Welcome to the Get Fit Guys, quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up.

My name is Ben Greenfield. I'm the Get Fit Guy. And in today's episode, I am going to be giving

you part two of my series on The Perfect Workout for 2017.

In last week's episode, you discovered how to intelligently and properly structure things like strength, speed, and power training into a perfect workout plan.

Now, I would highly recommend you go back and check that one out.

It's at quick and dirty tips.com, episode number 320.

Now, unless you're a football lineman, for example, you'll still

need to include additional training modalities to have a truly perfect training program that

targets every component of your body, brain, and nervous system. So let's pick up where we left

off and dive into the next component of training, cardio. As you learned in my

episode, does weight training count as cardio? A lot of the strength and power training

methods you learned in last week's episode will train your cardiovascular system. But if you're

an athlete, you want to work on fitness parameters like the O2 max or lactate threshold or mitochondrial density

or fat burning efficiency or you're training for some kind of an event like a triathlon, an obstacle

race, etc. Then using bicycling, running, elliptical trainer, rowing, swimming, or any other

cardio mode of choice, you should actually do the following, preferably on Mondays and Thursdays, which would be the same days that you do your strength training.

Do five, four-minute hard efforts with full recoveries between each.

That's one option.

Another option is four to six 30-second sprints with full two to four minutes of recovery after each.

Now, those are a couple of the cardio options that have been shown to give the most bang for the buck when it comes to cardiovascular interval training.

The only one I'd consider throwing in there would be if you didn't want to do the four-minute hard efforts or the 30-second sprints would be one to two to bad a sets, where you do four total

minutes of 20 seconds really hard and then 10 seconds easy. Either way, you just have a few different

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