How to Start Cardio Again Without Burning Out

Fuel Your Strength

Steph Gaudreau

Fitness, Health & Fitness, Nutrition

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 9 September 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For many women over 40, cardio brings up memories of the 90s and early 2000s – endless hours on the elliptical, chasing a smaller body, and pushing through with Red Bulls and salads. It was an era marked by toxic fitness culture, and the fallout left a lot of us burnt out, swearing off cardio completely. But now, with energy, stamina, and health markers changing in midlife, it might be time to take another look at how cardio fits into your life.

In this episode, we explore what it means to rebuild a healthier relationship with cardio. From my personal journey – burnout from endurance sports, swinging the pendulum into strength training, then finding my way back to cardio on my own terms – to practical ways you can ease it back into your routine, this conversation is about healing from old patterns and creating balance. You’ll also hear answers to common questions about what counts as cardio, how to tell if it’s moderate or vigorous, and how to weave it in with your lifting.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

Why so many women over 40 have a complicated history with cardio
The role of diet culture and body ideals in shaping our relationship with endurance exercise
How to reframe cardio as a supportive tool instead of punishment
Practical ways to bring conditioning back without burnout or dread
Guidelines for balancing cardio with strength training so both work together
Simple strategies for starting small and progressing over time

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Storytime. There are just some songs that you can remember exactly where you were when you first
0:07.5	heard it. One of those for me is Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana. I was at my grandmother's house
0:13.3	in her little den and I was watching MTV on her huge TV that used to be one of those that would sit on the floor and it had a big
0:23.6	wooden cabinet built around it. And I will never forget the first time I heard that song and just
0:29.0	wanted it in my brain forever. And here we are all these years later. Another one is Britney Spears.
0:35.8	Oops, I did it again. This came out when I was in college. And I remember
0:41.2	being in my dorm room and watching this and just thinking, there's something special about this song and
0:47.2	about this girl. And it was so catchy. The other day, I was playing this song on drums and realized,
0:53.9	yes, this song is indeed 25 years old.
0:57.9	And it got me thinking about this time of life and growing up in the 90s and the early
1:02.1	2000s and all the stuff that many of us did, like spending two or more hours at a time
1:10.2	on the elliptical machine, subsisting on not much more
1:15.7	than salad and Red Bull, or I guess if we were in the nightlife, Red Bull vodkas, and almost no
1:24.2	sleep endlessly engaged in the pursuit of trying to shrink ourselves down
1:30.8	into these progressively lower-wasted, low-rise jeans.
1:38.0	I think we can all agree that the 90s and the early 2000s were not a kind time for a lot of us in going through
1:47.4	these different phases of dieting and trying to whittle ourselves down into the smallest
1:53.2	that we could possibly be.
1:55.4	And because of that experience, a lot of us really wrote off cardio for quite some time.
2:01.3	With that in mind, I want to dive into this idea on this podcast because recently I put
2:08.5	this on threads and it got so many comments and then I put it on Instagram and it got even
2:14.5	more comments.
	...

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