Burn 340 Calories a Day with Aerobic Exercise
June 8, 2008
Strengthen your heart and lungs and give your body a wonderful shape with Aerobics.
Aerobic Exercise ? Improve your fitness the right way.
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Aerobic exercise involves the manner of muscles drawing on oxygen in the blood as well as fats and glucose that increase cardiovascular endurance. Aerobics is done in order to improve fitness, burn calories, shape the body, strengthen physical well-being, and maintaining fitness. There are different types of Aerobics, apart from a Warm up, a Cardio part, and a Cool down. There is another lesson that consists of Floor work, and Stretching.
Your body is always burning some fat but if you want to lose weight, you need to increase your activity to the point where your body starts to let go of some of its fat reserves. That means sustaining some activity. It takes about 20 minutes of aerobic activity before the body starts to burn its fat deposit. And fat-burning has an added bonus: if you can get your body into its fat-burning range, your metabolism stays elevated even after you’ve stopped exercising ?for up to six hours!
Better Cardio Workouts
May 22, 2008
The Cardio King
Change it up
One of the most important aspects to a cardio workout is changing it. Most people get bored with exercise simply because they pop these DVD’s in and do the same thing everyday. Imagine if you had to read the same book everday, would that be fun. No way, so why would you do the same workout everyday. Most people don’t realize what they are doing. You have to make it fun in order for it to work.
Try to have at least 4-6 different exercises.
Intensify
Make sure the you are reaching your target heartrate. If you don’t you are not getting the most out of it. Why do something just to do it. Your goal is to burn fat and it is real difficult to do that without reaching your target zone.
Take it outside
Don’t just stay in the gym. Change it up and take it on the run. Try doing some intense walking or some bike riding. Play some basketball in the park. Make it fun and interesting, that’s the only way you will keep it up.
Cardios Effect on Overall Health
May 7, 2008
When most people hear the word “Cardio”, their mind automatically pictures jogging, or threadmills, or stationnary bikes. Yes, those are some forms of cardio. They also think it’s only purpose is to loose fat. But doing cardio has many benefits.
- Cardio helps prevent heart attacks due to clogged arteries in heavier people.
- Cardio strenghtens your heart and can lenghten your life span.
- It decreases depression and anxiety.
- It shows off the muscles that you have.
- It prevents high blood pressure and can promote a lower resting heart rate.
- It can allow you to do more work while putting less of a strain on your heart.
- It increases the overal function, and well-being of your life.
- Helps increase bloodflow to your muscles, wich helps bring more nutrients to them for better performance & growth.
- It increases the overall heart functions.
So you see, cardio has alot of benefits that far surpass any aesthetic reason. But where does Cardio fit in ones body building routine? Well that depends on your body type. If your like me, and have a hard time gaining muscle. Then you should be carefull when doing cardio. I was worried that cardio would give me less gains, but then after seeing all the benefits that cardio can give you, I decided that it was worth doing them for the sake of my health. So I only do them 2 times a week. But for someone who wants to loose weight, doing cardio 3-5 times a week would speed things up.
An Alternate Fitness Tool
April 22, 2008
Any competitive or recreational athlete will use a variety of cross-training methods or tools to complement their particular sport or to meet their fitness needs. One such tool that is becoming increasing popular is the Kickbike. The Kickbike is a high end adult version of a scooter. Although new to North America, the Kickbike has been around for about 20 years in Europe and the Netherlands where national and international Eurocups are held yearly establishing national and world records for distances ranging from 200m to 30km.
How does one train on a Kickbike?
The Kickbike is propelled forward by kicking back as you would on any scooter. The only new skill needed is learning how to switch kicking legs. There are two techniques that can be used for switching kicking legs. One is called the "Heel Roll" and the second the "Hop- Step" technique. How often you switch kicking legs is dependant on the person but usually a cadence of 3 to 10 kicks before you switch is normal. When attacking hills your cadence will increase. When descending hills you are best to just stop kicking and enjoy the ride. For those who would like to see both techniques you are invited to visit Kickbike Ontario’s website at www.kickbikeontario.ca were a short 36 second video clip is available.
Benefits of Elliptical Training
April 7, 2008
The basic motion of an elliptical trainer is a smooth, flowing…well…elliptical motion. The low impact nature of these machines greatly reduces stress on the joints of the lower body (ankles, knees, and hips).
Since it is a weight-bearing exercise, elliptical training promotes cell growth in the bones of the lower body and spine thus helping ward off the debilitating effects of osteoporosis. This is a distinct advantage that elliptical trainers have over other exercise devices that are not weight-bearing such as rowing machines and stationary bikes.
The other great advantage that elliptical trainers have over other exercise machines is that most models work the muscles of both the upper and lower body. This results in a cardiovascular efficiency that produces an equivalent training effect as other forms of exercise, but over a shorter period of time.
Joggers for example, will sometimes swing small dumbbells while jogging in order to achieve this training efficiency. This was popular during the height of the jogging craze during the 1980s, but is now rarely observed in the wild. Perhaps joggers decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. Maybe they also finally realized how goofy they looked in the process. Remember, no one ever looks goofy while gracefully striding away on an elliptical trainer!
Spinning Exercise
March 23, 2008
Spinning exercise or studio cycling is not only popular these days it’s an excellent form of fitness. It helps strengthen your heart, tone your glutes, calves, thighs in addition to being a great exercise to slim legs.
Spinning exercise classes usually consist of about 12 to 20 people. Classes range from 50 to 60 minutes and are set to music. The instructor takes the class on a ride that includes all types of terrain that produces a great spinning workout.
If you are the type of person who doesn’t care for traditional exercise classes, this form of exercise is perfect for you. One of the many benefits of spinning is you will always feel like you’re keeping up with the class because everyone finishes at the same time.
The special spinning bicycle that you pedal has a weighted flywheel in the front and makes you feel more like you’re riding on a real bicycle. The spinning bike allows you to adjust the tension to keep pedaling within a comfortable range for your fitness level.
Adjustments can also be made to the handlebars and seat to make you more comfortable. Here are a few stationary exercise bike tips before you start.
Cardio Enthusiasts: Discover a More Effective Training Method for Fat Loss and Heart Health!
March 8, 2008
It is common to hear fitness professionals and medical doctors prescribe low to moderate intensity aerobic training (cardio) to people who are trying to prevent heart disease or lose weight. Most often, the recommendations constitute something along the lines of “perform 30-60 minutes of steady pace cardio 3-5 times per week maintaining your heart rate at a moderate level”. Before you just give in to this popular belief and become the “hamster on the wheel” doing endless hours of boring cardio, I’d like you to consider some recent scientific research that indicates that steady pace endurance cardio work may not be all it’s cracked up to be.
First, realize that our bodies are designed to perform physical activity in bursts of exertion followed by recovery, or stop-and-go movement instead of steady state movement. Recent research is suggesting that physical variability is one of the most important aspects to consider in your training. This tendency can be seen throughout nature as all animals demonstrate stop-and-go motion instead of steady state motion. In fact, humans are the only creatures in nature that attempt to do “endurance” type physical activities. Most competitive sports (with the exception of endurance running or cycling) are also based on stop-and-go movement or short bursts of exertion followed by recovery. To examine an example of the different effects of endurance or steady state training versus stop-and-go training, consider the physiques of marathoners versus sprinters. Most sprinters carry a physique that is very lean, muscular, and powerful looking, while the typical dedicated marathoner is more often emaciated and sickly looking. Now which would you rather resemble?
3 Keys To Finding Your Natural Running Stride
February 22, 2008
When I think back to when I was at school, my worst nightmare was running. I hated it, even more than football and rugy which I don’t like even today. So I never thought that I’d be any good at running… until I found out the trick that I’m about to share with you now.
I realised that running was an important part of my cardio-vascular exercise, and that I needed to find a way to make it a little bit easier for me. When I used the treadmill, I was getting way out of breath way too quickly (less than 10 minutes, and that included 3 minutes fast walk to warm up). And yet I could go on the rowing machine for 20 minutes and hardly even notice it.
So something was wrong with my running technique.
Not knowing what to try, I just varied everything I could: speed, incline, the length of my stride, the height of my stride, and so on.
And these are the three tricks to running that made the difference for me:
1. Don’t be afraid to INCREASE your speed!
The Fitness Cardio Secret That Propels Lance Armstrong
February 7, 2008
What is Lance Armstrong doing that you can do to improve your results?
Most people exercise to lose weight, focusing solely on that one single goal. But wait, it is not only about looking aesthetically pleasing, getting in those tight jeans, or losing ten pounds. It is really about improving your health, and human performance.
Each day when you are huffing and puffing on the treadmill, focusing vigorously on keeping yourself lean, have you ever thought about what physically is occurring in your body besides burning a bunch of calories?
For improved results, more people need to stop focusing solely on calorie burn, and start thinking about improving such fitness values as VO2 Max, or maximum oxygen uptake.
What exactly is your VO2 Max? VO2 Max is defined as the highest rate at which oxygen can be taken in and used during high intensity dynamic exercise. When you are exercising aerobically on your treadmill, each and every muscle contraction requires oxygen to break down the fats, carbohydrates, and protein; thus, providing energy (ATP) needed to fuel the muscles in order for movement to occur.
Aerobic Training
January 23, 2008
How to start your aerobic training program:
Consider first setting your goals for sometime in the future; make sure they are realistic. Start easy, be kind to yourself. Many of us start out joining a gym and telling ourselves that now we will train every day! Six out of ten people going to gyms drop out in the first month. That’s a staggering 60% of the people. The numbers are just as high for those that buy exercise equipment and don’t use it. So you need several ingredients, not necessarily in order of importance, but because you want to be successful in your training.
1. Desire or motivation that is from who you are, not to get something.
2. Energy: This means you need to start thinking about eating better. No matter where you are with nutrition you can always improve (see nutrition for details). You need nutrients as well. Vitamins, power foods, high technology nutrition is available; you just need to make the effort. Without good fuel it’s hard to get the energy to train.
3. Set your goals within yourself and make them realistic. Remember, there is no cause and effect so you can’t cause health; you can only live it.
