Is 30 minutes of cardio enough?
Rebecca Robinson says: It depends what you mean by ‘enough’. Five 30-minute cardio sessions every week meets the UK government’s recommendation of 150 minutes of physical activity per week, but what’s your goal?
If you’re simply trying to lead a healthy, active lifestyle, 30 minutes of steady-state cardio (exercising at a continuous effort) five times a week has been proven to improve both cardiovascular and lung function, as well as lower blood pressure and build heart strength.
If you’re trying to gain muscle, increase your endurance or lose excess fat, on the other hand, you might need to consider increasing the duration or the intensity of your workouts.
An increase in intensity (which has been proven to help build strength and burn fat) might then affect how long your session needs to be. For instance, a 15-minute HIIT session or speed run can be just as beneficial as a 30-minute steady-state walk, because you’ll be working harder and will therefore trigger the same benefits in a shorter space of time. Conversely, if you’re working towards a marathon, you might need to do more than half an hour per session as race day nears and your training levels up.
Whatever duration or intensity of cardio you do, it’s critical you bookend it with a warm-up and cool-down – even if that means spending 10 minutes warming up, 10 minutes doing the cardio and then 10 minutes cooling down.
A warm-up will make your cardio more impactful by getting blood flowing to your heart, lungs, muscles and tendons – this will then get things primed and help avoid stiffness, which means your technique will be better and you’re less likely to get injured.
The cool-down – ideally, stretching and gentle variations of the movements you did during the workout – helps quicken the process of releasing the build-up of lactic acid (the stuff that’s created when your body doesn’t have much oxygen during exercise, causing muscle cramping and aches), so you’ll recover quicker ahead of your next workout. I recommend incorporating two to three resistance training sessions alongside your cardio fixes to balance strength with heart and lung fitness. This will improve your overall health, while the strength work will also do good things for your cardio capacity – if you’ve got super-strong gluteal muscles and hamstrings, they’ll be able to carry more force, which will help with running, HIIT and most other forms of cardio. You’ll reap the broadest benefits with both forms of training, basically. To sum up, 30 minutes of cardio is good for you no matter what, but try not to make it the benchmark for all of your workouts. Your optimal workout length depends on a lot of different factors, from the time you have available to your current fitness level and the goals you’re hoping to achieve.