How to Determine the Frequency of Your Cardio Workouts

The frequency of your cardio workouts depends on your health and your fitness goals. Follow these steps to determine how often you should be hitting the gym.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Determine the Frequency of Your New Cardio Workout Program

1. Set attainable goals. If you decide on Memorial Day that you want to lose 30 pounds by the Fourth of July, you're setting yourself up for failure no matter how frequently you workout.

2. Start a new fitness program with a workout frequency of about three days a week. If you haven't exercised in years, you don't want to jump right into a plan that puts you at the gym almost everyday. This is a recipe for disaster because your muscles, bones, tendons and ligaments may not be used to this amount of stress and you can easily injure yourself.

3. Increase your cardio workout frequency to four days per week after two to three weeks of workout if you feel good. If you determine that you are feeling good and your body has adjusted to the increased strain you're putting on it, you should be able to go to four days a week fairly easily.

4. Maintain a four day per week frequency for at least one month or longer. After you've been working out four days per week regularly for one to two months, you can increase the frequency to five days per week.

5. Don't exceed five days of workout per week. Some fitness pros say that six days per week is OK, but remember that rest is an essential component of any fitness plan. Your muscles, heart and skeleton need time to recover after a workout so two days of rest per week is recommended.

Tips & Warnings

• Combine weight training with your cardio workout for better results. People trying to lose weight often skip weight training, but muscle fiber requires more energy to maintain, thus the more muscle you have, the more calories your body will burn.

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on 8/9/2008 Polar F11 heart rate monitor comes with a feature that actually does the workout planning for you. The plan takes into account your current fitness, which can be measured by the monitor itself (Polar Fitness Test). What it then does is to ask you how much time you have got for training per week, and it comes up with suggestions on the weekly number of training sessions, the duration, calorie (that you should burn) and intensity of each session. Instead of you doing the detailed planning, the Polar F11 does it all for you.

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