Forget the ‘Rocky IV’ montage. You can
bypass winter and get a great cardio workout indoors. (No treadmill required.)
By Todd Soura

Welcome to the dead of winter. If you’re an outdoor-cardio person, your workouts just got much tougher for the next couple of months.
There’s the bitter cold, the wind, the snow and ice, the dark early mornings and nights. Even simply getting dressed in the appropriate attire can take an extra 20 minutes.
For those reasons and plenty of others, I break from my traditional cardio workouts during this time of year and opt instead for a 20-minute, high-intensity, multi-exercise routine. Nothing about it makes it specific to winter, so feel free to implement it as an alternative cardio workout at any point during the year. It should be performed two to five days a week depending on your fitness level (two for beginners, five for advanced).

The workout:
30 Squats
20 Push-ups
30 One-leg step-ups (per leg)
10 Pull-ups
30 Lunges (per leg)
20 Bench dips
30 Crunches
30 Hip bridges
30 Bicycle crunches
2 Minutes jumping rope
1 Minute side plank (per side)
1 Minute front plank

Illustrations of all of these exercises are available online. Just Google whichever ones you’re unsure about.
This is a cardio workout, as opposed to conventional strength training, so the idea is to perform the exercises as part of one continuous circuit with no rest in between. Depending upon the level of your conditioning, you should be able to complete two to four cycles within 20 to 25 minutes.
If you can’t do the full set of any of the exercises, do as many as you can, even if it’s only three push-ups or half a pull-up. Don’t skip the exercise altogether. If you can’t do an exercise for any reason — other than lack of strength or conditioning — substitute it with a similar one that you can execute.
The benefit of this workout is threefold: You’ll burn a good amount of calories in under a half-hour; you’ll exercise your heart in the same ways you would if you performed a traditional cardio workout; and, you’ll build lean muscle, which, in turn, will raise your resting metabolic rate, turning you into an all-day, calorie-burning machine.
An added benefit: changing pace in your regimen will provide every bit as much of a boost mentally as it will physically. Variation is what keeps us in top form. Keep your mind and your body guessing, and they’ll return the favor by fueling you with all the motivation you’ll need.

Todd Soura is the owner of the Doylestown-based Action Personal Training (215-230-8923; www.actionpersonaltraining.com).