Don’t sell cardio short when setting up your exercise routine

Over the past year I’ve taken an interest in getting strong, which means I’ve done more bodyweight workouts and even lifted a weight now and then at my local fitness center. This is a 180-degree turn for someone who has loudly and consistently declared how much she despises the gym.

I had good reasons: mainly that the gym is a great place to go to pick up on everyone else’s — heavily exerted — germs, get profoundly bored, and associate exercise with grueling, unpleasant work.

I dislike the sticky surfaces. I don’t like the bleeping. I miss the wind on my face. Navigating an indoor space with others is awkward.

All that said, I’ve found myself appreciating and even enjoying the gym now that it has a clearer purpose for me. I don’t go there for cardio, although it’s a nice option if it feels too punishing to go outside. I go there to use their equipment: to lift and pull stuff; to swing a kettlebell around, and sometimes slam a heavy, weighted sack against a wall — apparently it’s a core exercise.

I like the SkiErg because it throws my heart rate into high gear, fast, and leaves me with a spinning, giddy feeling. I like trying chin ups, particularly with bands under my feet. And, I even do simple bodyweight exercises there, because it’s a space and time that exists just for me to focus on strength. When I peel off from work to go over to the gym, it’s because I’m investing that time and energy in myself. It’s a nice attention diversion, and I enjoy tracking my progress and feeling myself getting stronger.

It’s particularly nice when the entire sky repeatedly dumps snow on everyone throughout oh, say, December 2022 and I don’t have a snow blower or plow service. For the first time last year, I noticed that shoveling was actually a viable workout. Yes, I got sore, but it didn’t wreck me like years past. I credit that to my new strength training practice.

With this new practice, I’ve paid closer attention to strength training guidance and motivation through reading articles, following accounts on social media, listening to podcasts, and talking with friends and acquaintances who are also into fitness.

I’ve noticed something strange: cardio is getting a bad rap.

The rhetoric is something like: sure, cardio’s good for your heart, blah blah blah. Do it sometimes. But your best bet is progression in your strength training. Also, walk more.

The subtext, and sometimes the in-your-face text is that exercise is mostly about weight loss and how one looks. Sure, sometimes there’s a nod to “how you’ll feel when you’ve reached your goals,” but I don’t wholly buy that — more in a minute.

In some ways, cardio deserves the backlash. I understand why the pendulum swung against it: we’ve collectively overdone it. I have oodles of my own experience abusing cardio exercise in an effort to offset eating and manage my weight, and I can think of countless — especially, but not only by a long shot — female friends who have done the same. Wedding coming up? This elliptical machine is your new hobby.

This ties back to my former dislike of the gym: it was not a fun place to develop a habit around cardiovascular exercise because, for me, it wasn’t particularly rewarding. There are so many areas of my life that require discipline and work. While I liked the effects of moving my body — the sense of accomplishment, change of pace in my daily life, physical fitness gains, and at that point, weight loss — at the gym on a treadmill, elliptical, or stationary bike I felt like a hamster on a wheel.

It was work, and I came to dread it.

But eventually, I took my cardio to the streets and the trail and discovered that by pairing up fitness with being outside, it at least partially negated the work part of exercising. I discovered that by taking in new scenery as I ran, hiked, or biked; by feeling fresh air on my face, by running up an actual hill — cue Kate Bush — I built in reward in the form of joy and discovery. Over time, cardio became a positive habit. Yes, it was still work and still is, but the payoff was always — always — greater than the effort it took, simply because when I stopped going outside to exercise, I felt and functioned more poorly in my life in general.

Put simply, how a running mentor’s eight-year-old daughter once put it to her: “Mommy, when you don’t run, you get stupid.”

Slowly, I cultivated a fitness habit that veered away from my former — undiagnosed — disordered approach; exercise became its own practice and reward that supported me as a person.

I’ve been thinking about this as I develop my own hybrid approach to both cardiovascular fitness and strength training, taking the advice and guidance I can from “muscle mass” world while continuing to do the things I love, like run, hike, bike, ski, and more outdoors.

People find respite, support, and joy in different ways. Surely, many people sincerely love the gym, and I don’t begrudge them that. I’m sure there are many folks who are happy to focus primarily on building their strength, tossing in a cardio workout here and there to throw their heart a bone.

For me, outdoor cardio exercise has become so much more than just a fitness practice. It is that, of course. But it also helps — literally — ground me in my own life. Sometimes I need to jack my heart rate up and keep it high in order to have a physical experience of stress I can control and survive, which helps put other stressors in my life in perspective and, in the aggregate, actually lowers my heart rate. Can you tell I just got a watch for Christmas? Lots of data!

It helps me sleep. It helps me eat well, because when I exercise I want to feel good, which in turn requires that I fuel my body properly, kindly, and wholly. It truly does make me smarter, by resetting my full body and giving me more peace when I’m not exercising to make and execute decisions.

In short, cardio helps me keep up with myself. While I work on getting stronger, I am keeping this practice as an intrinsic part of life, and for anyone with whom this resonates, I encourage you to continue and grow that part of yours, too. No matter what the fitness gurus and trends are saying.