If you are a cardio junkie that usually sticks to running or some other type of steady state cardio (keeping your heart rate at a constant Beats Per Minute for vast majority of your workout) then you need to try interval training and this video is a great starting place. For those of you who know how effective interval training can be, you will love this combination of full body cardiovascular moves that will leave you tired and feeling accomplished.

Finding cardiovascular workouts that are fun can be challenging especially if your cardio of choice is running on a treadmill, turning the pedals over on a stationary bike or counting the seconds on an elliptical machine.  Most of the time, if you are at your local gym, the only way to make the time seem to go by more quickly is watching bad TV or reading a retiree magazine or a celebrity gossip magazine that is 6 months old, but still the seconds just seem to take twice as long to tick by. Even when you have the opportunity to run outside (which is by far better than in a gym in my opinion), after the 100th time you go around the same route you always take, steady state cardio can get to you no matter where or how you do it.

Put that on top of the fact that interval cardio can actually improve your overall cardiovascular function faster and more effectively than steady state cardio and there is hardly an excuse not to swap out. Oh… and did I mention that interval cardio - especially the way we do it with full body dynamic exercises, causes you to have to use so much concentration that the time seems to fly by.  So by this point this is sounding almost too good to be true but believe me after getting into interval training we now very rarely do steady state, it just seems too boring to bear after all of the unique and fun options that intervals have to offer.

This workout is a total routine in one. Starting with a gradual cardiovascular warm up, followed by an intense interval cardio routine that will test you physically and mentally. When you are just about ready to quit, we have a relaxing cool down and stretch routine to sooth those tired muscles. This entire routine takes 56 minutes but because of the intense full body exercises and the intervals that have you rapidly changing from one move to another you will feel like it takes half the time. The good news is that it definitely does not burn half the calories. In fact you will burn far more calories with this routine than with a steady state cardio workout of the same length.

This workout burns 6 calories per minute on the low end and 11 calories per minute on the high end. This gives you a total burn range of 330 to 636 calories for this 56 minutes workout.  Just remember that there are a lot of factors that go into how many calories you will burn with this video one of the most important of which is how hard you push yourself. If you put the effort in you can easily push towards the higher end of this range.

Workout Structure:
This is a no equipment at home cardiovascular workout that you can do in your own living room. If you want to make it more difficult, you can add dumbbells to many of these exercises.

Warm Up:
Each exercise is done for 30 seconds, with the intention of slowly increasing your heart rate and core temperature to prepare your body for the more intense exercises to follow.

Workout:
In this section you will be going through an interval of 40 seconds of activity with 15 seconds of rest. Every interval you will switch between two motions in an AB, AB format. There are 9 separate groups to go through in this section 8 of which are 3 and 1/2 minutes and the last group which is 7 minutes in length.

Cool Down:
To finish off we will take you through a cool down and stretch targeting the most used muscle groups and we will be holding each position and stretch for 20 seconds.