Want to get fit! Should I do cardio everyday?

I want to get fit to improve my fitness and my level in sport. I'm not doing it so much to burn calories as I'm a pretty healthy weight. The sport I want to focus on getting better is badminton.

Do you think it's worth doing cardio everyday? And what type of cardio do you think would be best in this regard?

Also would anyone recommend a strength program I could stick to that might help me? I would rather have one without using weights though if possible.

Thanks

Cardio everyday is not a good idea and a good way of injuring yourself! Try every other day to start and then work up to a max of 5 times a week

Weight training, requires weight... to increase the strength of your legs you're going to have to lift weights. BW squats have no purpose after you can do 10.

What about bodyweight exercises like pushups and variations, or adding an element of jump e.g. to squats?

Depends what you're doing, but generally cardio every day isn't a good idea.

Brisk walking is considered low intensity cardio. Obviously that can be done every day indefinitely.

Jogging (or similar steady state cardio) is more stressful. If you do it every day you will tire out quickly. That said, you can do it pretty frequently. However, despite its popularity it isn't very effective in terms of fitness. It has been shown many times that for fitness and body composition goals you are much better off doing shorter, more intense workouts. People prefer gentle jogging and cycling because, even though its longer, its easier. But when was easier better? Things like sprints (especially hill sprints), circuits, sprints, HIIT, sprints, tabata, sprints or just sprints are infinitely better. These would also be more applicable to an intense sport like badminton. This sort of thing is more strenuous, so probably a few times a week is perfectly adequate, though you could do more depending on your conditioning and ability to regulate intensity.

I really like the idea of tabata but not sure it's the best type of exercise. Was training for a charity run and I was doing tabata workouts and though while I did feel fit, when I actually tried out running as practice I was pretty bad. Found out I had to do running to get myself fitter to run the charity run. While I do realise that obviously you have to practice running, but since it's good endurance, I'm worried that solely focusing on tabata will not build good endurance which is needed in badminton especially for singles.

I personally find things like high intensity for a short time easier. A short time of pain is easier than 30 mins of pain (I don't particularly like running but I do it). Plus running for a half hour bores me.

I want to get fit to improve my fitness and my level in sport. I'm not doing it so much to burn calories as I'm a pretty healthy weight. The sport I want to focus on getting better is badminton.

Do you think it's worth doing cardio everyday? And what type of cardio do you think would be best in this regard?

Also would anyone recommend a strength program I could stick to that might help me? I would rather have one without using weights though if possible.

Thanks

As many of the others have said you don't need to do cardio daily. To reduce weight quickly, running coupled with a good diet is the most efficient way of doing it. Doing too much of anything won't give you enough recovery time. I've been training for a couple of years now and I wouldn't want to run more than 5 times a week.

Yea I'm the same. I'd rather work out shorter and harder and get bored on long runs, but for most people (especially unfit people) it doesn't seem to be true.

I come down hard on long distance, but it depends on your goals. Running is effective training to get better at running, but it actually involves quite a limited type of fitness. It trains your body's ability to maintain low intensity exercise for a long time, which is mainly a function of how quickly your body can get oxygen to the muscles and, in fairness, that is not a useless skill. But it trains not at all your body's ability to produce or sustain high intensity action (which obviously also requires getting oxygen to the muscles, but uses other pathways too). Someone who only does steady state would do far worse if asked to do tabata than someone who did tabata trying their hand at steady state.

For something like badminton, you need to train for high intensity work, which you can't really do with steady state. That's not to say you must avoid steady-state, a wide variety of training techniques are always useful, but generally I think there are better methods. Also, unless you are training for a run, being able to run very long distances at a sustained pace isn't the most useful skill anyway for most sports.