The primary benefits of cardiovascular exercise - strengthen your heart and reduce body fat!

When I recommend exercise I do not only mean formal exercises in a gym or fitness club setting. I refer to any activity that gets you moving and pushes your body outside of its usual sedentary or rested state. This is a principle described as OVERLOAD. You overload a muscle when you encourage it to work harder than it normally would and this also applies to your heart muscle!

I am not going to overwhelm you with all the theory behind why you should exercise, but I am positive that you are reading this because you want to improve your health. Health and vitality starts with your capacity and committment to use and improve your physical body.

I am confident that there will still be people reading this, believing that they don't have time to exercise, or don't really believe that they need to, but this may be because a part of the brain is attempting to sabotage their efforts to improve themselves! This is the same part of the brain that tells you that your diet can wait until Monday, or that one more biscuit wont make any difference! We all have coping strategies of some sort and look to justify choices we make, even though we know through basic logic that what we are telling ourselves isn't always the case! The trick is to learn to acknowledge when you are making excuses and to learn to ignore the voice of negativity! This is a hugely important element to making positive changes in any area of your life.

So I will just describe 3 areas to consider for your own personal fitness regime. You must consider your cardiovascular exercise (elevating your heart rate), muscular exercise (strengthening and toning your muscles) and flexibility exercises (improving your posture and range of motion around your joints). Each of these areas are just as important and should be included in your exercise programme.

Cardiovascular Exercise

In this article I will be detailing cardiovascular exercise. Cardiovascular exercise is necessary for a number of reasons: Firstly, it improves the efficiency of your heart and lungs and enables your body to take in and circulate larger amounts of oxygen. If your body is able to uptake and pump more oxygen then you are less likely to get out of breath as quickly. You will be able to sustain physical activity for longer durations and your heart and lungs will generally be healthier. This is known as cardiovascular fitness.

If we overlook the obvious then there are additional benefits to working at higher intensities. If we use a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is too easy and 10 is almost impossible then you should ideally exercise at a minimum of 7. At 7 it should be hard and you will sweat, but you should be able to maintain the intensity for a minimum of 20 minutes. When you exercise at this level, changes begin to occur in your body. Your body builds more mitochondria in the muscles and the mitochondria are responsible for processing oxygen. To cut a long story short, your body can only use fat in the presence of oxygen, so the greater your body's capability to absorb oxygen, the greater your capacity to burn fat!

There is another school of thought that implies you should exercise at a level of 6 out of 10, as this is the 'fat burning zone'. Let me just clarify this: you DO NOT burn more fat working at a difficulty level of 6 out of 10 than you do at an intensity of 7 out of 10! PERIOD! However, if you cannot sustain at least 20 minutes at higher intensity then you should reduce your level of difficulty to achieve the full amount of time. In my opinion this is the only time you should exercise at a lower intensity (other than warm ups and cool downs). Working at 6 out of 10 will NOT encourage your body to undergo change and become a fat burning machine!

That said, only work up to greater difficulties as your fitness develops. You should be in this for the long haul, so don't over do it in the first few days! Start with what you are comfortable doing and aim to advance over time. Also, seek guidance from your GP if you have any health conditions or concerns.

In my next post, I will be detailing an approach for determining and improving your cardiovascular exercise and fitness. This will provide a workable guide for anyone who is ready to begin exercising TODAY, or who has been exercising and wishes to improve further.

Please be advised that when you exercise your body uses more oxygen and as a waste product more free radicals are created within your body. Free radicals are volatile molecules, which attack and damage healthy cells in a process called oxidation (or free-radical damage). It is widely believed that we need to ensure that we consume optimum quantities of antioxidants (i.e. vitamins) to eliminate free radicals and protect our bodies against degenerative diseases.

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