For some people, hitting "Quick Start" on the treadmill is all it takes to get going on a great cardio workout. For others, the thought of climbing aboard a machine and staring at a screen for 40 minutes is reason enough to avoid the gym altogether.

Fortunately, there's no need to spend your life on cardio row to get your heart pumping. Any activity that elevates the heart rate sufficiently will have the same effect as traditional cardiovascular exercise. There are a wide variety of heart-happy workouts that even the most cardio phobic folks will love.

Go Full Circuit

A circuit workout is simply a set of exercises performed one after another without rest, keeping the heart rate consistently elevated. In the traditional cardio realm, a circuit might consist of five-minute bouts on the elliptical, treadmill and stationary bike. But you can follow the same format with resistance exercises

How to do it: The key to an effective resistance circuit is to keep moving and work as much of your body as possible. When you do multi joint exercises, you increase the blood flow to more muscles, and that increases your heart rate.

To create your own circuit, choose five multi joint exercises and string them together. Perform 15 repetitions of each exercise, with one to two minutes of rest between rounds, up to five rounds. Alternate between push and pull or upper- and lower-body exercises to reduce the need for rest.

What?s in it for you: circuit training to be the most time-efficient way to gain both muscular endurance and cardiovascular fitness.

Dance Your Heart Out

If there?s one physical activity that?s universal in human culture, it?s dance. Genres such as hip-hop, ballroom, swing and salsa have kept people moving for years, but dance has carved a niche in the fitness world, too. For example, Zumba features fast and slow dance intervals set to the tempo of Latin music and incorporates light resistance training. Nia features a blend of dance, martial arts and restorative movements such as yoga.

How to do it: Health clubs, recreation and dance studios are all great places to find dance programmes. You can also rent a DVD, go out to a dance club or just turn on the radio and groove in your living room.

What?s in it for you: For most people, dance becomes a whole-body activity. The more musculature you involve, the more calories you burn and the more you place overload on the heart.

Mix It Up

Interval workouts consist of alternating bouts of high- and lower-intensity activity, known as work and recovery phases. For example, high-intensity interval training, or HIIT, features work intervals of no longer than a minute, followed by two to three minutes of recovery.

Intervals are commonly associated with cardio exercises such as running or cycling, but you also can apply the concept to plyometrics and resistance exercises.

How to do it:Start by choosing movements that involve as many muscle groups as possible e.g. variations of running, jumping, crawling and climbing. Because interval training can be stressful to the body, limit these sessions to about two days per week, with 72 hours of recovery between workouts.

What?s in it for you: If you want the most cardiovascular benefits in the least amount of time, interval training is your best bet. By applying short bursts of high-intensity overload to the body, you improve the ability of the heart and lungs to deliver oxygen to the muscles and remove waste. Because of that overload, the heart will respond by making itself stronger. You also typically burn more calories per minute than you would in steady-state endurance exercise.

Be a Groupie

Today?s cardio-based group-fitness classes have come a long way since the days of Jane Fonda and leg warmers. While age-old favourites such as step aerobics and Jazzercise have stood their ground, boot camps, kickboxing and other strength-cardio combo classes now attract a wider range of gym-goers to group exercise,

How to do it: Look for words such as circuit, fat-burning, interval, conditioning, metabolic and, of course, cardio in class descriptions. Some of the newer classes have participants doing mainly multi-joint strength movements, but they?re still demanding that your heart pick up the pace. Exercises are performed with lighter weights than in a strength class and at slower speeds than in a pure cardio class.

What?s in it for you: Group exercise offers people three benefits that they wouldn?t get working out on their own. One is more energy and motivation. Two is guidance and supervision. Three is the camaraderie. You?re in an environment where you meet people and can say, ?Hey, I?ll see you next week.? It?s like being on a team.?

There are plenty of options that don?t involve monotony or machinery. Ultimately, the best type of cardio is the cardio you?re going to do. If you like cycling, running or swimming, then you should go ahead and do it. But if you don?t, then there?s really no need to. Other variations will work equally well.

The bottom line is to keep your heart rate up. As long as your heart rate remains elevated, you can get the benefits of a cardio workout without doing traditional ?cardio.