Your Guide to Boosting Your Cardio While Maintaining Strength and Mobility

Your Goals:

• Primary goal: Endurance
• Secondary goals: Strength and Mobility

Endurance is the ability to continue moving for long periods. When you train for endurance, you do activities with a high oxygen demand — such as running, cycling, swimming, stair-climbing, or rowing — and keep it up at an intensity that allows you to converse (but not sing) easily, for at least 20 minutes.

“Endurance is present in all facets of our life,” says distance-running coach Frankie Ruiz, Life Time’s chief running officer and cofounder of the Life Time Miami Marathon. “[It’s] anything you want to continue for long periods without slowing down.”

Though endurance training requires lots of work from the biggest muscles in your arms, legs, and torso, it primarily exercises your heart and lungs. The more oxygen you can process, and the more oxygen-rich blood your heart can pump to your working muscles, the longer and harder you can continue your chosen activity.

If you’re new to endurance training, says Ruiz, “your first milestone is the 20-minute mark.”

“If you can jog for a minute before you have to walk or stop, that’s what you do,” he suggests. Catch your breath, start again, and repeat until you’ve been going for a total of 20 minutes, resting and running combined. Take a day off, come back, and repeat the process, gradually trying to reduce the amount of time spent resting.

Avoid the common pitfall of doing too much too fast, Ruiz advises. Be patient and stick to that conversational pace.

Do these brief workouts three nonconsecutive days a week until you can perform your activity of choice for 20 minutes nonstop. Don’t push too hard: Aim for an effort level of six or seven out of 10. Even your longest session should feel relatively easy.

From there, work your way to 30 minutes per workout in the same manner, alternately walking and jogging (or cycling and resting, or swimming and standing) for 60 seconds each, before gradually reducing the rest periods.

Once 30 minutes becomes doable, experiment with a few additional training techniques:

1. Hills improve your running or cycling form and offer a greater cardiovascular challenge than moving along flat ground. Run or ride up an incline for one to two minutes at a medium-hard pace, then descend for the same duration. Repeat for up to 10 reps. (Try this hill-run workout.)
2. Long sessions give you additional physical and psychological stamina, training you to stay focused for longer periods. Roughly every two weeks, do a session that’s 30 percent longer in duration than your typical weekly long workout.
3. A high-volume program exposes your heart, lungs, and muscles to more frequent stimulation, increasing your fitness at a faster rate. So instead of three cardio sessions per week, go for four or five. Ruiz advises work­ing out multiple days in a row (say, Monday through Thursday) before taking the rest of the week off to facilitate recovery.
4. Intervals or sprints in which you work at a higher intensity for several short bursts, each followed by a rest period that lasts as long as or longer than the high-intensity portion, help improve your form and increase your top-end speed. If you’re a beginner, Ruiz suggests, see a coach before you start working with intervals.

For this template, fit in 10 minutes of mobility work prior to each workout and five minutes after it. Also complete two or three sessions of full-body strength training per week. ­Because your primary goal is endurance, rather than strength, perform just one or two sets per strength exercise.