The Importance of Cardiovascular Fitness for Your Overall Health
How’s your cardiovascular fitness? Considering that heart disease remains one of the leading causes of death in the United States, it’s a pretty important question to ask, isn’t it? Cardiovascular fitness is one’s capability to handle aerobically tricky situations in different lengths of time.
By improving cardiovascular fitness, you’ll boost the function of your heart, lungs, and blood vessels and minimize the risk of getting heart disease. It is because it becomes easier for the heart to pump blood that carries oxygen throughout the body. Now, isn’t that something that you should aim for?
In this post, Award Winning Fitness dives deeper into why your cardiovascular fitness needs to improve. We’ll also share some tips on how you can train for improved cardiovascular fitness:
Why You Need to Work on Your Cardiovascular Fitness
Apart from the benefits mentioned above, cardiovascular fitness also ensures that you maintain healthy body composition. When both aerobic and anaerobic exercises are done (especially at high intensities), you also achieve a healthier caloric burn.
The fat stored in your body is used up during prolonged periods of intense activity. Thus, working the cardiovascular system through high-intensity interval training can help you lose weight, too. Additionally, it increases hormonal activity, especially that of testosterone and growth hormone.
How to Effectively Improve Your Cardiovascular Fitness Through Proper Training
Tried a Variety of Cardiovascular Activities
Your body can adapt to a specific type of training pretty quickly, so it will be harder to achieve optimum results when you just do the same kind of workout over a long period. To continue enjoying the benefits of your cardiovascular training, you can change your activities or the equipment you use. For instance, you can alternate running or walking with biking, circuit training, swimming, and others. You can cycle these on a weekly or daily basis.
Train at the Right Intensities
It’s recommended that you wear a heart rate monitor to track your cardiovascular training. Most fitness watches and smartwatches have this feature now. As much as possible, you should train within 60% to 80% of your maximum heart rate to get the best results.
Follow the Appropriate Work: Rest Ratio
You should try setting your working intervals between 15 and 60 seconds. Then have a work to rest ratio of 1:3 or 1:4. What it means is that for every 15 seconds of a sprint interval on a stationary bike, you should rest for about 60 seconds. The duration of your workout can be between 10 and 30 minutes if you do this.
Always Challenge Yourself
When you regularly do cardiovascular training, you’ll soon find that your workouts become easier. That’s why you should always work towards making your routine one level harder. You can do this by reducing your rest intervals, increasing the number of repetitions, or lengthening the intervals you do.
Conclusion
Whether you are doing it as a fitness competition prep or improving your overall health, cardiovascular training is essential and should be a part of your regular routine. That said, you should remember that it’s not enough to do just that and that you should always work on the four pillars of health and fitness, which are cardiovascular fitness, strength, body composition, and mobility. If you want to make sure that you are doing complete fitness training, it’s best to get a seasoned personal trainer to coach you.
Award Winning Fitness offers personal fitness training as well as fitness competition prep coaching. Contact our gym today to know more about our certified trainers and our programs!