There are lots of 30-day challenges that you can try if you want to specifically focus on one or two areas of your body.
For example, there is the 30-day push-up challenge that will predominantly target your chest and triceps, there is the squat challenge that will mainly target your glutes and leg muscles and there is the calf raise challenge that will obviously help to develop your calf muscles.
However you may be interested to know that there is also a 30-day cardio challenge available that is primarily designed to increase stamina and improve your overall level of fitness, and may also help you to lose some weight as well.
This particular challenge consists of two simple exercises – high knees and mountain climbers – and is outlined below:
High Knees
The high knees exercise is simple but effective, and very easy to perform. All you need to do is run on the spot in an upright position, and raise your knees as high as possible whilst doing so.
You can either place your hands in front of you and aim to hit them with your thighs with each knee raise, or you can swing your arms as if you were running, as demonstrated in the video below:
You will find that this exercise will get your heart pumping and improve your fitness, but will also tone up and strengthen your legs. Plus it will also help to stretch your hip flexors as well, which can get pretty tight if you are sitting down for long periods of the day.
With this particular 30-day challenge, you will be starting off with 40 reps on day 1 (1 rep = 1 knee raise on each leg), which should be fairly easy, and slowly progressing up to 240 reps on day 30 as your fitness starts to improve.
Mountain Climbers
Mountain climbers are a lot harder to do, but this exercise is another one that will really improve your cardiovascular fitness and stamina, whilst at the same time strengthening and toning your legs.
That’s because it is essentially the same exercise as high knees, except that you are doing it from a push-up position and driving your knees and your legs forwards and backwards on the floor.
The important point here is to keep your body in a straight line and avoid arching your back or dropping backwards to make it easier, as demonstrated in the video below:
At the start of this challenge you will be doing 20 of these mountain climbers to ease you in gently, but this will increase to 60 or 80 reps during the course of the month.
Closing Comments
It’s worth making the point that there are no rest days as such, but there are days that require you to do fewer reps of each exercise. So this should help you to recover if your muscles are aching, but you can of course have a rest day whenever you like, and choose how many reps you do each day.
The point is that this 30-day cardio challenge should help you to improve your fitness and lose some weight if you follow it to the letter, and you should also find that it will give you a lot more power and strength in your legs as well, with more toning and definition. So it is well worth doing if you haven’t already done so.
Once you have completed this challenge, you may want to try doing some more intense workouts such as HIIT workouts, for instance, if you want to improve your fitness even further (or lose some more weight), or try doing some weighted squats and lunges to develop your legs even more.
Alternatively, you could also try one of the other 30-day cardio challenges that people have come up, such as this one from Jeremy Raymer that is a combination of skipping, sprinting and jumping jacks:
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