Cardio – 15 Minutes

After finishing the resistance training portion of your workout, take a one minute break to catch your breath, and then dive into cardio. Jump on an ellipse machine, precor, or treadmill, and start moving. The chart below gives a step by step guide to an interval cardio workout designed to maximize fat loss and cardiovascular benefits in a minimum of time invested. The numbers in brackets in the workout guide below refer to how hard you should push yourself on a scale of 1 to 10. Print this guide out, take it to the gym with you, and pop it on the machine you work out on. Before you start this program, we want to emphasize again the importance of the rest breaks. Taking full rest breaks during your workouts is critical to getting optimal results. Don't be tempted to cut the breaks short and dive back into the active portions of this workout before you're fully recovered.


                                                     ReEvolution Quick and Easy Cardio


1. Start Running at a medium pace (6 out of 10), and accelerate to a fast pace (8 out of 10) over the course of 2 minutes.

2.  Hold this fast pace (8 out of 10) for 2 minutes. Feel free to speed up (9 out of 10) and slow down (6 out of 10) every 30 seconds or so during this 2 minutes, trying to really push yourself and get seriously out of breath.

3.  Slow way down and catch your breath. Walk slowly (1 out of 10), or even stop moving entirely until you’ve fully recovered. As we mentioned above, taking breaks to recover fully during your workouts leads to better results, so don’t short change this break.

4.  After you’ve caught your breath, start running again at a medium pace, and accelerate to a fast run over one minute.

5.  Maintain a generally fast pace for 5 minutes (8 out of 10). To really rev your metabolism, try speeding up (9 out of 10) and slowing down (6 out of 10) every 45 seconds or so. You should stay seriously out of breath over the whole of this interval. Try upping the resistance on the ellipse or precor for 45 seconds, sprinting almost as fast as you can and getting totally winded, then scaling back for 30 seconds before repeating this cycle. After 5 minutes, slow way down (1 out of 10) or stop, and fully recover your breath before starting to move again.

6.  Depending on fatigue and time, repeat steps 4 and 5.

7. Stop moving, and sit down for a minute or two to recover before getting up and heading to the locker room to shower and change. 

8. The End

That's it. Your Quick and Easy workout is now complete, and you've gotten a thorough resistance training and cardiovascular workout in under 35 minutes. If you have the time, now is a great time for some stretching. See our Stretching Tutorial for a full body stretching guide.