We need to stop thinking of doing cardio and instead think of moving and conditioning. Cardio tends to mean doing cardio machines at the gym and that’s a terribly boring way to work out. There are so many more options available to you today so why should you get stuck on a stupid machine?
But if you have to do some form of machine “cardio” and find it boring, here’s a way to make it go easier. Everyone needs a warmup, right? So choose a piece of cardio equipment that works the whole body, like the rower. The rower is the best piece of cardio equipment in a mainstream gym, by far. Look for a future article on that. So use the rower for your warmup by going for 20:00. Start out easy for 3-4:00 and then pick up the pace until you’re going pretty good at around the 10:00 mark. For the next 10:00, get a good pace and keep it up. At around 20:00, you’re done for now so get off the machine and go do your workout.
After you finish, go back to the rower for 10:00. This time, you will do intervals as a finisher. You’re really warm at the point so go hard right from the beginning. I suggest :30 as hard as possible and :30 of rest for 10:00. So you will row hard for the interval and then row slowly to recover. When you’re done with that, you should be done, period. Time to hit the showers.
What you’ve done here is 30:00 total time of “cardio” but you’ve used the time wisely, making it much less boring. The intervals at the end are a finisher that allows you to burn a lot of calories and this will get you much better results than just doing boring long, slow, distance (LSD) cardio, which is not very good for fat loss.