Last time, I went over the importance of diet in any fitness regime. Now, onto the more fun parts: the actual activity!
In this section, Part 2, I will be going over cardiovascular exercise, or aerobic exercises.
The Importance of Cardio
Cardiovascular exercise has significant benefits, including a reduced risk of heart disease and coronary heart disease. Most of the benefits result from increased aerobic capacity, which increases the amount of oxygen your blood can carry, so your heart doesn’t need to work as hard. This means that you can do more everyday activities with much less fatigue and much more energy.
In addition, you can reduce the amount of low-density lipoproteins (LDL), or bad cholesterol, in your system. A person with high LDL has high quantities of bad cholesterol built up in their bloodstream, and if enough builds up, this will cause atherosclerosis, which can cause heart attacks or sudden cardiac death.
There are many types of cardio exercises that you can do; in fact, anything that you do that requires you to breathe hard and actively move can be considered cardio. For simplicity’s sake, I will go over the three most common cardio exercises and the benefits of each: running, cycling, and using the elliptical.
Running
This chart shows the immediate differences between the most common, various types of cardio:
As you can see, running burns the highest number of Calories per hour. Running is very versatile when on a treadmill, since you can alter the incline and speed for a harder or a simpler workout as desired. Furthermore, you can easily go for a run around your neighborhood. Running has some drawbacks though; it’s a high-impact exercise, and has a tendency to wear out the knees much more than other exercises.
Woman runs on treadmill.
Image source: skynesher
Cycling
Cycling is exceptionally nice because it is very low-impact. It doesn’t affect your joints as much, and allows you to build muscle in your legs. Cycling is also considered an anaerobic exercise when performed at a high resistance level (resistance level is when you set the physical resistance to a certain level; higher resistance levels means that it is harder to pedal a given distance.) Some studies show that in certain cases, cycling is superior to running because cycling for extended periods causes a higher increase in oxygen uptake than the equivalent amount of time spent running.
Unfortunately, cycling has some downsides; it only directly works the lower legs, and it does not burn calories nearly as quickly as running does. In addition, if you choose to cycle outdoors, it’s easier to get hurt because you’re traveling at high speeds.
Using The Elliptical
Ellipticals are very popular because they are also low-impact and have the added benefits of having the machine track the caloric expenditure for you. When used at high enough intensities, your entire body is trained due to the back-and-forth rowing motion of your arms. Unfortunately, the elliptical is imprecise, so you may think you’re expending more calories than you actually are. As a result, you would need to spend much more time on the elliptical to expend the equivalent amount of calories than running or cycling.
Why you shouldn’t do JUST cardio to lose weight
Most people choose a cardiovascular activity of some sort –running, cycling, ellipticals, etc. –when referring to exercises they believe they should do when they want to lose weight. So, they hop on a treadmill every day. At the end of the month, they’re surprised they haven’t lost any weight.
Why is that? It’s really simple actually. Even the most intensive exercise, done continuously for a full hour, burns less Calories than a meal at McDonalds. Once you consider that burning off a pound of fat requires a deficit of roughly 3500 Calories, it would still be very difficult to lose weight if you consumed above your TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure). In essence, cardio isn’t something that magically compensates for a poor diet, it merely complements and enhances a good diet.
So, how can you lose weight while still continuing to eat above your TDEE?
Hence, we enter the magical world of resistance training, which I will cover next week in Part 3. Hopefully, this section gave you a good understanding of what cardio can and can’t do, so you can use this information to form a holistic and healthy exercise routine!
