Cardio exercises are essential for a healthy life. What exercises are best for you?
The Power of Cardio Exercises
If you want to live an active, engaged and fully fruitful life for as long as possible a balanced exercise regimen is your best ticket. However, if your lifestyle only allows for one element of exercise – go for cardiovascular exercises.
Cardio exercises may be as ambitious as climbing the tallest peaks on each continent if your time, budget, energy and interest allow for this. If that is not your cuppa tea though, the sky’s truly the limit as far cardio exercises go.
Any activity you love that gets you huffing and puffing and that you can maintain continually at an elevated heart rate for at least twenty minutes counts. Sorry to say that cheering for your favorite sports team for 90 minutes doesn’t quite qualify guys, you get my drift though – yes?
You Might Ask, Which Cardio Exercises Are The Very Best Ones?
The simple answer to that is the one or more that work for you.
If you are an outdoor type this could be digging intensively in the garden, cross country skiing, running outdoor stairs, tennis, jogging along a beach, or if you are like my husband and daughter, surfing.
If you are more of an indoors warrior, like me, your cardio workouts of choice might include dancing, working out on the cardio machines at the gym, aqua aerobics, other group fitness classes, swimming in an indoor pool, indoor soccer, rock climbing on an indoor wall, or what ever else takes your fancy.The most popular cardio exercises include walking, jogging, swimming, cycling (including stationary bikes).
Frequency of Performing Cardio Exercises
So how often should you train following a cardiovascular exercise program?
To achieve the benefits of cardiovascular exercises train three to five times per week. On the one hand if you only include two or less cardio sessions per week, they probably will not make significant gains in the health of your heart and lungs – which cardio exercises aim to do.
On the other hand, if you perform your cardio work more frequently or too intensely you risk developing joint, tendon and muscular injuries. Listen to your body and find the balance that suits you.
How Do You Continually Increase Your Cardio Fitness?
The answer is – by pushing yourself with either more frequent cardio sessions, working out for longer or more intensely. So find a baseline, keep a training log so you can measure your progress and keep challenging yourself.
You might start out just walking around the block, three times a week for the first few weeks. As your heart and lungs adapt walk further, faster, and add more sessions until you reach five per week.
A Balanced Program
There isn’t one activity that will balance all your muscles or condition your heart and lungs in a way that adds up to total fitness. Please be aware that a single minded approach to a particular sport, without some cross-training, can cause muscular imbalances that could very likely result in injury and ongoing fatigue.
Having a balanced approach yields better long-term benefits, so mix up your exercise program to keep yourself motivated and challenged, adding strength and flexibility training to your basic exercise program.
Remember that we need to move it, lift it, and stretch it for balance. This helps you become fit for life.
The Importance Of A Balanced Exercise Program
It is easy to forget or ignore the importance of a balanced exercise program in adding years to our lives and quality to those years. Please understand that our bodies and minds need to be exercised to function well. You may find that if you don’t take the time to care for yourself now, you may find that in your latter years the time you do have is spent dealing with ill-health challenges, including lost mobility, low levels of energy and a potential host of debilitating disease states.
Getting off the couch is the hardest part of following any exercise program. Once you start your walk, jump in your car to drive to the gym, put on your exercise clothing, you have won. Then afterwards you can enjoy the sense of accomplishment as you soak up the heat of a hot shower.
There is a vast difference between a fit and healthy sixty plus year old and an unfit and unhealthy older person. One is full of joy and vitality, the other is…
So make the right choices now and you will most likely prosper and flourish in a healthy, long, and energized life!
As always, the choice is yours.