From the category archives:
cardio
A pulse watch is a good way to help make sure you are physically fit in one of the most important ways of all: your cardiovascular fitness. In other words, a healthy heart.
A good cardiovascular work out is essential to everyone’s health. Whether you don’t exercise and need your heart to be stronger, or whether you focus on muscle strength and need to make sure your heart is in good shape to support your body’s exercises: a pulse watch can help aid heart health for everyone who exercises, in any capacity.
Here is how pulse watches work. Just like any other watch, they strap to your wrist, tell you what time it is, and have other available functions, such as a stop watch or other information. But pulse watches have an extra feature that makes a big difference. On the back of the watch, against your wrist, there is a sensor that measures your pulse, and displays your heart rate (in beast per minute) on the face of the watch.
This allows you to work on your heart’s health in several different ways:
- Reach your desired heart rate. If you are working on keeping your heart healthy, you’ll want to make sure it’s working enough to challenge it to get stronger. A pulse watch helps make sure you’re working hard enough to get your desired results. If your rate is lower than you’d like, simply push yourself a little harder.
- Keep yourself from over-working your heart. If you’re just getting started exercising, or if you know you have a heart condition or other physical issues that make it important for you to not over-exert yourself, then a pulse watch is a good way to monitor this as well. Obviously your body will tell you when you’re tired, but a pulse watch can give you specific feedback on how hard your heart is working. When you exceed your desired range, you know to pull back.
- Maintain consistency, or do intervals. Whether you’re looking to maintain a consistent heart rate, or do intentional interval training, a pulse watch can help you time how long you’ve been working, and how hard your heart is pumping to keep up your current level of activity.
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A cardio workout routine usually creates images of jogging or running. I know that if I had to run every day to meet my body’s cardiovascular requirement, I would get bored to death after about three days. Luckily there is more than one alternative cardio workout routine out there besides jogging or running. Here are some of my favorite alternative routines in this post and why I like each one.
Whenever I get bored of running, I opt to jump on a bicycle and head to the mountains. Bicycling is one of my favorite exercises because it is very low impact on my feet. I personally have plantar fasciitis on my feet so I cannot run very much. Throwing biking into my weekly routine helps me satisfy my cardiovascular requirement while reducing ware and tear on my feet.
While all exercise is important to short term vitality and long term health, it’s also important to remember that complimenting your cardio workout routine with a great diet and solid eating habits is also part of the equation.
Another good alternative to running is swimming. Swimming is a full body exercise that will definitely work your heart. Since swimming is a full body workout, 15 to 20 minutes in the pool is usually enough cardiovascular exercise for me. Another great thing about swimming is that there is no pressure on any joints. If you have lots of joint issues, you can still achieve your requirement by hitting the pool.
If traveling long distances is not for you, you can still get a good cardiovascular workout by means of circuit training. The basic idea in circuit training is to focus on lifting high repetition on one body part until a minute or two goes by, then immediately switch to the next body part for the same amount of time, then continue this technique until your whole body gets worked out. While you are resting one muscle group, the next one is working, and your heart is still pumping fast to keep up with the work that you are doing. This is my most favorite cardio exercise routine since it incorporates both anaerobic and aerobic exercises at the same time!
If you are like me, exercising is pretty boring if you keep doing the same thing day after day. A cardio workout routine is usually the worst because they usually take the longest to do. These are some really good alternative exercise routines to help mix things up and keep things interesting so that you can stay focused on your goal, and remember that by being consistent with your cardiovascular routine along with a healthy diet you’ll be able to maintain your ideal body weight or even lose weight quickly with ease.
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Home exercises can be fun and rewarding without having to deal with the cost, crowds, and time consumption usually associated with working out at a gym. The common reason why many people choose to do home exercises as opposed to getting a gym membership is not because they are trying to keep fit and healthy, but because they realize they are gaining weight and want to keep it down.
Even if you are not seeing signs of weight gain, it is important to have home exercises in your schedule at least three times a week in order to keep fit, maintain a healthy lifestyle and generally a strong body. There are a number of simple yet effective workouts that you can incorporate in your home exercise routine to transform your life and body within a short time. These home exercises work best when combined with proper diet and some exercising equipment.
Workout 1: Jogging with walking intervals
This is one of the simplest home exercises that you can even do every day. Be on your track suit and do jogging for about 100 yards and a walk of 20 yards. Cover half a mile in one session and the exercise will make your body healthier and stronger than before.
Workout 2: Jumping rope
You can do three sets of 100 jumps using a rope. It is important to complete all reps and sets before resting otherwise the whole idea of jumping will be diluted. You should take a few seconds to one minute to recover between sets. Doing this exercise three times a week will help a lot but since they are simple home exercises, there is no harm doing them every day.
Workout 3: Stretching
Stretching can be done alongside other home exercises and, if done correctly and long enough, can be a workout in and of itself. Stretches should target most of the body muscles especially those on the arms, legs, torso and back. Your stretches should last for between 3 to 5 minutes at the start but when you get used to them, they can last as long as 10 to 15 minutes a day.
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Cardio Enthusiasts: Discover a More Effective Training Method for Fat Loss and Heart Health!
It is common to hear fitness professionals and medical doctors prescribe low to moderate intensity aerobic training (cardio) to people who are trying to prevent heart disease or lose weight. Most often, the recommendations constitute something along the lines of “perform 30-60 minutes of steady pace routine 3-5 times per week maintaining your heart rate at a moderate level”. Before you just give in to this popular belief and become the “hamster on the wheel” doing endless hours of boring cardio, I’d like you to consider some recent scientific research that indicates that steady pace endurance cardio work may not be all it’s cracked up to be.
First, realize that our bodies are designed to perform physical activity in bursts of exertion followed by recovery, or stop-and-go movement instead of steady state movement. Recent research is suggesting that physical variability is one of the most important aspects to consider in your training. This tendency can be seen throughout nature as all animals demonstrate stop-and-go motion instead of steady state motion. In fact, humans are the only creatures in nature that attempt to do “endurance” type physical activities. Most competitive sports (with the exception of endurance running or cycling) are also based on stop-and-go movement or short bursts of exertion followed by recovery. To examine an example of the different effects of endurance or steady state training versus stop-and-go training, consider the physiques of marathoners versus sprinters. Most sprinters carry a physique that is very lean, muscular, and powerful looking, while the typical dedicated marathoner is more often emaciated and sickly looking. Now which would you rather resemble?
Another factor to keep in mind regarding the benefits of physical variability is the internal effect of various forms of exercise on our body. Scientists have known that excessive steady state endurance exercise (different for everyone, but sometimes defined as greater than 60 minutes per session most days of the week) increases free radical production in the body, can degenerate joints, reduces immune function, causes muscle wasting, and can cause a pro-inflammatory response in the body that can potentially lead to chronic diseases. On the other hand, highly variable cyclic training has been linked to increased anti-oxidant production in the body and an anti-inflammatory response, a more efficient nitric oxide response (which can encourage a healthy cardiovascular system), and an increased metabolic rate response (which can assist with weight loss). Furthermore, steady state endurance training only trains the heart at one specific heart rate range and doesn’t train it to respond to various every day stress. On the other hand, highly variable cyclic training teaches the heart to respond to and recover from a variety of demands making it less likely to fail when you need it. Think about it this way — Exercise that trains your heart to rapidly increase and rapidly decrease will make your heart more capable of handling everyday stress. Stress can cause your blood pressure and heart rate to increase rapidly. Steady state jogging and other endurance training does not train your heart to be able to handle rapid changes in heart rate or blood pressure.
The important aspect of variable cyclic training that makes it superior over steady state cardio is the recovery period in between bursts of exertion. That recovery period is crucially important for the body to elicit a healthy response to an exercise stimulus. Another benefit of variable cyclic training is that it is much more interesting and has lower drop-out rates than long boring steady state cardio programs.
To summarize, some of the potential benefits of variable cyclic training compared to steady state endurance training are as follows: improved cardiovascular health, increased anti-oxidant protection, improved immune function, reduced risk for joint wear and tear, reduced muscle wasting, increased residual metabolic rate following exercise, and an increased capacity for the heart to handle life’s every day stresses. There are many ways you can reap the benefits of stop-and-go or variable intensity physical training. One of the absolute most effective forms of variable intensity training to really reduce body fat and bring out serious muscular definition is performing wind sprints. Most competitive sports such as football, basketball, racquetball, tennis, hockey, etc. are naturally comprised of highly variable stop-and-go motion. In addition, weight training naturally incorporates short bursts of exertion followed by recovery periods. High intensity interval training (varying between high and low intensity intervals on any piece of cardio equipment) is yet another training method that utilizes exertion and recovery periods. For example, an interval training session on the treadmill could look something like this:
Warm-up for 3-4 minutes at a fast walk or light jog
Interval 1 – run at 8.0 mi/hr for 1 minute;
Interval 2 – walk at 4.0 mi/hr for 1.5 minutes;
Interval 3 – run at 10.0 mi/hr for 1 minute;
Interval 4 – walk at 4.0 mi/hr for 1.5 minutes;
Repeat those 4 intervals 4 times for a very intense 20-minute workout.
The take-away message from this article is to try to train your body at highly variable intensity rates for the majority of your workouts to get the most beneficial response in terms of heart health, fat loss, and muscle maintenance.
About the author:
Visit http://truthaboutabs.com to discover dozens of powerful strategies for losing body fat and bringing out your hidden muscular definition. Several free bonuses are yours to keep just for stopping by.
Michael Geary is a nationally dual certified personal trainer (NCSF-CPT, AFAA-CPT), and author of “The Truth about Six Pack Abs” 2004-2005.