to use daily steps as a way to gauge this, even if it isn’t perfectly accurate (either in the step tracking itself or the fact that it doesn’t account for movement outside of steps).

You may have heard the 10,000 steps figure thrown around, but there really is no single target that everyone should aim for. If you are currently doing less than 3,000 to 5,000 steps per day, then bumping up to 6,000-8,000 would be a great idea. If you are currently doing 8,000 to 10,000, then this is something you are already doing a great job with. The return on investment does seem to level off around the 8,000 steps mark, so I wouldn’t be too worried about pushing excessively beyond this (there are still benefits beyond this, the ROI for effort is just lower).

Much like other aspects of exercise, you need to perform a needs analysis and an assessment of what you are currently doing. Focusing on getting more steps in may be very relevant to someone who is sedentary, but it may be irrelevant to someone who already has a physically demanding job but who isn’t hitting their formal exercise targets. 

You don’t just need to keep adding more and more steps in, you just want to standardise it to some extent.

Having said all of that and assuming you do want/need to increase your daily activity, here are some easy tips you can implement to help improve your general activity: 

1. Park a little further away when shopping. 
2. Take the stairs. 
3. Skip the travelators and escalators. 
4. When meeting a friend, go for a walk. 
5. Skip the drive/transport, and walk when travelling short distances. 
6. If you listen to podcasts or audiobooks, walk while listening. 
7. Take “long cuts”, not shortcuts (e.g. walk the long way to your destination). 
8. For sedentary workers, have a movement reminder (e.g. on the hour, walk for a few minutes – to the bathroom, up the stairs, or whatever works). 
9. If you do lots of calls for work or leisure, try to do them while walking or at least pacing around.
10. Build activity into your leisure time – hiking, beach walks, etc.

Ultimately, we just want to try and be active throughout the day in whatever way makes sense. This informal exercise does provide a really good baseline for our overall health. It contributes towards calorie expenditure and it does actually get you relatively fit.

Formal Exercise

Once we have a baseline of activity dialled in and standardised, then we can start programming some formal cardio. As we stated previously in our article on why you should be doing cardio, we generally feel that doing more aerobic cardio represents the best option when it comes to calorie burning, due to the lower systemic fatigue. Aerobic cardio is also generally the best option for most other goals, as the aerobic system is the baseline energy system that allows for performance improvements in the anaerobic system. But aerobic cardio isn’t always the best option.

The cardiovascular system can broadly be broken down into two energy-providing systems. These are the aerobic system and the anaerobic system. The aerobic system requires oxygen to function effectively, and as such, it works better when your effort and heart rate are relatively lower, as this facilitates you being able to breathe effectively (and thus breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide). 

Once your level of effort goes up, or you are required to do movements that require a very fast generation of energy, you must use the anaerobic system. This system doesn’t require the same oxygen that the aerobic system requires, and as such, it can work in low-oxygen conditions. But the trade-off is that it doesn’t work for very long.

This is why you can’t sprint a marathon, the anaerobic system just can’t supply power for that long, and instead, the aerobic system must kick in, which can go for much longer but can’t provide that “jet fuel” required for the higher intensities. This is important to understand because some of the adaptations you get from doing higher-intensity cardio, you don’t get with lower-intensity cardio, and vice versa. 

So the exact adaptations someone is looking for will dictate the exact protocol we use. However, having said that, for the vast majority of people, we are still likely going to try and start with a foundation of aerobic work. This is because a lot of the aerobic adaptations we get also improve the anaerobic side of things.

Most athletes, even in the most anaerobic sports, will actually spend the vast majority of their training doing aerobic training. This is because the aerobic system is required to actually restock the anaerobic system, and thus any sport that requires repeated anaerobic efforts, requires a strong aerobic system. For health purposes, having a strong aerobic system offers the biggest return on investment, as it can be developed far more (compared to the anaerobic system) and for longer throughout their life, for most people.

So for most people, even with performance goals, we are probably still going to suggest they do some aerobic work first and foremost, once we introduce formal cardio. Good proxy endpoints for the improvements of the cardiovascular system are lowering resting heart rate (RHR) and increasing heart rate variability (HRV), and once they are in a good place, then we can start thinking about bringing in more high-intensity cardio methods. Improving RHR and HRV offer a huge return on investment, as they improve or are associated with improvements in pretty much all the performance and health metrics we care about. There are a number of ways you can introduce more low-intensity cardio, and we will discuss them in a moment.

There are some specific goals that will require higher intensities, but they are mainly sports related, which is beyond the scope of this article. However, there may be rationale for introducing some higher-intensity work, either in addition to low-intensity work or indeed, before you introduce lower-intensity work. 

The most obvious one, and quite frankly, the reason that higher-intensity cardio is so widely utilised (despite the superiority of lower-intensity cardio for most goals), is simply a time component. We would rather that most individuals actually get some sort of cardiovascular conditioning done each week, and if they simply don’t have time to do some lower-intensity work, then it may just be best to introduce some higher-intensity cardio.

If time is a limiting factor, then higher-intensity cardio can be incredibly beneficial. You get a lot of the adaptations you would get with low-intensity cardio (at least initially), and getting people to actually do a shorter, higher-intensity cardio session rather than a longer, low-intensity cardio session can oftentimes be easier to commit to. You do still have to be aware that the higher-intensity cardio will likely impact recovery and may reduce your ability to push performance with resistance training. 

If you are someone who is already doing some low-intensity cardio, or already has a high HRV/low RHR, and wants to do some (or has a goal that may benefit from) higher-intensity cardio, then it may make sense to introduce some high-intensity work. The context matters, and you must take into account everything you have going on.

When you do introduce some cardio, regardless of type, you have to pay attention to recovery and how the rest of the training is affected. You have to be aware that fatigue does accumulate, and thus you have to monitor things over time (e.g. just because you didn’t feel overly fatigued in week 1 of a program doesn’t mean you won’t feel excessively fatigued by week 3). The effects of the training take time to see. 

You must also monitor how your hunger changes. Some people see large changes in appetite in response to different types of cardio. Some people find cardio blunts their appetite, while others find it massively increases their appetite, and different types of cardio affect people differently. So if we are trying to manage body composition change, and you introduce some low-intensity cardio, and suddenly you start noticing a huge increase in appetite, then you have to dig a little bit deeper. It may be related to simply being in more of a deficit than you were previously, but it may also just be the type of cardio being performed. 

Some people also find certain types of cardio leave them more or less physically drained. Higher-intensity cardio is notorious for making people just feel depleted and low energy (likely due to depletion of glycogen). So while it may be the best type of cardio for a given goal, if it negatively affects the rest of that person’s life, we need to make a change. So you have to really pay attention to your individual response, and then adjust accordingly. It doesn’t matter if one type or style of cardio is better on paper, the individual response must factor into our decision-making.

What Type Of Cardio

While we have been discussing the different types of cardio in terms of the more cardio-metabolic side of things, we haven’t actually discussed the actual activity you will be doing to perform the cardio. While this is often discussed as purely an afterthought, it is actually a vital variable to consider when programming cardio.

There is a huge diversity of options in which to perform cardio, and they all have pros and cons. Obviously, we simply can’t cover every possible permutation of cardio in this article, but we can go through a kind of mental framework to consider the specific cardio choices you make in your programming.

Firstly, you should consider what type of cardio you actually enjoy doing. This can apply to the intensity of the exercise, but it also relates to the actual enjoyment of the activity itself. The intensity does factor in here though. For example, some people will say they hate running, but they have never actually run at a lower heart rate, and they actually hate the feeling of excess acidosis because they are running so hard all the time. Conversely, some people don’t enjoy running at low intensities, but do actually enjoy sprinting.

So the metabolic side of things does factor in here, however, this is also heavily influenced by the actual activity itself. For example, some people will say they simply don’t like low-intensity cardio, but then they will happily do a 2-hour hike and have the time of their life. Or they will do a dance class and love every minute of it. So the actual activity itself does make a huge difference here, and you should try to take this into account. Now, you may not know what you enjoy doing, in which case, you will have to sample a few different activities, and do them at various intensity levels. 

After that, we should consider the specificity of the type of cardio you intend to do, relative to the other goals you have. This doesn’t apply to everyone, but very often, people have multiple peripheral goals that we can somewhat bias our cardio training to help with. This obviously applies quite a lot to sports, as you need to consider how sports-specific your cardio is. You certainly don’t need to be hyper-specific with everything that you do, as there are benefits to cross-training, however, we can still program our training in such a way that we do actually improve on the ability to do specific things. This will make more sense by giving you a few examples.

In our coaching, we may program the following types of cardio for the following individuals:

• For someone who enjoys hiking and wants to improve their ability to hike, we might use something like a StairMaster, incline treadmill walking or even something like rucking.
• For someone who wants to improve their skiing, we might program something like the elliptical or ski-erg.
• For someone who wants to improve their cycling, we might program the stationary bike.
• For someone who wants to improve their sea swimming, we might program our cardio in an indoor swimming pool.
• For someone who wants to improve their field sport, we might program outdoor running or the treadmill.
• For someone with a specific sport they want to improve, we might program sports-specific drills for their cardio (i.e. heavy or speed bag for boxing).

Again, we don’t always need to be specific, and there are benefits to training a variety of movements. However, if we can improve someone’s ability in some other area by our cardio choices, then it certainly makes sense to at least consider our choices.

We must also consider the rest of the training program though. This is very often forgotten when discussing cardio, and is something you must especially consider when programming higher volumes or higher intensities of cardio. It is very common to just ignore the fact that you are using your muscles to perform cardio. 

If you are also performing resistance training, there can be a negative crossover effect depending on your cardio choices and the overall structure of the program. For example, the legs are very often doing the work when we do cardio (it is actually very hard to find a purely upper-body cardio method, except for maybe the hand-ergometer). This isn’t actually a huge issue, but it must be factored in.

If your program consists of lower-body intensive cardio the day before a heavy lower-body focused resistance workout, then the legs are likely to be going to be somewhat fatigued going into that resistance session. So both the choice of cardio (both the method and type of cardio) and when it is performed need to be factored into the programming decisions.

You must also consider whether you have the mobility and control to do the type of cardio you have programmed. Does the type of cardio put you into ranges that you simply don’t have? Or do you have the ability to actively control those ranges, or are you being forced into passive ranges that you simply can’t control?

For example, you may think running is a fairly good option, but perhaps you don’t have the dorsiflexion range to allow you to run without ankle/calf issues. Similarly, you may think that using an incline on the treadmill would be an easy way to increase the intensity of your cardio. However, again, this may require you to get into ankle ranges of motion that you simply don’t have.

You may be a bigger individual, and thus the cardio machines in the gym may simply not be well built for your needs. For example, you may be quite tall and have relatively broad shoulders. When you use the rowing machine for cardio, the handles may be excessively “short” for you. They don’t allow you to use a grip width that is comfortable for you throughout the movement, and as such, your wrists may take a beating when trying to perform rowing as cardio.

Stuff like this is rarely discussed, but it is actually incredibly important. 

We must also consider whether the activity we program has the potential to increase the risk of overuse injuries. While we want to be somewhat specific with our cardio, if you are someone who already does a lot of running for your sport, and then you increase your running volume by programming running as your cardio, the potential for overuse injuries does go up. This can be somewhat overcome by slowly increasing volume and/or intensities, but it is something that needs to be considered.

We must also consider the level of impact that the cardio modality has on the body. While higher impacts can be beneficial for increasing bone mineral density, if you aren’t accustomed to those higher impacts, or you are already doing a lot of high-impact work, then the risk of injury does go up.

Doing lots of running, skipping, or other high-impact cardio options can lead to certain musculoskeletal injuries. It can also be quite fatiguing on the body and thus reduce recovery and subsequent performance in other activities (disproportionately to other activities that work the same energy system(s) and musculature, and burn a similar amount of calories). So the level of impact the cardio method you choose has, must be considered when programming.

We must also take into account the level of eccentric loading that a given cardio type requires, as eccentric loading seems to be more demanding of the musculature and results in more muscle damage. You might think that walking downhill should be easier than walking uphill, however, you will very often see people say that going downhill is way worse than going uphill. It beats up the knees and the quads get very sore. This is because of the high amount of eccentric loading that occurs when walking downhill, as the body must effectively slow the descent and the quads are tasked with doing this.

So downhill walking has a lot of eccentric loading, and thus is way more fatiguing than something that is largely concentric contractions like cycling. This must be taken into account when programming cardio, especially if we also want to use those muscles for other activities in a relatively short time frame (i.e. you have a resistance training session planned the day after).

The level of skill required to perform an activity must also be factored into decision-making. It probably isn’t wise to program very high-skill movements for your cardio, because as you fatigue, your ability to perform those high-skill movements will very quickly deteriorate. So, it would be wise not to do stuff like Olympic lifting movements (or derivatives) or box jumps (or plyometrics) as a form of cardio. Low-skill-requiring activities are likely the best option when we are programming cardio.

Finally, we must also consider what you have access to, and what environmental constraints are in place. While you may think a certain piece of cardio equipment is the most perfect piece of equipment for cardio, if you don’t regularly have access to that equipment, then it simply isn’t going to be an effective cardio option to program. You will very often just have to work with what is available, even if it isn’t ideal.

This doesn’t just apply to the equipment, it applies to the environment too. If you want to do some outdoor running, you better have access to somewhere you can run. If you are in an extremely hilly or even mountainous region, then your outdoor running experience is going to be completely different to someone who lives in a flat area. 

The weather must also be taken into account, as someone may live in a very wet, cold or warm climate that may make certain cardio choices impossible (or at least very unappealing). Running outside in extreme heat, extreme cold or extreme rain isn’t generally an enjoyable experience.

You must also consider what your environment is like safety-wise. Doing outdoor cardio when you live in an incredibly rural area where you have to share the road with cars speeding around blind corners, or where there aren’t any street lights, well, it isn’t ideal.

We have covered a lot of considerations so far, but we have a few more things to cover before we can wrap up this section. You may have noticed that we haven’t really discussed when to program the cardio yet. So we will cover that now!

When To Do Cardio

There are a variety of options for programming when exactly cardio is to be done, and each has its pros and cons. Certain methods lend themselves better to certain adaptations, and other approaches are simply just more practical (and thus more likely to actually be done). It makes sense to be very clear on what you are trying to achieve with the cardio, as that does help you to make better programming recommendations when it comes to the timing of the cardio.

The first timing category is simply stand-alone cardio sessions. These are sessions with the sole goal of performing cardio (and maybe some light pre-hab/re-hab/stretching). They can be high-intensity or low-intensity sessions, but regardless, the sole goal is to perform cardio during that session.

The main benefit of this style of programming is that it theoretically maximises your energy for that session. You go into the training session with the sole goal of performing cardio, and you aren’t depleting yourself with resistance training or sports-specific training before you perform the cardio.

Stand-alone sessions can be quite useful when aiming for aerobic adaptations, especially at the heart level, as that usually requires 45+ minutes at that intensity to really start maximising the benefits.

Stand-alone sessions are also quite beneficial for people who are trying to maximise their muscle mass, as they reduce any interference effect that cardio training might have on the resistance training adaptations.

There are some downsides, however, as stand-alone sessions obviously require you to do your cardio as a stand-alone session, which can be quite time-consuming, especially if you are already doing resistance training too. If you do your cardio on the same day as your resistance training, then it requires that you train multiple times per day, which most people don’t have the time for, and even if you do, it still requires quite a lot of willpower to train multiple times per day.

If you do the stand-alone sessions on the days in between resistance training sessions, then you can end up with very few actual rest days, and fatigue can constantly be high, especially if the sessions are higher-intensity sessions.

Cardio can also be programmed as a “finisher” at the end of workouts, and while this can be high or low intensity, very often it is high intensity. Most people don’t want to do 45+ minutes of low-intensity cardio at the end of their workouts, and doing so may actually interfere with the resistance training stimulus, producing less muscle building.

Doing high-intensity work at the end of the session does have the downside of being performed in an already fatigued state, but it does have the benefit of being very time efficient (hence why it is one of the most used methods).

We can also program cardio at the start of a resistance training session, but this will generally mean the resistance training will be performed in a fatigued state. This wouldn’t be a great idea if the resistance training session is supposed to be high-skill requiring, or if muscle or strength building is the main goal. However, if the goal is to prioritise improving the cardiovascular system, then performing cardio first may make sense.

In the real world, what very often occurs is that most people will program higher-intensity work after resistance training and then program lower-intensity work as stand-alone sessions. For example, you may program 2-3 resistance training sessions, with 5-10 minutes of anaerobic intervals at the end of the workouts, and then have 1-2 45+ minute low-intensity aerobic sessions programmed as stand-alone sessions. This is a very nice setup and hits all the major bases we would like to see covered.

We must also consider the time of day in this discussion, as some people do find that higher-intensity cardio performed close to bedtime, really reduces their sleep quality. Some people program their cardio as fasted cardio, especially low-intensity aerobic cardio, in the belief that it has better fat-burning properties. While there may be some truth to this, in reality, it only really applies to bodybuilders looking to get their body fat to extremely low levels (i.e. you already have to be very lean to see the benefits of this).

For most people, we recommend that they program their cardio for a time that makes sense for them. Very often in our coaching practice, we are making programming decisions based on what we feel will actually maximise adherence, rather than optimising for the specific adaptations. This is because adherence is the biggest decider of success, not how “perfect” a plan is in theory. 

Cardio Programming Conclusion

We covered a lot on cardio programming in this article, but I know we haven’t actually really covered the specific protocols you can use in your cardio programming. This article was really only intended to be an introduction to the topic of cardio programming, and there is actually quite a lot of nuance to cardio programming.

Most people have performed cardio in some manner at some point in their life, so most people are somewhat familiar with cardio. However, most people have many incorrect ideas about how to actually program cardio training. While this article hopefully cleared up a few misconceptions, it is really only as we get through the next few articles that you will really see the misconceptions about cardio programming cleared up.

As with everything, there is always more to learn, and we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface with all this stuff. However, if you are interested in staying up to date with all our content, we recommend subscribing to our newsletter and bookmarking our free content page. We do have a lot of content on how to design your own exercise program on our exercise hub.

If you would like more help with your training (or nutrition), we do also have online coaching spaces available.

We also recommend reading our foundational nutrition article, along with our foundational articles on sleep and stress management, if you really want to learn more about how to optimise your lifestyle. If you want even more free information on exercise, you can follow us on Instagram, YouTube or listen to the podcast, where we discuss all the little intricacies of exercise.

Finally, if you want to learn how to coach nutrition, then consider our Nutrition Coach Certification course. We do also have an exercise program design course in the works, if you are a coach who wants to learn more about effective program design and how to coach it. We do have other courses available too. If you don’t understand something, or you just need clarification, you can always reach out to us on Instagram or via email.

The previous article in this series is about Why Do Cardio Training? and the next article in this series is Foundational Cardio Protocols, if you are interested in continuing to learn about exercise program design. You can also go to our exercise hub to find more exercise content.

Paddy Farrell

www.triagemethod.com

Hey, I'm Paddy!

I am a coach who loves to help people master their health and fitness. I am a personal trainer, strength and conditioning coach, and I have a degree in Biochemistry and Biomolecular Science. I have been coaching people for over 10 years now.

When I grew up, you couldn't find great health and fitness information, and you still can't really. So my content aims to solve that!

I enjoy training in the gym, doing martial arts and hiking in the mountains (around Europe, mainly). I am also an avid reader of history, politics and science. When I am not in the mountains, exercising or reading, you will likely find me in a museum.