When your doing cardio you should keep in mind there is a Heart Rate (number dependent on age) that is telling you how hard to are working. Listen to you body -- but the HR is a good reference point if you are just being a bitch or if you are going psycho.
For early 30s
its like 140-160 is moderate to moderately high intensity exercise...you want about 30 mins of this. Look up what it is for you (its on the machines a lot of times) and try to obtain this HR range for at least 15-20 mins. It can be problematic to weight loss to do too much exercise in this zone though.
In addition you can do some time in the fat burn zone. I would say 15-25 mins. Fat burn zone is like 125-139 for early 30s and will burn calories. The intensity will be low enough for you to talk to someone if you wanted to -- or pay attention well to T.V. etc.
This way you can do a full hour -- get aerobic conditioning in and burn maximum calories -- without getting into that long distance conditioning stuff. I hear that can slow weight loss down a lot toward the end of you de-fatening.
so to recap:
5 mins warm up
5 mins fat burn
30 mins aerobic
20 mins fat burn
or something like that. You just modify the setting of the machine you are on. For example: I tend to go up in intensity for 2.5 mins, up again 2.5 mins, down for 2.5 mins, down for 2.5 mins, up... etc. And by up and down I mean mostly incline but also speed. This keeps heart rate up but prevents it from slowly overloading constant high settings.
Obviously if you are just getting started -- you don't burn yourself out trying to run an hour out of no where. Start with 30 mins -- or AT LEAST 20. Try to get the speed up to like 5.0 for most people. You can slowly increase everyday until you are working off way more fat than most around you. Unless you become a running addict you should probably not buy into the "take it easy" mantra. Just be age appropriate.
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