Those who lead a healthy lifestyle achieve physical fitness, but what is optimal fitness, really? Those who are at the height of health are their strongest in several categories. These categories include flexibility (yoga is a good practice), cardiovascular endurance (achieved through aerobic exercises, raising your heart rate), muscular strength (weight-training), and balance (yoga and Pilates).
This article will focus on cardiovascular endurance, and how aerobic exercises will help you to achieve improved performance in this area. When you exercise, your heart, lungs, and blood vessels must deliver oxygen to your cells. When you kick up the pace, your heart speeds up, pumping more oxygenated blood to your cells, as the demand for it goes up. Those muscles are getting the oxygen they need to move, to even live. The faster or harder they are required to move, the more oxygen they nee – fuel for your cells. If you are unfit, you tire easily and cannot meet the demands of your cells for oxygen delivery. You get out of breath and have to slow down. When you are fit, aerobic exercises can be sustained. You can meet the elevated demands for oxygen delivery; you can run longer, climb more stairs, swim, whatever activity you’re doing that raises your heart rate.
By doing aerobic exercises, you gradually increase the ability of your heart, lungs and vessels to meet this higher demand. They get stronger and more efficient due to the demands. But don’t rush into things you’re not used to. It must be a gradual process.
There are many places to get good information on fitness and aerobic exercises. There are plenty of good books available and information on the Web. You could visit a web site called bodytrends.com: health & fitness at www.bodytrends.com. They have information on “Basic Aerobic Exercise Principles: for improved health and fitness”.
On this site you can find information on this type of exercise. For instance, they state that, “Aerobic exercise uses large muscle groups rhythmically and continuously and elevates the heart rate and breathing for a sustained period.”
They discuss using care when selecting the type of aerobic exercises that would be right for you. Everyone’s goals will be different. And for how long should you exercise? That is discussed here too, as well as how often.
How hard should you work out? Bodytrends discusses how the intensity of your aerobic exercise can be measured in three ways: Using heart rate monitors, doing it manually with your index and middle fingers, and the talk test will tell you how hard you’re working. You need to be aware of this. The importance of warm-ups and cool downs are discussed here too. You should never start or stop your aerobic exercises abruptly; it is very bad for you. Find out that attention to technique is important. This website also includes an aerobic exercise progress chart. This is a very informative site and worth reading over. You should have some background knowledge before you begin any exercise routine.
By Laura Hogg