One the biggest complaints about cardio is it’s boring.
One gentleman said to me “ I feel like a hamster on his
wheel whenever I get on the treadmill”. A young lady mentioned
“ I can think of more productive ways to spend my time,
whin I ride the bike I feel like I am going nowhere fast”.
The other side of the coin is, “ I just put on my headphones
and I can run forever”, or “it wakes me up”, my personal
favorite, “ it gives me time to think”
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Regardless of what you think about cardio it is a very important
component for getting healthy and staying that way. Weather
you are trying to loose fat or gain muscle, you still need
to do cardio.
We have different needs at different times. The intensity
and duration of your cardio depends on what you are trying
to accomplish.
.
The question I am asked the most is how much cardio should
I be doing? Most of my clients are either trying to lower
there body fat or increase there muscle mass. They all do
cardio but they don’t all do it the same way. Depending
on there current fitness level I have them do anywhere from
15 minutes to1 hour at a time.
Let’s start by determining our maximum heart rate (the most
amount of beats per minutes for a substantial amount of
time) .. This is easy to calculate all you have to do is
subtract your age from 220. Example I am 44 years old so
I will subtract 44 from 220 to get my max which is 176 beats
per minutes.
If I were trying to gain muscle without increasing my
body fat I would do 30 minutes of cardio 5 days a week in
my fat burning zone. My fat burning zone is 65% of my max
which is115 beats per minutes. If I were trying to increase
my endurance I would get in my cradio zone which is 85 %
of my max( 150 beats per minutes) 6 days a week and keep
it there for an hour.
Lowering your body fat takes a little more effort. The
best way to do this is to increase and decrease the intensity
every couple of minutes through the workout, this is called
interval training.. This should be done 4 or 5 times a week
45 minutes at a time. By increasing your heart rate to just
below your max and then lowering it to just above your cardio
zone causes your body to work harder thus we burn more calories.
There are a lot of different ways to do cardio for more
ideas keep checking the cardio page on this web site. Remember
before you start any new routine check with your doctor
first. If you have any questions please contact me and I
will be happy to answer them
I hope to here from you soon
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