How To Start Cardio For Beginners (Without Burning Out in a Week)

Cardio for beginners, no matter if you choose, running, biking, inline skating or dancing the can-can all rely on the same principles: get a check-up, find what you like to do, don’t waste money on equipment and start slow.

How To Start Cardio: Safety First

The first thing to do before you start cardio in any form is to check your health status with your doctor.

This concerns everyone, not only people with known health problems. You might have a condition you don’t know about and it would be stupid to endanger your health with something supposed to make it better.

Not to mention you are reading this advice on some guy’s site who sat down to find his way to lose weight and gain muscle, but is going by a handle so ridiculous you wouldn’t mention it in civilized company and who has no qualifications whatsoever to give you advice at all. Don’t make “I read it on the internet” your epitaph. 

Choose Beginner Cardio Equipment

Depending on the activity you picked, you need the right cardio equipment to do it. For running that’s the right shoes, for cycling a suitable bike etc. It’s beyond the scope of this article to explain the right choices in detail, but for beginners it’s wisest to not spend too much money.

Garages and basements are full of expensive carbon fiber bikes, running shoes suitable for Olympic competitions, cross-trainers that take your pulse and write your emails (not yet, I think) and more cardio paraphernalia. Having it seemed a great idea when people decided to get fit. But when the early enthusiasm wore out it all ended up neglected. The right time to get out the big bucks and go for serious gear is when you know what activity really suits you.

To start cardio get cheap running shoes that fit and feel comfortable. Borrow a bike for the first cycling tours etc. You get the drift.

At The Beginning, Slow Cardio Wins Your Race

Once you have decided for an activity and got simple equipment to do it, starting always, always, always comes down to the same thing: Take. It. Easy. This goes for the number of training sessions per week and how long and exhausting you make each.

Many newbie trainees, especially runners-to-be, tend to take the “now you cycle / run / skate” part of any beginner cardio instructions as “do it as often and as fast as you can for as long as possible.” The only results you get out of that are burning out and risking an injury on top.

In the beginning, two or three sessions per week for half an hour (eg. Mondays – Wednesdays – Fridays) at low to moderate intensity, which we’ll get to in a second, will suffice. Not feeling totally exhausted also makes you look forward to your next session.

Warming Up For Cardio

Now we get practical. Each of your sessions starts with warming up, which means spending the first two or three minutes with the activity you are going to do, but at low intensity. For runners this means swift walking, for cyclists, inline skaters and others to do low speeds. This will increase blood flow to your muscles and prepare them for the “live” task.

Loads of people believe in stretching before cardio, but in many cases that does more bad than good, as stretching a cold muscle can cause injuries. Imagine trying to bend a frozen piece of butter or a warm one. Warming up with the activity you actually want to do is more recommendable.

Ok, You Start Cardio For Real

After this warm-up phase is over, do the real thing. Which is where we have to talk about intensity. You let your intensity go too high, you may burn out or injure yourself, as said above. You stay too low and you won’t see any training effect.

Difficult, isn’t it? Here’s a simple rule of thumb: do your cardio with intensity, but at a rate where you can still hold a conversation.

If you want to be a bit more exact about it:

• Measure your pulse by taking a watch with you and count how many times you feel your pulse within 15 seconds.
• Take that number times four and compare it to your maximum heart rate, which you roughly calculate with the formula 220 – your age.
• Aim for 50 – 75 percent of that number.

If, for example, you are 20 years old, then your maximum is 200 and your pulse during cardio should be 100 – 150 beats per minute.

Half An Hour, Are You Crazy?

Chances are that when you are very out of shape, even this intensity will prove difficult to do for half an hour. Which is perfectly ok and was the same for me. When I started I felt like having paramedics close at hand at any given point would be a good idea.

When you are getting mucho out of breath and your heart feels like an internal machine gun operated by a maniac, slow down. Don’t stop, because that makes it harder to get going again. Simply switch back to swift walking (for runners) or low speeds (if you do inline skating, cycling etc.). Let your breath come back and your pulse go down. When you feel you are out of the yellow alert zone, go back to the speed from before. Repeat this as often as is necessary to get your half hour session done.

When I picked up running, back when I was 196 lbs (89 kg), my running stretches were from here to the next street corner and the breaks from, well, considerably longer. Trust me, the ratio between actual cardio and where-is-my-breath will reverse and finally you will be able to do a continuous half hour session. When it happened to me, it felt like I had climbed Mount Everest, discovered America and invented the wheel.

At The End, Decelerate

At the end of your session, don’t simply stop, but do what you did at the beginning: continue for two to three minutes at low speed. If you heart is at 170 bpm and you simply stop, your body has trouble keeping your blood pressure up and you may faint.

Let’s Summarize

Here are all steps on how to start cardio in summary:

• Get a check-up by your doctor before you start
• Buy cheap gear to find out what you enjoy doing
• At the beginning, go for 2 -3 sessions per week, half an hour each
• Start each at low intensity to warm up
• Then go for medium intensity, but switch to low intensity as often as needed
• Finish each session with low intensity to slowly let heart beat and blood pressure adjust

Frequently Asked Questions

How much cardio should a beginner do per week?

Two or three sessions of 30 minutes is the right starting point. Not more. Your muscles, tendons, and cardiovascular system all need time to adapt between sessions. If you go out there five, six, seven days a week because you “should,” you’ll be done in ten days with a shin splint and maybe a pulled hamstring. Add more only when the current amount feels easy.

Can I do cardio every day as a beginner?

You shouldn’t. Daily cardio sounds like the right thing to do, but for someone who has not exercised in a while it’s the fastest route to injuries and hating the activity. Your body needs recovery days the same way a car engine needs to cool down between pulls. Two or three days is the floor, not the ceiling you’re supposed to max out.

Is running bad for your knees?

Is being overweight bad for your knees? Running is like any other activity that stresses the leg joints, especially the knees. What ruins knees in runners is doing the same repetitive stress on the same joints for months wih no  variation. If running is your thing, do it, but do the occasional low-impact option (cycling, swimming, rowing) here and then. If you are overweight and your knees are already stressed, walking is a perfectly valid cardio exercise when you’re starting from zero.

Should I do cardio before or after weights?

If your goal is building muscle, do weights first, cardio second. If your goal is weight loss or general fitness, the order matters less than whether you actually do both. There’s a whole article on this here: Cardio Or Weights First?. The short version: you can’t do your best lifting if you’re already winded, but you can still get a decent cardio session in after a workout. What matters is what matters most to you.

What’s the easiest cardio to start with?

Walking. I’m not joking. If you’ve been on the couch for a decade year, a 30-minute brisk walk is a legitimate cardio session. It’s low-impact, you can do it anywhere, you don’t need equipment, and you can talk the entire time (which means you’re at the right intensity). Once 30 minutes of brisk walking feels boring, you’re on your way to more.

How do I know if I’m doing too much?

The talk test from the article above is your first check. But beyond that: if you’re sore for more than a couple of days, if you’re dreading the next session instead of feeling slightly looking forward to it, if your sleep got weird: that’s your body’s locomotion and accounting departments filing a complaint to upper management. You don’t need to white-knuckle through it. Scale back one session, give it a few days, come back at the level that felt fine. Cardio is a habit you’re building, not a punishment you’re serving.

You Can Do It!

There you are: this is all a beginner needs to start cardio. And you too can do it. Seven years ago, I was one of the worst couch potatoes possible and would have thought it insane to seriously contemplate doing this.

Pictures courtesy of Bruno Collinet and Mike Baird.