Concept2 Forum

It depends on your health, age, and prior conditioning. Running may not be suitable for someone who is overweight and has bad knees. A lot of factors come into play here.

Ambrozy wrote:Hey...
Guys what do you think which cardio exercise is best option for the purpose of fitness...???
share your opinion with me..

Swimming or cross country skying

For pure cardio, I'm always a fan of cycling. Low impact, and it's very hard to injure yourself with it. Upright exercise bikes are pretty affordable too, don't take up too much space and work well.

However, if you actually want to engage a variety of muscle groups (general fitness), swimming is great (watch for shoulder injuries though, and it's hard to do at home), as well as rowing (which ended up being my choice, and I barely use the bike now that I have the erg).

Running I'm against, due to the impact on my knees and ankles. I've always sucked at it and have no interest in it whatever. Cross country skiing could be fun, but I'm a city boy and prefer to stay inside when it's freezing outside. Stair climbers I've always disliked too, again due to the impact issues.

So... if you're in truly bad shape, I'd start with a bike and work towards and erg. The erg can be intimidating as first, as well as frustrating because it takes a while to get the movement right. For me, that was mostly due to my core being out of whack. Relatively strong legs but a weak core meant that I couldn't convert much power from my legs to the handle and most of the work felt like it was coming out of my arms. Took me about a month to get to a balanced effort.

Swimming and the Erg.

Totally seen as cheating in the pool however, I wear fins , swim 60 min non stop in a 50M pool on my back using no arms and keep it totally aerobic and low Heartrate. Still pretty much have to crawl to the hot spa pool afterwards, its a serious leg workout. It really helps my performance on the Erg. Head to subway after and scoff a foot long !

I tend to do the bulk of my cardio work on the Erg, but always find time to fit one or two runs and a swimming sesson in per week.

The only thing lacking really is some strength work, but just dont have time!