New Year - New You. Day 6. Aerobic conditioning for weight-loss

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Training your heart to become stronger and your lungs to work more efficiently is basically why you must do structured and progressive cardio/aerobic training. There are many other benefits to being consistent with aerobic training, you feel better, you eliminate toxins quicker and you lose weight. Clearly there are many ways to train aerobically and I'm not re-inventing the wheel here, but for maximum impact and making the most of the short time allotted for exercise, I have come up with the following weekly aerobic training plan. It is important you get your head around this and don't do anything else until you have 2-3 weeks of aerobic training behind you. It will also give you well needed structure in the gym. There is plenty of time for weights and core and remember, exercise is for life and not just for post- Christmas.

Cardio Workout 1 - Long Cardiovascular

This can be on any piece of cardio kit you choose, you can even mix the pieces of kit up. The most important thing to remember is the level of intensity. You will be aiming for an hour of exercise at a RPE of 6/10- 6.5/10. I appreciate that you may not be able to do a full hour at this point, but aspire to it over time. If the resistance on the machines hasn't changed, but you suddenly feel the 6/10 become a 7-8/10, make a note of the time completed and look to add on two-three minutes every long session until you reach the full hour.
Cardio Workout 2 - Short Cardiovascular
Session two of the weekly cardio training is half the time of Cardio workout 1 and will not exceed 30 minutes. So, if for example your long cardio is at the 40 minutes point, session two needs to be just 20 minutes. What changes is the intensity of the workout.
You need to be working at a 7.5-8/10 intensity. This workout can be on any piece of cardio kit and can be achieved outdoors if needed.

Cardio Workout 3 - Interval Training
Session three is an interval training session and like session two it is half the time of session one the long cardio session. The time is broken up into equal amounts of intense working out and rest periods. There are many ways of structuring this, what is important is that when working on the intense part of training, is that you are working at a RPE of 8.5/10 - 9/10. Again, this can be on any piece of cardio kit and can be achieved outdoors if needed. To create extra intensity when walking you should use a hill or incline on the machine. A good place to start is to do two minutes work then two minutes rest. So, if you are running in your cardio workout 2 session at 10.0kmh, your interval training speed should be about 20% quicker, so 12.0kmh. Follow this with two minutes walking and repeat for the same total time as Cardio workout 2.
Broken down it will look like this, assuming you can only do 40 minutes in your Cardio Workout 1. Obviously this will be individual to you all.
Cardio workout 1= 40 x minutes jog at 9.2kmh.
Cardio workout 2= 20 x minutes run at 10.2 approximately 10% quicker than cardio workout 1.
Cardio workout 3= 20 x minutes intervals running at 12.00kmh for two minutes then 5.6kmh rest for two minutes. Repeat five times.
Once you have got to the hour in cardio workout 1 and 30mins in cardio workout 2, in cardio workout 3 you simply increase the speed in all the workouts