Make Your Cardio Sessions a Competition

Raise your hand if you look forward to cardio.  My hand is down.  Raise your hand if you are competitive.  My hand is up.  Actually, my hand is WAY up in the air.  The idea of competing always gets my blood flowin’.  I don’t care whether it is a board game, basketball, or, “I’ll give you $5 if you can name 7 movies with Denzel Washington in them in 15 seconds or less.  GO!”  Now that is fun, I look forward to anything that involves competition.  As a matter of fact, the majority of my day involves some kind of competition…  when I drive to the gym; “over/under on how many minutes it will take me to get there?”  Of course, being the model-citizen that I am, I make sure to follow the rules of the road in my attempt to “win.”  Carson and I play this game quite often; “Carson, over/under on when your mom will get home?”  And through experience, here is how I set the line; whatever I think the normal time would be that she would be walking through the door, I multiply times 3.  So, if she is coming home from the grocery store and 15 minutes sounds about right, I set the over/under at 45 minutes.  Women!  What?  I love y’all, but you take a long time to do schtuff.

I could go on and on with examples of things that I do throughout the day that make me not-so-normal, but I think you get the point.  Back to competitive cardio…

My Day At The Field

On Sunday I decided to suck it up and head to a local field to get some conditioning work in.  It is a beautiful “field turf” field with lines all over the place.  My goal was to find two lines that looked like it would take me about 15-20 seconds to run.  So I went with two yellow lines and gave it a try.  I told myself to run at about 85% intensity on set 1, and from there I just timed how long it took me to get from one yellow line to the next.  100% would be like I was running from a hungry grizzly bear.

So, this first sprint was fast, but not quite all-out.  It ended up to be a 17-second sprint.  I estimate it was about  300 meters .***  I then rested twice as long on every set.  So, 34 seconds of rest  (a 2:1 rest:work ratio).  My goal was to see how many sets I could get in before hitting the 18-second mark on any sprint.  I ended up getting 8 sets at 17 seconds or less, with set #9 taking me 18 seconds.  I then called it a day.  And I’ll tell you what, I’m actually looking forward to my next cardio session.  Not because I enjoy cardio, but because can’t wait to attempt to beat my numbers. 

Bottom line, there are ways to make cardio “fun.”  Making your cardio sessions a competition is the best way to make sure that you, 1) actually get your cardio in, and 2) encourage you to make progress with each session, getting you one step closer to your goals.  So, get that notebook out, record your results and try to beat your numbers each and every time!

***More like 150 meters.