• Tweet
• Email

• Tweet
• Email

All of us enjoy being outdoors. And we all enjoy building muscle and shedding body fat. Yet when it comes to working out, many of us will abandon our natural desires to be at one with the earth, and resort to being cooped up inside a temperature-controlled gym, wearing headphones, starting at a television. We forget there is an outdoors, and treat our cardio session like another other office task we must complete on a daily basis.

Cavemen ruled the earth for a million years, and they developed a lean and meanness that today’s crop of humans just can’t math. Why? Because their exercise was real life. Despite their nutritional deficits (not to mention dental!) they stayed active outside, leading to muscle gains and fat loss. And you can do the same. Let’s look at a few outdoor cardio techniques you should be employing to stay lean, build muscle, and get stronger.

Sprinting
The earliest cavemen learned you gotta run fast if you don’t want to be lunch for something with big scary teeth. Very fast explosive running – say, of the 40 to 100 meter variety – is great for building muscle, burning fat, and really changing the body into a lean, mean movement machine capable of getting from point A to point B very quickly.

Jumps
If your calves are lagging and you’re seeking a way to pump them up, then standing jumps will be the way to go. Crouch down, then go sky high – it’s that simple! Complete 10 reps, rest for 3 minutes, then repeat. Also, if you play a little basketball on the side, you will undoubtedly see an increase in your vertical jump in no time!

Hiking
You can spend all day on a treadmill and never establish the real level of mind-muscle connection, thigh stimulation and fat burning that you’ll see from actually hiking in the wilderness. Fill up your pack with plenty of food and water, a GPS unit and your cell with extra batteries, and get moving out there.

Biking
We’re not talking about the kind of stationary biking where you’re tuned in to watch Jeopardy on the gym TV system. Rather, this is the kind of biking that forces you to get out of the way of Mack trucks while pumping your thighs and breathing in a great deal of outside air!

Think of your cardio sessions not as “fat burning time”. Rather, look at your time outdoors as muscle building, fat burning time which also allows you to connect with nature while training your body to the extreme!