The 5 Secrets of Cardio Progression

Progressive overload.

If you’ve been lifting for some time, you’ve no doubt heard that phrase.

The brief explanation: Over time, you need to consistently add work to your muscles, beyond what they are used to doing.

This can take the form of going up in weight.   Or adding more reps.  Or adding more sets.  Or lifting more explosively.  Etc.  For more ideas, click here.

These, and other, techniques keep you progressing – your muscles have to get bigger in order to accomplish the added work.  And bigger muscles can be progressively overloaded more.  And they in turn get bigger.  It’s a virtuous circle!

[Another technique for consistently making progress involves switching your routine itself periodically, but that’s a different post…]

My point being that you

a)    Hear about progressive improvement in weight training a lot.

b)    Have several techniques at your disposal to accomplish it.

Even if you are saying to yourself, “I’ve got the right amount of muscle now, I don’t need to gain any more,” then you need progressive overload (and periodization) just to prevent muscle loss.  Otherwise, in a few years you are going to see less and less muscle mass due to sarcopenia.

But What About Cardio?

How do you keep progressing in your cardio?

I mean, if your body will reach a sort of homeostasis with weight training unless you continually force it out of its comfort zone, won’t that happen with cardio too?

The short answer is yes, but it’s more subtle.

See, it all starts with goals.

Why are you lifting weights?

Probably to gain more muscle mass.  And that’s really hard to do.  As I’ve written before, gaining muscle is much harder than losing fat.

Which brings me to “why are you doing cardio?”

Chances are, it’s to lose fat (or worse, to lose “weight” – ughh – please don’t ever use that phrase, “lose weight”).

Sure, for some of you it’s to build endurance.  Or compete.  Or you simply love running.

But most you have it tied to the calories it burns and the impact on your metabolism.

And make no mistake, you will reach a point where doing the same cardio week after week will stop producing fat loss.  Your body will adapt.

How To “Progressively Overload” Your Cardio Training

I often get people asking me for specifics on what cardio they should do.  How long, how fast, how far, how intense, etc.  That’s somewhat akin to asking me “How much weight should I lift?”

There’s no way I can answer that without being your trainer.  Even then, I’d want to understand your overall goals first.

But with lifting, we have the guiding principle of “progressive overload”.  So I can answer “How much should I lift?” with “Assuming that last week you lifted as much as you could for the program you are on, then this week you should lift just a tiny bit heavier weight.”

So how do we answer the question about “how far/fast/often/intense should my cardio be?”?

Let’s think about what might be in those steps.

First of all we want to break things out into steady state cardio versus interval cardio, and I’m not going to get into which one is better or worst at this point.

1. Duration

But, in both cases, you’ve got time as a factor. Increasing your time week after week is progression.

For intervals it gets more complicated because you could increase your overall time, or you could just increase the time you run at the slow pace and keep the high pace constant.  For example, each week do the slow intervals for 1 minute longer.  Or you could keep the slow pace time constant and increase the high pace in terms of the duration of each of the intervals.  For example, adding 10 seconds every week to each fast pace period.

In either case,  I would only increase about 10 to 15 % each week.

2. Distance

Somewhat related to duration is distance.  So increasing the distance that you are running is another way to progress, for whatever cardio you are doing. If you go 3 miles this week for each run, increase that to 3.25 miles next week.  One caution:  I would only increase about 10 to 15 % each week.

3. Intensity

Then the next thing for both cases is the intensity, so you’d keep the duration the same but the actual intensity could be increasing. For example, if right now you’re  running 3 miles and you’re doing it at an 11-minute pace, then you could increase that to a 10 minute 30 second pace.  That’s more intense.

And with intervals the same applies.  You could increase the speed of your fast periods, or increase the speed of your slow periods (though I’d recommend keeping the slow periods pretty slow).

Usually, people talk about perceived excursion on a scale of 1 to 10.   So if your fast periods now are at a 70% of your fastest bear-fleeing run, then that’s a 7.  Maybe next week you increase that to an 8.

Or, of course, go to the ultimate interval intensity and that’s HIIT.

4. Hills

Another thing to think about with intensity is hills. So for example if you’re on a treadmill, you can increase intensity over time by slightly increasing the incline of the treadmill.

5. Frequency

Our last progression tactic is to increase the frequency.  If you are running twice a week now, you could add a third day.  But I’m not sure I would recommend increasing the frequency beyond 3, maybe a maximum 4 cardio sessions a week if you are really trying to shed fat and aren’t worried about losing some muscle too.  Otherwise you’ll have too much of a challenge keeping up your muscle mass.  (As you know, having a lean muscular look is a focus here at WFN.)

Avoid Regression

A final thing you want to be thinking about is making sure you don’t do regression. Meaning, as you start losing weight, that’s less weight that you’re carrying around. That means less work and thus a form of regression.

So as you are losing weight, especially if you are starting off really fat, you might find that you hit a plateau and you stop losing the fat because your regular routine isn’t actually burning as many calories.  This affect is small, but still exists.

You could of course start adding weight, like with a weight vest.  That’s a form of intensity and progression.

…………………………

Do you have any secret progression tactics you’d like to add?

Just starting out with weightlifting? Want to get bigger muscles this winter?
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Related posts:

1. 10 Ways to Achieve Resistance Progression
2. 2 Cardio Mistakes You’re Still Making
3. Steady State Cardio 5 X More Effective Than HIIT????

Tags: cardio