How Often Should You Do Cardio?
Q: Remember how Peloton was fined $19M for failing to recall its Tread+ treadmill that came into the market without a rear guard to prevent people from getting pulled underneath the machine? Well, after the Tread+ was discontinued for a few years following 150 injury reports and the death of a six-year-old child, the line was rereleased with the previously missing safety feature but at a much higher price. I don’t have that kind of money but as luck would have it, I was able to snag one of the original models for a considerable bargain. Now, even though the treadmill was relatively cheap because it’s a potential deathtrap, I still want to get my money’s worth. So how often should you do cardio? Yeah, yeah, yeah…the treadmill cost me little money but it might end up costing me considerably more if I get seriously fucked up because of it. Ha, that’s whatever!
A: Treadmills cause more injuries and emergency room visits per year than any other piece of exercise equipment, so the Tread+ without the rear guard safety feature makes the machine even more dangerous than it already is. That being the case, it’s good to see that you take your health and wellbeing so seriously that you’re willing to jeopardize your health and wellbeing in pursuit of their improvement. Kudos to you!
Kudos to you, indeed!!!
Anyway, I think the question of how often you should do cardio is less about getting a return on your investment for the expense of a discounted treadmill. Instead, given the safety risks of an original Peloton Tread+, I think the matter is more about determining how much cardio you should do to get the most benefit out of the machine without increasing the odds of injuring yourself by way of exposure to more opportunities to do so through the performance of cardio that you don’t necessarily need. Am I right?
Of course, I’m right!
But context aside, how often should you do cardio?
Well, exercise guidelines call for adults to get a weekly total of at least 150 minutes of moderate cardiovascular activity or 75 minutes at a vigorous intensity.1Cardio at a moderate intensity causes your heart to beat faster and makes you breathe harder than normal but not so much that you have difficulty talking while performing the activity. Vigorous intensity is a pace where your heart rate increases significantly and your breathing is labored enough that you can’t carry a conversation. For even greater health benefits, 300 minutes of moderate cardio is what’s suggested.2In fact, there’s no upper limit on the amount of cardio you can do throughout the week, so more cardio can and should be done if you have certain performance or physique goals beyond improving your general health. That duration is likewise halved by more intense activity.
Given the total minutes of cardio that should be performed per week, how often you should do cardio comes down to a simple math operation of taking the amount of time needed to hit one of the advised targets and dividing it by the number of days you want to spread the cardio out due to preference or schedule constraints.3For example, you could meet your exercise quota for the week with only two cardio sessions as long as each workout lasted 38 minutes and was performed at a demanding pace because 75 minutes divided by 2 days is 37.5 minutes, buddy!!!
For health results from cardio, all that matters is exercising at a moderate or high intensity and accumulating the prescribed amount of total minutes for the week. How you go about doing that is up to you, whether that be the number of cardio workouts, length of individual bouts, or type of exercise performed, all of which your age, goals, fitness level, and physical health play a factor in determining.
Now, does anyone else have a fitness or nutrition question of their own that they want to ask?
Glossary: cardio, exercise, exercise equipment, fitness, goal, intensity, nutrition, physique, treadmill, workout
- Just The Tip #4441 - May 5, 2026
- Just The Tip #400 - May 4, 2026
- Just The Tip #3017 - April 30, 2026
