Cardio challenge – 30 days of calorie burning

Give your cardio fitness a boost with this 30 day cardio challenge.  The main benefits of the workout are:

  • Burning calories, which helps with weight management
  • Improving heart and circulatory system health
  • Increasing energy levels

Although the workout will mainly benefit cardio fitness and help with weight loss, it will also improve muscle tone and flexibility, strengthen the core stabilisers and improve coordination.

Printable 30 day cardio challenge

What you will need to do the 30 day cardio challenge

You’ll need suitable clothing – something you can move easily in and that you won’t get too hot in.  As the challenge consists of 3 high impact exercises, you should wear training shoes to cushion the impact.

Exercise instructions

It’s important to warm up your joints and muscles before doing high impact exercise.  This helps you to get the most out of the exercises and avoid injury.  Before you start each day, do these warm up exercises.  Please also read these exercise safety guidelines.

These are the 3 exercises the challenge is made up of.  For the first few days, you’ll just be doing jacks and then you’ll add in the other two exercises.

#1 How to do jacks

Cardio challenge - jacks

  1. Stand with your feet together and arms by your side. Jump your legs wide as you take your arms over your head.
  2. Lower your arms as you jump your feet back together.
  3. It’s important that you don’t let your knees rotate inwards as you land. To help avoid this, turn your toes outwards slightly as you land.

#2 How to do side leaps

Cardio challenge - side leaps

  1. Start by standing with your feet close together.
  2. Raise your right knee, then jump sideways to the right, leading with your right leg.
  3. Follow through with your left leg, bringing your left foot close to your right.
  4. Now lift your left knee and repeat to the left.

#3 How to do squat jumps

Squat jump

  1. Start in a squat position, with your arms down by your sides.
  2. Swing your arms up over your head as you push your toes off the ground and jump up,
  3. Come back down onto the floor in the starting position and repeat.

30 day cardio challenge workout chart

The chart below gives you the number of reps of each exercise to do every day.

30 day cardio challenge workout chart

Get  the printable cardio challenge PDF

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