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

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

I believe that exercise is essential for everyone, regardless of our own goals and aspirations relating to health. Exercise is not just for sports people or those looking to drop weight or gain muscle, it is critical for all of us. If you decide that you dont need to exercise because you look ok the way you are then it is possible that the inside of your body may tell a different tale!

When I recommend physical activity I dont necessarily mean traditional exercises in a gym or fitness centre setting. I am referring to any activity that gets you moving and gets you to push your body past its usual sedentary or cumfortable state. This is a principle described as OVERLOAD. You overload a muscle when you encourage it to work harder than usual and this also applies to your heart muscle!

I am not about to drown you with all the reasons why you should exercise, but I am positive that you are reading this because you still want to maintain or improve your health. Health and vitality begins with your capacity and committment to use and develop your physical body.

I know that there will still be those reviewing this, believing that they don't have time to exercise, or don't really feel they need to, but this is probably because a part of the brain is attempting to sabotage their efforts to improve their selves! This is the same part of the brain that tells you that your exercise plan can wait until next week, or that one more piece of chocolate wont harm you! We all have coping mechanisms of some sort and try to justify decisions we make, even though we know applying standard logic that what we are telling ourselves isn't necessarily the case! The key is to learn to realise when you are making excuses and to learn how to silence the voice of negativity! This is vitally important as an element to making positive changes in all areas of your life.

So let me just describe 3 areas to incorporate into your own personal exercise plan. 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 regime.

Cardiovascular Exercise

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

If we look past the obvious then there are other advantages to working at greater intensities. If we use a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is too easy and 10 is almost impossible then you should aim to exercise at a minimum of 7. At 7 it will be hard and you should sweat, but you should be able to maintain the intensity for at least 20 minutes. When you exercise at this intensity, changes begin to occur in your body. Your body generates more mitochondria in the muscles and the mitochondria are responsible for absorbing oxygen. To cut a long story short, your body will only burn 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 says you must exercise at a difficulty of 6 out of 10, as this is the 'fat burning zone'. Let me just clarify something: 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 a minimum of 20 minutes at higher intensity then you should reduce your level of difficulty to achieve the duration. 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 calorie burning machine!

Saying that, you only build up to more demanding intensities as your fitness develops. You should be in this for the long-haul, so don't over-train in the first few days! Start with what you are comfortable doing and aim to advance over time. Also, seek support from your GP if you have any health conditions or concerns.

In my next article, I will be outlining a method for managing and improving your cardiovascular exercise and fitness. This will provide a workable guide for any person who is ready to begin exercising TODAY, or who has been exercising and wishes to develop further.

Please be advised that when exercising your body consumes more oxygen and as a waste product more free radicals are produced within your body. Free radicals are volatile particles, which attack and damage healthy cells in a process called oxidation (or free-radical damage). It is widely believed that we must ensure that we consume sufficient quantities of antioxidants (i.e. vitamins) to eliminate free radicals and safeguard our bodies against degenerative diseases.

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