How to do cardio when you hate cardio (if you absolutely must)

The Question

Dear Swole Woman,

First of all I just want to thank you for everything you've ever written. You've changed the way I think about my body and about exercise, and I'm so grateful. I first got into lifting three years ago because your column was so inspiring. I loved that I only had to lift three or four days a week to feel stronger!

So for a long time I've done minimal cardio and just lifted a bunch and felt great. Once the pandemic hit and I was staying at home 24/7, I was fortunate to still use my little home gym, but also...I felt a very strong urge to fight someone. And I mean that literally. Once I was vaccinated, I joined a Brazilian jiu jitsu gym and it has been amazing. Strength training supports jiu jitsu because it helps protect my joints from injury and also makes it easier for me to pick people up and throw them down (I honestly can't recommend it enough), but I have found that my lack of cardio is holding me back. I often feel out of breath after only 10 minutes, so I have to take frequent breaks. It's the same awful burning-lungs feeling I got while running the mile in middle school.

As much as I hate cardio, it seems like I may actually need more cardio to accomplish my goal of getting better at grappling. A lot of people on the internet just recommend going to class more often for more conditioning, but unfortunately because of the gym's schedule I can only go three days a week. I know I should supplement with some kind of cardio outside of class, but I HATE running, and I'm a little reluctant to buy some kind of new equipment that I will also hate and possibly never use.

I could go on like...brisk walks? Because those are pleasant. But somehow I don't think that will have the impact that I need. What do you recommend? Should I just toughen up and get a jump rope? How does someone find the least-terrible cardio option? Is this a problem I can somehow solve by lifting more??

Sincerely, BJJ Jane

The Answer

So first of all, I want to be clear that, if you lift three or four times a week, you are more fit than most people you or I know. I’m a staunch believer that if you have only limited time to work out, that time should go lifting first in virtually every case. I don’t offer the advice below to undermine that.

But! Cardio fitness is its own kind of fitness. You will get some from lifting, but probably not all that you could ever want (unless you’re doing a very highly varied kind of training that’s probably more like Crossfit). The She’s A Beast Liftcord is duly aware of this, and many of them have taken to logging their “heart chores” there. Heart chore is a perfect term, because while many of us don’t feel much enthusiasm or attachment to cardio stuff, it is good for you, and can be a limiting factor if you’re doing high (8+) reps and sets and getting winded.

It sounds like you don’t need quite so much of the sustained, steady-state cardio designed mostly for using up energy, which is what we typically think of when we think of cardio. You want to build up your overall capacity for intensity, especially at the higher heart-rate end of things.

The thing to think about here is (smart, reasonable) overreach. You will get better at the thing you want to be good at by breaking it down into its parts and drilling them, faster than just doing more of the thing.

However! I will also more clearly point out two levers to pull:

• You do not have to go as hard and fast as humanly possible. It’s possible you hate cardio because of the sustained discomfort. I actually think this is where a more objective measurement of your effort, like heart rate, can come in handy: You are actually probably working harder than you think, a lot of the time!
• You can rest between sets as long as you want. (Yes, you can do fairly short “sets”! More on that in a moment.) It’s also possible you hate cardio because you imagine anything other than a fairly long slog is useless. Just as in lifting, you don’t have to go maximally hard all the time for eternity, until your body gives out. Regular, consistent doses of effort will get you very, very far.

First, a note on heart rates

I am not some great scholar of heart rates. But they are a pretty good analog for how much effort you are exerting. I find often that my heart rate is higher than I think, with less effort than I imagine I need (you might say this is because I'm out of shape, but even when in pretty good shape, this holds).

The idea for most exercise is to get you to about 50-85% of your max heart rate, according to your age. I find that a very normal, non-exerting walk gets me to 60-65% of my max heart rate. (I guess I do tend to to walk fast.) At a comfortable jog (we're talking like, 11-12 minute miles), I'm at 73-78%. Jogging up a steep hill, I'm at 85%.

I don't say this to make you feel bad if your your heart rate is activated differently than mine. I'm me, you're you, and we are at different places on different paths. Obviously I am exercise lady. But my general point is that I'm reaching a place of "benefiting my cardio fitness" often at a much lower exertion threshold than I need, versus than when I'm just guessing at whether I'm going hard enough. The whole point of this is to get a better sense of how much different activities exert you personally.

I also don't say this to, for instance, make you scared of your higher heart rate ranges. You want to be pushing your heart rate, kind of, if you are trying to build your cardio capacity! But if you are, for instance, sprinting so hard your heart's going 200 beats per minute and hating it, guess what (I'm virtually just speaking into the mirror now): You don't have to go that hard in order to get something out of what you're doing.

I recognize that measuring heart rate is not that easy. The old school way is to just put a finger on the spot on your neck where you can feel your pulse, and count the beats for 15 seconds, and multiply by 4 (or, count for the whole minute, but that takes forever). I think you could do it even with a cheapie pulse oximeter. You don't even have to do this all of the time, but checking your heart rate can be a good sanity check on how much you actually are exerting yourself, if you find the amount of exertion of cardio annoying.

Okay, now here are the approaches I would try, in order or least to most involved.

A lil dose of high-intensity, at the end of existing workouts

The current thinking around cardio training is that doing some high intensity activity after you’re fatigued, even in relatively small doses, has a significant impact on building tolerance for higher intensity (in running, this takes the form of “going faster”), more so than, for instance, “trying to run at a slightly faster pace for all of the miles of your training session.” This means, for instance, packing in a few all-out sprints to your 3 miles at 12 minutes a mile, instead of trying to run 3 miles at a consistent 10 minutes a mile. This appeals to me deeply, AND I’ve found it to work well. It's actually quite like lifting! I'm convinced they're stealing from our playbook, but I digress.