Cardio: Not Too Hard and Not Too Easy

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Regularly doing cardio is one of the best investments that you can make in your health. Benefitting both mental and physical health, the benefits of regularly doing cardio are legion.

Besides rowing, one of my favorite forms of cardio is biking.

The just-right challenge is the key to optimizing the time that you spend doing cardio. I often see people working on the two extremes;


  • "Too easy." Many people spend hours per day being physically active, though they’re not optimizing the time that they’re investing. If you're not breathing hard and heating up, you can likely extract a lot more benefit from the time that you are investing. Even increasing your workload a little bit can make a significant difference in wellbeing.

  • "Too hard." For some people, they spend too much time in the “red” zone. Too much high-intensity cardio can lead to depletion, injury and increased levels of stress hormones and inflammation.

    • High-intensity cardio is important for developing capacity, though it’s generally best to spend a few minutes per week doing high intensity cardio.


While the best form of cardio is the one that you do, if you have a choice in the matter, I heartily recommend rowing. In this article, the benefits of rowing are outlined. I find it particularly interesting, given my interest in MDFL CARDIO, to see reason #9 mentioned.


While any movement can be accompanied by meditation, the rhythmic back & forth of rowing seems particularly conducive to the double dipping combination of cardio and meditation

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