I love seeing people who are motivated enough to see a change in their life. It keeps me motivated to improve myself.
From my experience (2 years of body weight training + 3 years of weight training) you don't have to workout daily to see the results that you want. Just increase the intensity of your workouts and (as you mentioned in your post) improve your cardiovascular strength in order to raise your fitness standard.
I really suggest you try body-weight training for additional benefits. I recently wrote a blog on body-weight training. You should check it out:
https://steemit.com/fitness/@mujtabazahmed/why-body-weight-workouts-are-worth-it
Keep up the good work!
I will. Thank you. One thing that I don’t fully understand is when people say increase the intensity of your workout, does that mean I should go all out for as long as I can, which might only be thirty seconds, or should I pace myself to last the full minute, but pace myself in a way that is intense and challenging over the slightly longer period of time?
Both ways work. However, I'd suggest to pace yourself to last the full minute since this way you're forcing your body to fight till the end (which really burns a lot). This way your endurance also improves.
Once you're stamina is up then you can change your focus onto shorter high intensity workouts. This is what I did and it really paid off.