The Dark Art of Gauging Cardio Progress
from reddit:
I got a stupid as shit problem that's bugging me.
Bro, shit problems are my WHEELHOUSE.
How do you measure progress on cardio machines? The reason why I ask is that my main priority is weight loss, and second is building muscle. I've been consistently doing HIIT type workouts for 1.5 years now. The more weight I lose, the less my hard work reflects on the machine. I understand I have less mass. I am also well aware to not get hung up on calories burned. But it's disheartening as shit to feel like I'm doing worse every week because I burn less. I measure my heart rate and go by the recommended zones but other than that it doesn't feel like I'm really progressing. Is there a better way to measure this? I push myself to the brink of my capabilities which is ultimately the goal but it just sucks not seeing the reflection of that.
Ah, yes. The measuring of progress on a treadmill.
Weightlifting progress is easy to measure: Did I lift a little bit more today than I did last time? Alright, I’m making progress. Even if it’s slight, maybe you deadlifted the exact same amount as last time for reps and then added 1 pound for 1 rep, that’s progress, boom, you’re done.
Cardio/conditioning progress is harder to gauge. Because there are so many factors.
But I’m here to help.
I can hear your sighs of relief from here.
The Scenario
For the sake of simplicity, we’ll say you’re using a treadmill with a hear rate monitor, and it’s one where you can program your bodyweight in as well. That way, we’re all talking about the same thing, and that’s probably the easiest version to make an example of.
Let’s not get caught up in ALL the details. Yes, someone who is 6’5” and someone who is 5’1” will take a really different number of strides and do a different amount of work. But that’s getting more academic than we need to here, eh?
Just picture, well, this:
Factor: Speed
This one’s pretty easy, right? If you’re going faster, over the same distance, you’re making progress. If you’re going slower than you did last time, not progress.
Moving on!
Factor: Distance
If you run a longer distance, you’ve made more progress…maybe.
Much like the movie Tenet, this gets complicated quickly.
Let’s say you do two workouts: Workout A is a 1-mile run, Workout B is a 1.5-mile run.
Workout B would seem to be “more,” but we have to consider the first factor, speed.
Workout A might be shorter, but if it’s a lot more intense, if you’re going nowhere on that treadmill but going there MUCH faster, you might burn more calories (or require more energy) than you will running 1.5 miles at an easy jog.
You can’t divorce speed from distance.
Factor: Calories/Watts/METS
These three factors attempt to measure pretty much the same thing: How much energy is being used/generated by the athlete. Yes, I’m calling you an athlete now. Because you’re working out the biggest muscle in your body by reading this: Your Brain (editor’s note: the brain is not a muscle).
Let’s switch workouts briefly to talk about these force calculations. Let’s say you’re carrying a heavy box.
If you carry a 50 lb box for 1 minute and cover the same distance as someone carrying a 100 lb box for the same distance over the same period of time, you will have burned fewer calories, generated less power, and generally “done less” than the person who carried the 100 lb box.
If there was a rating of the calories required, your 50 lb. box carry would be less than the 100 lb. box carry.
The same idea applies to a treadmill: the 225 lb. person who does the same treadmill workout as a 175 lb. person will burn more calories because it requires more energy to move 225 lbs. over the same distance, at the same speed, than it requires to move 175 lbs. the same speed/distance.
Here’s Where It Gets Sweaty
Normally I’d say “sticky” to talk about something complicated, but you’ve been on the treadmill for a couple minutes now, so let’s be real.
If you’ve lost 35 lbs. by running on the treadmill, you might hit a point where your treadmill readout is telling you that you’re burning fewer calories than you were when you started!
I’m going backwards!?
Consider What This Means
It’s not necessarily bad to burn fewer calories in a workout than you once did.
If you began your Fitness Journey while carrying a lot more weight, and now you’re closer to where you’d like to be, consider that burning fewer calories to do “the same” workout is a reflection of your body operating closer to the way it should.
Your body requiring X calories to run 2 miles, instead of Y, can be a sign that your body is now able to operate efficiently. You’re not carrying that extra box, know what I mean?
Embrace the Plateau
As you get more fit, your progress slows down.
As a weightlifting example, you might be able to add 5 lbs. to your deadlift every workout when you’re starting out. But as you get stronger, you might have to add 5 lbs every other workout. You might have to add 2.5 lbs. per week. While the overall amount you’re lifting is higher, your increases will be lower and lower.
If you graphed out your progress, before too long, your curve starts to flatten out and *gasp* plateau.
And I think, especially with conditioning like treadmilling, it’s okay to plateau.
People talk about plateaus like they’re this awful, dreaded thing, but if you’re a normal-ass person doing normal-ass things, as opposed to being a super athlete or a person who thinks of fitness as a primary focus in their life, hey, if you run a 25-minute 5K, and that’s where you want to be, there’s no reason not to stay there. You might hit a point where you’re treadmilling, and you’re not improving, just maintaining.
And for a lot of folks, that’s a great place to be.
It’s a mindset switch, but consider that when you started, you wanted to be where you are right now. And now that you’re here, you can make a choice to move ahead, or you can choose to hang out here for a while.
There’s no shame, nothing wrong with hanging out in the place you really want to be.
Tracking Early Progress: The Blended Approach
I really recommend, for runners starting out (or people working on their conditioning), that you take a blended approach to measuring your progress. Because while it’s good to keep track of how you’re doing, it’s not as critical as DOING the thing you’re tracking.
Start by running an amount of time. Don’t worry about distance right away. Don’t plan your run based on distance, plan it based on how much time you want to spend on the road, and do a simple out and back, turning around when you hit the halfway mark in terms of time. Or, if you’re on a treadmill, set it up for a certain amount of time, and just go with how you feel.
Aim for 20 minutes. If you aren’t at the place where you can jog 20 minutes without stopping, you don’t need to worry about your speed or any other factors yet. Just work at it until that 20 minutes is fairly easy. It might take a few weeks, it might take a few months, just keep at it.
The Advanced Blended Approach
When you get to the level where you can knock out 20 minutes pretty consistently, then you can consider blending higher intensity, higher mileage, and longer time duration runs together to make a tasty run stew.
Ugh, “run stew” definitely sound like a disgusting dish. Why would I even say that?
Upping the intensity is easy: incline will do it. Or, periods of faster running. It’s not hard to manage on a treadmill, a little tougher on the road, but it’s not rocket science, just pick a route with a hill.
But when you do a higher-intensity day, do a lower mileage, shorter time run.
Upping the mileage is easy: go 10% further than you’ve gone before. If you’re knocking out 3-mile runs, 3.3 is where you can go next. If you feel like running a little harder, do it. My trick with this is that I don’t let myself go hard at the beginning, but if I’m feeling great halfway through or so, I can go a bit faster if I want.
Upping the time is easy, too: If you’re running 30 minutes consistently, today you run 33. Maybe you cover a bit more distance, maybe not.
Perhaps You Noticed
That I did not talk about METS or calories or watts anywhere in this discussion of progress. Look at you, you super sleuth!
That’s because I don’t think those are great ways to measure your fitness progress. Because they’re too micro.
When you’re working on your cardiovascular conditioning, there are SO MANY factors that taking micro measurements gives you the illusion of accuracy, but from day to day, it doesn’t work.
For example, if you did the EXACT same workout in super different temperatures, which one burned more calories?
It might’ve been the workout on the 90-degree day because you felt more limber and were able to run faster from the very start. It might’ve been on the 20-degree day because you were wearing an extra 5 lbs. of clothing.
And the real truth is that micromanaging your workouts on the caloric level is for Olympic track athletes, not people with jobs who run for fun or for fitness.
Why This Micro Data Sucks
If someone did a study of the effects of eating pizza (conclusion: happiness), and they only studied two people, you couldn’t really learn much from the data, right?
But if they studied 200 people, we’d be getting closer.
2,000 people, a little closer.
20,000 people, and we’d have something reasonably worth considering.
If you’ve done 20 runs, single bad days or great days will skew your data wildly. Maybe you slept like shit one night, maybe you where hung over, maybe you got off work early and had lots of energy, whatever the cause, one data piece out of 20 can really throw things off a lot.
Now consider that 200 runs comes after a full year of running every other day. Meaning it would take a full year of pretty consistent running to put together enough data to give you a crappy dataset.
It would take you 10 years to put together a dataset that would be moderately useful.
Now, I don’t say this to discourage you from running or from keeping track of this stuff. What I mean to say is that chaining yourself to the small numbers fairly early on is going to result in you spending a lot of time pouring over data that really isn’t all that meaningful.
The Other Factor You Can Ignore Now, And Maybe Forever
There is A LOT of talk about heart rate zones out there, and while I think this is a great tool for beyond-novice trainees, I think it ends up being too much for beginners.
In my opinion, the time to concern yourself with heart rate is once you’ve reached the point you can run 20 to 30 minutes without stopping, and it’s not too bad. This is the point when you might consider using a watch or other tool to measure your heart rate. You can also just stop and take your pulse, which should be pretty easy to do when you’re running.
Heart rate can be a useful tool to help beginning trainees who’ve never run with a team or a group. Running is hard, and it can be deceptive: You might be very capable of running quite a bit faster with some training. Heart rate can be good info that says, “Hey, you’re not dying, even though it feels like it.”
But that’s further down the road, when you want to start thinking about running harder and faster as opposed to fitting into a pair of pants.
My Favorite Data Point
Enter races.
Seriously, run a 5K every month or so.
They’ll all be a little different, some tougher and hillier and shittier and better than others, but that’s okay.
See, you’re trying to be a real person in the real world, and the real world is not so exact. Most people don’t have an exact, dead-on fitness goal, more a way they want to feel. The way you feel running a 5K is a better measure of your progress than the treadmill’s readout.
You’ll have good races and bad, you’ll learn how to race better, and you’ll improve. It won’t be 100% linear, you’ll have setbacks, and that’s cool because you have another race in a few weeks.
Carts and Horses
When you get into a hobby, it’s naturally tempting to want to start out hard.
I wanted to draw, and the art supply store was my enemy. Pens and pencils and erasers and special sharpeners, brushes, inks—all this shit that I could buy that would probably make drawing more fun and help me get better.
But what I really needed to do, as a beginner, was just sit down and draw every day.
Getting really into the data on cardio machines is buying a $40 Japanese brush pen before you’ve drawn a single horse, horses being notoriously difficult to draw. Hell, you haven’t even drawn a cart yet, the cart coming before the horse in ONLY THE REALM OF DRAWING EDUCATION.
I need to wrap this up before I confuse myself. Confuse myself more.
Think of your cart, think of your horse.
Your cart can involve data, it can involve tracking progress, it can involve goals.
But don’t build that cart before you’re running consistently, before you’re ready to strap in and pull that cart along. You horse, you.