Cardiovascular Exercise and how to do it Right

Hey everybody, and welcome to the first video of the exercise section. This is all about cardiovascular exercise. So, if you don't know what cardiovascular exercise is, it's basically doing something that's gonna elevate your heart rate. Okay, so it's a rhythmic activity generally, and it's for an extended period of time. This isn't something you usually do for about 10 seconds. It's gonna be at least a few minutes long, up to even a couple hours long. It will elevate your heart rate, and there's different heart rate zones that we're gonna get into. So, a lot of information here. So, the benefits of cardiovascular exercise are that it helps burn fat so that you can lose weight. When we talk about losing weight, we talk— we really are talking about wanting to burn that excess fat. There are different types of cardiovascular exercise, but we really wanna target the stuff that's gonna use our stored fuel, which is our fat. to get us through those workouts. It will improve your blood pressure and the strength of your heart and your whole cardiovascular system, which in turn helps reduce your risk of having a heart attack. Now, heart attack is one of the major killers in, at least in America, but all over the world, and it's primarily because people don't strengthen their heart. You forget that your heart is actually a muscle, and we need to strengthen it like we strengthen everything else. So this is vital, vital. So it's a vital piece of exercise that we want to be able to include in our workouts, in our daily life. It will help reduce your cholesterol. If you have an issue with your cholesterol, this is one way to help reduce that, including— that included with some of the other stuff we've talked about in diet earlier in this course. This will help you prevent developing diabetes and some forms of cancer because as you get stronger and the blood flows better, You're gonna use the sugars in your body better. The sugars won't be floating around in the blood, which can lead to diabetes, and cancer cells also feed off of sugar. Cardiovascular exercise will also increase your lung capacity, so you're able to breathe better. You will find yourself at times, whether you're trying to exercise or not, where you're out of breath. Maybe you're moving a piece of furniture, or maybe you're in danger and you're running for your life. You wanna be able to have that lung capacity to really be able to breathe as you're pushing your body through these things. Your sleep will improve if you are doing cardiovascular exercise. You will reduce the amount of stress hormones in your body, so that's important. And it will help you feel a lot better about the health and management of your body as you're doing this and beyond. Okay, so here's a couple of examples— more than a couple, a few examples of what cardiovascular exercise is. Walking or running would be a fine example of cardiovascular exercise. Biking, whether that's on the road or mountain biking, whether that's short-term or long-distance biking, also same with running and walking. Circuit training, so this starts to incorporate a little bit more resistance exercise generally, but getting in a lot of different exercises without letting your body rest, that can be considered cardiovascular exercise. Playing sports, if you like to play basketball, if you like to run 5Ks around town, if you like to play softball, playing sports can be cardiovascular. If you go to the gym, any indoor machine, whether it's a bike or an elliptical or a treadmill, all of those can help you achieve cardiovascular exercise. You can— we said go for a walk, that's up there twice. Class settings. Things like kickboxing, boot camps, different step classes, all kinds of stuff like that. And then there are just so many other options, but you get the idea now of what cardiovascular exercise is, and you wanna try to include some form of this throughout your week and throughout your exercise programs. Often, people despise this type of exercise because they feel it is boring, or they don't get much out of it. It's important to understand that it can have such great benefits for you, and that it doesn't have to be boring. There are creative ways you can do it. In this picture, we have somebody who's hiking, going and seeing great views. For some people, that takes away the boredom. You can do this with a friend, and maybe you can have a conversation while you're going for a walk, or a hike, or a bike ride, and that can make it more entertaining for you. But in addition to that, people are usually— people against cardiovascular exercise really aren't sure what they should do for a workout. And I want to get a little bit more into that as we go because it's not just what you're doing, it's how you're doing it. OK? So there's different modes of cardiovascular exercise. There's steady-state exercise which would be just walking. In this example, you can see somebody going for a long jog. They're running a race, maybe a marathon here. You're just going and it's one pace for an extended amount of time and that's totally fine. That's a great form of exercise and you can actually push your levels on this. Generally, this is a lower level that you can handle. Now, if you're not a runner, this may seem a little bit more extreme. So you've got to take into account your own abilities at where you're at right now. But you're able to maintain this pace for an extended period of time. There's also interval exercise. So that would be— you can do multiple— you can do this multiple ways, but this would be going at a very light speed or resistance in your run, for example, and then taking a small period of time where you really, really push yourself to a higher level. And then you go back to that easier level and then back to that higher level, and you can vary the amounts of time you have in each level. You can also add a medium level. You can go light, medium, hard, and you can vary and play with it that way. So there's another, another example of intervals. And for some people, that's enough to keep them entertained if they were previously bored with, say, steady-state cardiovascular exercise. Then there's also random, or what's called Fartlek training. Fartlek was a doctor that had created this method and did all kinds of studies on it, but it's basically Randomized intervals. So instead of saying, hey, I'm gonna go easy for 1 minute, hard for 30 seconds, and then easy for 1 minute, hard for 30 seconds. Instead, what you do is, let's use running through your neighborhood as an example. If you're running down the street and you look off in the distance and you see a mailbox and you're like, I'm gonna go really, really hard until I get to that mailbox. And you get to that mailbox and you go, I see a street sign up ahead and I'm gonna walk till I get to that street sign. And then you get to the street sign and you decide you're gonna go for a light jog until you get to the next marker. And so it's just totally randomizing the duration and the effort that you're putting into your cardiovascular exercise. So for some people that makes it a little more fun, it's less robotic, and it can be a way you can challenge yourself in different ways. So if you despise cardiovascular exercise, if you hate doing it, You should begin with learning how to breathe properly. Go back to the breathing videos. We had 2 of them in this course. Go back to those and start to work on breathing mechanics and practicing your breathing. Okay, very often people with poor breathing mechanics really have a difficult time with cardiovascular exercise because it's so difficult for them to breathe when they're pushing their bodies. And you can't expect somebody to be able to do that when they already can't breathe properly When they're at rest. OK? In addition to that, to your better breathing, you want to create more enjoyable exercise habits. So find what mode works best for you and start to play with those. Try them all out. You may have workouts you really didn't like, but go back and try something different. Try an interval. Try a 2-tier interval. Try a 3-tier interval. Try the randomized training. OK. Try using a different method. If you just don't like running, try biking. If you want to try some, some of the others that were listed earlier, give it a shot. There's going to be something out there. As you get better at this, you will enjoy it more. If you have any other questions on cardiovascular exercise, send me an email. I'm happy to answer any questions you've got about that and give you some advice. Otherwise, I'll see you in the next video where we start talking about resistance training. We'll see you over there. Thanks, Bill.