Cardio Workouts for better health!

Eveyone wants to be fit, for it has been rightly said, and accepted too, that Health is Wealth. Being fit, or being in good health, brings to you a lot of opportunities in your workplace and in personal life as well. You work more and enjoy more. Before you start with your fitness regime, in order to best determine how to reach your fitness goals, you first need to figure out where you are, physically. And the best way to do this is go sign up for a fitness evaluation, including a full health/fitness history and other important measures, such as the following:

• Resting heart rate: Also known as pulse, this test measures the number of times per minute your heart beats while you’re sitting down or in some other way relaxing. As you exercise more and more, your resting heart rate will likely drop.
• Heart rate after physical activity: Generally, you exercise for about 15 minutes on a treadmill or stationary bicycle and test your pulse. Cardio exercises can gradually lower this number.
• Blood pressure: This test measures how hard your heart has to work to pump blood through your blood vessels. Cardio activities can help alleviate high blood pressure (hypertension), which can lead to health problems.
• Percentage of body fat: Instead of measuring how much you weigh, which doesn’t necessarily indicate how fit you are, measuring your body fat tells you how much of you is fat and how much is muscle, bones, blood, organs, and other tissues. Up to a point, the lower the number, the better, reducing your body fat is often a matter of eating better and burning calories through cardio workouts and lifting weights.
• Strength: This test measures the strength of your upper body, abdominal muscles, and lower body by doing sit-ups, push-up, leg extensions (on a weight machine), and so on. Weight lifting helps improve your strength.
• Flexibility: Because flexibility is the downfall of even the super-fit, make sure your evaluation measures the range of motion of your joints and muscles. Stretching is one of the best ways to improve your flexibility.

Each of these tests can be done by a physician, a personal trainer, or a fitness professional, working at a gym. But don’t spend any time studying for them: You can’t fail these tests. Thing of them more as baseline measurements that help you decide where to put your emphasis: improving the health of your heart, losing weight and reducing body fat, building strength, improving your flexibility, and so on.

Choosing Your Weapon

With so many workout options available these days, you have plenty of fitness weapons from which to choose. Your workout options tend to fall into three categories, however: cardio, strength, and combination workouts. The three following sections give you a brief overview of each:

Seeing into the heart of the matter
Workouts that get your heart pumping are known as cardio (short for cardiovascular) exercises, and these improve the health of your heart and blood vessels. Cardio workouts also burn calories, which helps you lose weight.

The simplest – and, perhaps, the cheapest – cardio exercise is walking. Other popular cardio exercises include running, cycling, in-line skating, swimming, rowing, and (if you live in a snowy winter climate) snowshoeing and cross-country skiing.

You don’t hae to brave the outdoors to get a cardio workout, indoor cardio workouts include treadmills, elliptical trainers, stationary bikes, stair-climbers, and rowing machines.

Getting buff with weights
Many men focus heavily on weight training, while some women shy away from it. The truth is that both men and women need to do some strength training (along with some cardio workouts to get the heart and blood vessels into tip-top shape) for one important reason: to help burn calories. Strange as it seems, weightlifting improves your resting metabolism, which means you turn into a fat- and calorie-burning machine.

Cardio and strength together: Two for the price of one
A few activities combine cardio and strength training into one workout. One of the most popular, ciccuit training, combines a cardio warm-up and cooldown with a series of weight-lifting and other strength stations. Not only can circuit training save you time, but it’s also a lot of fun, because you move from station to station every 30 or 40 seconds.

Two other popular strength-cardio exercises are Yoga and Pilates, which tend to focus on core strength, the strength and flexibility of your midsection. Yoga and Pilates can be high-energy, revved-up workouts or soothing, mind-body workouts that leave you feeling refreshed.

Stretching your mind (and body)

Don’t let recent headlines claiming there’s no correlation between stretching and injuries fool you. If you stretch properly and do it after (not before) you work out, studies show that you reduce your risk of injury. (But do take care that you perform some flexibility movement prep before you workout). And the bottom line is that you want to avoid injuries, because they keep you from working out as often and as intensely as you’d like.

Yoga is an excellent way to improve your flexibility.

What are you eating?

The link between exercise and nutrition has been clear for decades, and you’re likely to have trouble improving your fitness if you make poor nutritional choices. But how do you know which choices to make? Low fat? High carb? Low carb? High protein? Low calorie? Food pyramids? Hydration? Vitamins? It’s enough to make your head spin. Knowing what to eat for optimal fitness has never been a murkier proposition.