Bodyweight Cardio Workout

Posted: March 13, 2019

Cardiovascular training is an important part of developing your fitness. Doing things like sprints to escalate your heart rate, and steady state cardio to improve your aerobic capacity are both useful for your long term health and short term body goals. However, many of us are challenged for space and time to do cardio training. We don’t have a treadmill, rowing machine, or exercise bike at home, and we already spend a lot of our days at the gym doing resistance training or group fitness. This bodyweight cardio workout is designed to be done anywhere – your house, a hotel room, or on your next outdoor adventure. Think of it as your fast food for workouts.

Bodyweight Cardio: Warm-Up”

Before doing any type of workout, even ones without any resistance training involved, should begin with a full body warm up. It should also end with a little bit of a cool down and some mobility to help you recover for the next day.

The bodyweight cardio workout can be adapted to be longer or shorter, depending on your needs. You’ll do each station back to back to back, and repeat as many times as you’d like.

Set a four minute timer, and start moving. Do 10 reps of each exercise, moving at a moderate pace to let your body warm up appropriately.

  1. Jumping Jacks
  2. Air Squats (bodyweight squat, being sure to squat until your hip is below your knee)
  3. Leg Swings (forward and backward)
  4. Leg Swings (side to side, across your body)
  5. Front Lunges (5 per leg)

This warm up should take your legs through a full range of motion, and ensure your muscles are warmed up for the workout to follow.

Although burpees and jump squats are technically gymnastics movements (you moving your body through space – thanks for teaching us that, CrossFit) they are great at jacking up your heart rate and improving your cardio.

Each round of work will be thirty seconds long, followed by 30 seconds of rest. You will do each activity back to back to back, and then take a 2:00 break between rounds. You can pick your rounds for this bodyweight cardio workout. Four is the recommended number for a beginner, six for intermediate, and eight for a more advanced athlete.

This is a tough workout, so crank some good music, get ready to sweat, and HAVE FUN!

Bodyweight Cardio: Workout”

Perform an exercise for 30 seconds, then rest for 30 seconds before moving on to the next movement. Complete as many rounds as feels appropriate!

  1. Burpees
  2. Jump Squats
  3. Mountain climbers
  4. Jump Rope (or jumping jacks if you do not have a rope)
  5. Jumping Lunges (or regular lunges, if jumping is not in the cards for you)

<Rest 2 minutes>

Bodyweight Cardio: Cool Down

After doing that workout, you’re going to feel pretty spent, especially if you do all eight rounds! Rather than just going about your day and feeling terrible later, we recommend taking five minutes to do a cool down. For the first two minutes, simply walk around slowly, letting your heart rate come back down. Then, spend 1:00 per side doing the following stretches:

  1. Kneeling hamstring stretch
  2. Couch stretch (for your quadricep and hip flexor)
  3. Butterfly stretch

There you have it! You can do all of this in as little as 30 minutes (or shorter if you make the workout less rounds) and it will give you a great calorie burn plus a hit of those wonderful post workout endorphins.