If You Hate Cardio, Try CrossFit …It Might Make You Better At Cardio

If you’re anything like my sister, you dry heave at the mere mention of cardio. 

On your way to the dumbbell rack, you audibly hiss at the assault bike. You secretly flip off the innocent-looking rowers and ski ergs. You even dream of tripping runners on the treadmill, sending them barrelling down the belt and onto the rubber terrazzo floor.

Okay, maybe you don’t do the last one, but your disdain for cardio is obvious.

If you’re anything like my sister, maybe your idea of cardio is all wrong. 

Maybe, the reason you hate it so much is because you’ve been told it has to look and feel a certain way. A treadmill, a bike, a rower, and a clock … all counting down the minutes. 

But for CrossFit athletes, cardiovascular training can take many different forms and most do not include a single cardio machine or metered run. 

Cardio Is So Much More 

Cardiovascular training is about challenging the body’s ability to deliver and use energy during sustained activity, not simply performing one particular heart-pounding movement. In CrossFit-land, we define common cardio exercises as monostructural movements; continuous, repetitive, cyclical exercises like running, biking, rowing, skiing, jumping rope, or swimming. 

If you’re scoffing at the thought of strapping into a rower, unroll your eyes: these are merely common cardio tools. They’re not the only ways to get our heart rates up. 

CrossFit’s methodology – constantly varied functional movements performed at a high intensity – naturally creates a cardiovascular demand. Which means we can achieve “doing cardio” through all sorts of modalities, movements, and stimuli. 

Want to work on your endurance without signing up for a 5k? Pair high quality, high volume push-ups, deadlifts, and a long distance loaded carry together for a sustained challenge. 

Want to improve your sprinting capacity without stepping foot on a high school track? Put 10 minutes on the clock and do heavy thrusters every minute, on the minute. 

You don’t need to be on a treadmill to train your cardiovascular system (but if you are, watch out for my sister). It’s the workout’s demands – not its appearance – that will determine the physiological challenge. 

Gym members of CrossFit Renew work the assault bike during a workout. Photo Credit: CrossFit Renew

Intensity Versus Efficiency 

Now that we know CrossFit can bamboozle you into doing cardio, it’s important to note that cardiovascular fitness isn’t just the ability to push hard and power through. 

While high-intensity workouts can develop your cardiovascular and metabolic fitness, and while repeated exposure to these intense efforts can improve your ability to tolerate the demanding work, there’s a yin to the yang. Dedicated lower-intensity aerobic training can help develop your ability to sustain a manageable pace over those longer periods. 

The goal isn’t to make every session harder. You want to improve how effectively you produce and sustain the work. In the early days of CrossFit, as a training methodology and sport, the performance narrative was often, “go to the dark place,” or to push the limits of your capacity every time you trained. If you didn’t, it often felt like it wasn’t enough. A lot of those young athletes thought, ‘If I’m not sprawled out on the floor on the brink of puking my guts out, did I even get a good workout?’

But we’re older, wiser, and collagen-depleted now. We know there’s innumerable benefits to maintaining a steady pace, controlling our breathing, accumulating volume without excessive fatigue, recovering between sessions, and recognizing the difference between productive discomfort and unnecessary exhaustion. 

Consider two athletes walking into a 30-minute workout: 

• Athlete A comes flying out of the gate; spikes their heart rate early and aggressively, and slows down significantly at the halfway point.
• Athlete B maintains a controlled, sustainable pace from the jump and finishes with the ability to continue or increase their effort.

The lesson here isn’t that one athlete is universally worse, it’s that pacing and energy management are trainable skills that complement the intensity-focused demands of CrossFit. Getting your heart rate up is useful, but learning to control it is equally valuable.

Rule of Thumb: Train Both

And here is where you might slam your laptop shut … being good at surviving a hard workout isn’t always the same as being efficient at sustaining aerobic work. 

The best approach isn’t to abandon traditional cardio, but to use it alongside CrossFit to build yourself as a more capable athlete. Both disciplines can, and do, complement each other. 

Incorporating those common cardio tools doesn’t have to mean self-loathing. Choose monostructural activities that you tolerate – dare I say enjoy – and weave them into your weekly workout program. This can include taking an easy bike ride, going on a longer distance ruck walk, hiking, interval jogging, or short-distance rowing as part of a broader workout (that has movements you love). 

CrossFit offers varied, demanding efforts and movements while cardio provides opportunities to practice sustainable output. Together, they develop a broader range of conditioning skills and make you a more adaptable athlete and human.

If you hate cardio, you don’t necessarily need to do more of what you hate. 

You may simply need to broaden your definition of what cardio can be. Cardio becomes less of a beating when you stop treating it like the bane of your existence and utilize it as a tool to do more of what you love.