Cardiovascular exercise | Life Health Fitness

5 Best Cardio Workout at Home

Cardiovascular exercise burns calories and conditions your heart. We all need that! But you don’t need to go to a gym to get a cardio workout that’s as good for your waistline as it is for your ticker. For a heart-pounding workout, you don’t need to belong to a gym, buy expensive equipment, or even step outside your home. Yes, running and cycling are good for cardiovascular fitness, but you need a bike to cycle and, unless you run outdoors, a treadmill. Running outdoors isn’t always practical when the temperatures are below freezing. You also might not like breathing in car exhaust as you burn calories. Here are simple ways to do cardio at home.

Circuit Training

Circuit training is where you move from exercise to exercise quickly without resting between exercises. This type of training improves overall fitness and elevates your heart rate enough to get cardiovascular benefits. You can enhance the cardiovascular benefits even more by including cardio exercises in your routine. To do a heart-thumping circuit workout at home with no equipment, choose a few bodyweight exercises, like push-ups, planks, pull-ups, deep squats, and lunges. Then, choose four or five exercises that boost your heart rate, such as burpees, squat jumps, jumping jacks, kickboxing moves, and mountain climbers. Do a bodyweight exercise for 30 seconds followed by 30 seconds of a cardio exercise.

Keep alternating back and forth between a bodyweight move and a cardio movement until 20 minutes have elapsed. If it’s too challenging, take a 1-minute rest at the 10-minute mark. The beauty of circuit training is you can work every muscle in your body and keep your heart rate up with minimal space to exercise. Plus, circuit training offers infinite variety as you can change the exercises each time you work out.

Jump Your Way to a Healthier Heart

Yes, a jump rope workout does require a jump rope, but they’re inexpensive and easy to find. If you don’t have a jump rope, you can even “shadow” jump rope where you go through the motions without the rope. Jumping rope not only elevates your heart rate quickly, but it’s also a calorie scorcher. If you do it with intensity, 30 minutes of jumping rope can burn 400 calories. Since it’s hard to do 30 minutes of non-stop jumping, try interval jump rope instead. Jump rope quickly for 20 to 30 seconds and recover for an equal period of time. Alternate back and forth until 30 minutes have elapsed. Crank up some tunes to make this intense workout go by faster!

Climbing up and down the stairs is harder than walking on flat ground and it activates the glutes, the muscles that shape your backside more. Climbing stairs also target the hamstring muscles, the muscles in the back of your thighs. To add an extra challenge, strap on an inexpensive weight vest or place a backpack on your back when you climb up and down. Stair climbing is also a handy workout when you’re on vacation. Be sure to choose a hotel that has lots of stairs!

Take Advantage of Video and Live Streaming Workouts

The advantage of the internet is a workout is as close as your computer. Check out some of the sites that offer free workout videos or live streaming workouts. Choose videos designed to get your heart pumping. If kickboxing is your thing, do a search for kickboxing workouts. Kickboxing gets your heart rate up and works every muscle in your body. If you get bored, vary your workouts regularly.

Plyometrics

Plyometrics are moves where you shorten a muscle and then lengthen it in an explosive manner. Think of a basketball player jumping into the air to shoot the ball into the hoop. Most plyometric exercises involve jumping. The classic examples are squat jumps, lateral jumps, split lunges, and box jumps. Put these exercises to work for you by alternating between plyometric exercises. For example, do 20 seconds of squat jumps. Rest for 20 seconds and keep repeating. Don’t try box jumps if you’re a beginner. Build up a baseline level of stamina and agility before attempting this more advanced exercise and choose a low box initially. The first objective is to avoid injury. Doing plyometric workouts will get you into better cardiovascular shape but also build explosive power!

Head for the Stairs

Do you have a flight of stairs in your house or apartment building? Stair climbing is an excellent way to cop a cardiovascular workout. You control the speed! When you first start out, walk up and down the stairs, but as you build up cardiovascular fitness, pick up the speed until you’re running up and down the stairs. Be careful not to fall! You’ll burn over 500 calories per hour depending upon your weight when you walk the stairs, but you can double the calorie burn by running up and down the steps.

Home Workouts Rock

When you’re short on time or hate the idea of going to a gym, try these home cardio workouts. They’ll boost your heart rate in short order and give you the benefits of a gym workout without the monthly membership fee

Compound Exercise Benefits for Weight Loss

Why You Should Focus on Compound Exercises When You Strength Train

To build strength and muscle size, you must gradually increase the challenge your place on your muscles. Fitness experts refer to this as progressive overload, and it’s a fundamental tenet of strength training. If you ignore this principle, your workout becomes stagnant, and you stop making gains. If you’re serious about improving your strength and total body fitness, that’s not what you want.

Unfortunately, some people devote too much of their workout to cardiovascular exercise because they are not aware of the benefits of strength training. Training our muscles keeps them around longer because with age, we gradually lose muscle size and strength. This process begins after the age of thirty and accelerates once you hit mid-life. What you don’t use, you lose, and most forms of cardiovascular exercise don’t preserve muscle in the upper body and core. Strength training does that. So, the time you spend working your muscles against resistance is time well spent in terms of your future health.

However, there’s a caveat. Not all strength-training exercises are created equal. Some exercises offer more return for the time you spent doing them. These exercises are called compound exercises, and they’re the key to making big gains in strength and muscle size. Furthermore, because you be using more muscles at the same time it will increase the amount of energy used. After all, it take more any to move two muscles than it does to move one.

What is a Compound Exercise?

Compound exercises are strength-training moves that involve movement around more than one joint simultaneously. Compound movements also work more than one muscle group at the same time. Examples of compound exercises include deadlifts, push-ups, squats, dips, bent-over rows, military press, and bench press. For example, the main muscles you work when you bench press are the pectoral muscles in the chest, but the muscles in your triceps and shoulders are activated too. You get more bang for you buck when you perform compound movements.

In contrast, isolation exercises activate a single muscle group. They consist of movement around a single joint. Examples include biceps curls, leg extensions, lateral raises, and chest flies. These exercises offer benefits, but they shouldn’t make up the bulk of your workout. Compound exercises have benefits you won’t get from isolation movements.

What Are the Benefits of Compound Exercises?

Compound exercises are time expedient. Since you’re working multiple muscle groups, you don’t have to do as many sets or exercises to get a full-body workout. In fact, you can work your entire body by doing only a few, compound exercises. A few sets of deadlifts, squats, and bench press will work every muscle without taking a lot of time.

Another benefit of compound exercises is they are functional movements. In other words, compound exercises, like squats and deadlifts, train your leg muscles to work more effectively as a unit. Muscles don’t usually work independently of each other, and that’s where isolation exercises fall short. Shifting the focus to compound exercises translates into greater functionality when you do things around the house, like bending over to lift something heavy or squatting down to retrieve something off the floor. Compound exercises are also beneficial if you play sports. It’s a more “holistic” approach to getting strong.

Compound exercises also burn more calories because you’re working multiple muscle groups at the same time. The more muscles you put to work, the more energy stores your body has to tap in to. Compound exercises that work the large muscles in the lower body burn the most calories. So, deadlifts and squats are your friends if you’re trying to get lean and ripped. These are the exercises that get you stronger and leaner faster.

Some studies suggest that working large muscles groups against heavy resistance creates more of an anabolic effect relative to working smaller muscle groups with isolation exercises. In other words, targeting large muscle group with heavy weights stimulates the release of hormones, like testosterone and growth hormone, which fuel muscle growth. However, this is controversial. Not all studies support this idea. Yet it does appear that anabolic hormones are elevated for at least 15 minutes after a challenging strength training workout that emphasizes the large muscles in the lower body.

Compound Exercises

Chest

Bench Press
Push Ups

Back

Bent Over Barbell Row
Pull Ups

Abs

Plank
Bicycles

Shoulders

Overhead Press
Lateral Raise’

Leg

Squats
Lunge

The Bottom Line

Include isolation exercises in your strength-training routine but make the focus of your workouts compound exercises. A good ratio is 75% compound exercises to 25% isolation exercises. If you have muscle asymmetries where you’re more developed on one side than the other, isolation exercises on the underdeveloped side can help restore balance. But, overall, compound exercises are a strength and muscle-building ally to take advantage of. When you’re pressed for time, make all of your exercises compound movements to get the most benefits out of the time you have. Twenty or thirty minutes of compound exercises pack a lot more punch than an equivalent amount of isolation exercises. Take advantage of the benefits compound movements offer. You’ll be surprised at how quickly you see gains!

Fasting Cardio Benefits: Should You Eat Before a Workout?

To Eat or Not to Eat

The basic meaning of fasting is ot to to abstain from food. How long your fasting lasts depends on the reason for fasting. Most people fast for religious or spiritual reason but in the fitness industry people fast to loose weight.

If you plan to workout while fasted it is very important to schedule the best time for you to workout while fasted. Because of our different lifestyle, this schedule will differ from person to person.

Should you grab a bite to eat or a small meal before a workout? Or should you start your sweat session with an empty stomach? Fitness gurus say that working out first thing in the morning after fasting overnight burns more fat. Does science support this idea?

It’s true that your body is primed to burn fat when you haven’t eaten in eight or more hours. In fact, some studies show that you burn up to 20% more fat if you exercise before eating. That’s because muscle glycogen, a source of fuel for muscle contractions is low, and your body must tap into fat as an energy source. If your intent is to burn body fat, exercising after a fast has potential advantages.

However, the benefits apply mainly to moderate-intensity exercises, like brisk walking, jogging, or cycling than it does high-intensity exercise. If you’ll be doing vigorous exercise, like heavy weight lifting, or a high-intensity interval session, your muscles are dependent on carbohydrates, in the form of glycogen, as a source of fuel. If you haven’t eaten in more than eight hours, you may have a hard time sustaining high-intensity exercise. The fatigue that goes along with fasting works against you when you’re trying to maximize your fitness level and burn the most calories. Exercising in a fasting state may keep you from performing your best, as you’re limited by fatigue and that means burning fewer calories.

You’ve probably heard of athletes who carb load before a race or other event where they need to perform at their best. There’s a reason they do this. They’re trying to maximize their muscle glycogen stores, so their muscles have enough fuel for a strong performance. They don’t want to “bonk out” in the middle of a race or other event.

Another Problem with Fasted Cardio

Fasted cardio may modestly boost fat loss since your body has to tap into fat as a source of fuel. But you may lose muscle as well, and that’s not desirable. If you overdo the cardio by doing a 10-mile run in a fasted state, it places stress on your body, not only from the exercise but the fact you’re running when you’re low on fuel. In response, your adrenal glands pump out more of a stress hormone called cortisol.

Cortisol has some good effects. For example, it helps keep your blood sugar from dropping too low when you’re fasting, but it also boosts muscle breakdown. It also sends your body into a catabolic or muscle breakdown state. Over a longer period of time, it also causes weight redistribution so that more fat ends up around your abs and waistline and less in the thighs and hips. So, cortisol isn’t favorable for body composition.

Fasted Cardio Can Impact Exercise Motivation Too

People respond differently to fasted cardio. Some people do it and feel reasonably well, but others feel fatigued, weak, or have problems with focus and motivation. Your brain needs a constant supply of glucose, and you don’t supply that glucose in a fasted state. It’s possible to adapt over time to a low carb diet and exercising in a fasted or low-carb state, but it takes time for this adaptation to take place. If you have blood sugar issues, particularly if you have a history of hypoglycemia or type 1 diabetes, exercising in a fasted state can be dangerous.

The Bottom Line

If you do low or moderate-intensity exercises such as walking, jogging, or cycling, you’ll likely have no problem doing it in a fasted state, especially if you exercise for 30 minutes or so. But, if you’ll be lifting heavy weights or exercising at a vigorous pace, it’s best to consume a snack within a few hours of a workout. You don’t have to eat a full meal. Choose a snack that has about a three to one ratio of carbohydrates to protein. For example, an apple or banana with peanut butter gives you healthy carbs and protein. Yet, this snack is still light enough that you won’t feel too full or heavy.

References:

Exercise Physiology. McGraw Hill. Powers and Howley. 2009.

British Journal of Nutrition. Volume 110, Issue 4 28 August 2013, pp. 721-732.

Fun Cardio Workout Ideas

Cardiovascular exercise is necessary to improve your aerobic condition and maintain heart health. Unfortunately, most forms of cardio revolve around jogging or biking, and can get boring fast. Try these five forms of cardio for a workout that is not only fun, but also highly effective. The American Heart Association recommends 30 minutes 5 days a week minimum. However, you can break it up in 15 minutes block 2 times for the day. You can also pick from 2 activities below. For instance you can jump rope for 15 mins then box for 15 mins. There are so many ways you can get a workout in between your other activities. Be creative and have fun.

Here are fun cardio activities that will get your heart rate up.

Use a boxing bag

You may not be a martial artist, but anyone can use a boxing bag. Find a pair of comfortable gloves, watch a few videos on throwing basic kicks and punches, and find a sturdy bag that can take your abuse. Focus on mastering the fundamentals of each strike or throwing combinations while moving your feet and body to avoid imaginary hits. It may sound easy, but you’ll be breathing hard in no time.

Try to perform ten 1 minute rounds with 1 minute of rest in between. As you get in better shape, try to increase your boxing rounds to 2-3 minutes each while keeping rest the same. This type of full body exercise will greatly increase your beats-per-minute while burning plenty of calories. Additionally, you can take out your stress and frustration while learning a valuable skill.

Jump Rope

Jumping rope is not just for school kids. Jumping rope provides a gentle, yet challenging way of elevating your heart rate that requires minimal space and equipment. You can do it inside or outside, and you can also take your jump rope to a park, beach, gym, or practically anywhere else you like to go.

Using a jump rope can be a challenge since it takes a while to develop the necessary rhythm and coordination. Make sure your jump rope is long enough for you to easily jump over, but not so long that it drags along the floor or gets tangled.

Set realistic goals for yourself that you can increase over time. Maybe you want to spend 20 minutes jumping rope, maybe you want to do 1000 total jumps, or maybe you’re still trying to get 10 clean hops in a row without messing up. There’s no wrong way to do it. Not only is jump-roping a great way to get good exercise and have fun, but jumping rope can also help those who are less than nimble become more footloose and spry.

Run Ladders

Lay an agility ladder down on the ground or draw a long row of approximately twelve adjacent 1-foot by 1-foot boxes on the ground to perform ladder drills. The goal is to quickly get from one end of the ladder to the other without stepping on the lines. The fun part comes when you try to do so using the most creative footwork possible.

You can just run straight through by putting one foot in each box. You can put two feet in each box. You can hop all the way through on one leg. You can put one foot in each box and one foot out. You can run it backwards, sideways, or while pivoting in circles.

Think of running ladders as a fancier form of hopscotch. If you can’t come up with imaginative ways to move your feet, watch some videos online. Not only is this a great way to get moving, but it’s fun to invent, experiment with, and practice your own original dance-like steps.

Plyometrics

Plyometrics have a formal sounding name, but they’re just any exercise where you’re jumping around in an explosive and energetic fashion. You can squat down and jump up as high as you can. You can lunge from your left foot to your right foot like a skater. You can try to skip up your driveway on one leg. Any type of repetitive and dynamic jumping motion that moves your body in different patterns and directions can be an effective plyometric exercise.

Find a few different moves you like and perform each one 10 times, one right after another. Rest for a minute after completing this first round of exercises, and try to complete 2-3 total rounds with one minute of rest in between each round. You’ll burn plenty of calories while having fun and you’ll also be developing your leg strength, balance, and coordination.

Sprints

Sprinting can be intimidating, but if done right it can be a manageable and effective way to quickly get in excellent shape. While you’re sprinting, your body’s heart rate will quickly spike to near maximum levels and then slowly lower as you rest or walk back to your starting position. This effect boosts your metabolism, increases your aerobic capacity, and improves fat burning for hours after you complete your workout.

Find a distance you can comfortably sprint across at 80-90 percent of your greatest effort. Slowly run back and forth a few times to warm up. When you feel ready, run your first sprint at 70 percent maximum speed, then the next one at 80 percent, then 90 percent, then 100 percent. After you run a few sprints as fast as you can, gradually work your way back down to a slower pace. Walk back to your starting position after each sprint you complete and rest for a few seconds. By slowly ramping up your sprinting speed to a maximum and then going back down you adjust the difficulty incrementally without feeling overwhelmed or exhausted. It may sound tough, but the challenge is exhilarating.

Step Aerobics

Step aerobics is fun and easy. All you need is a step platform . Besides being a good cardio workout, stepping on and off the platform firms and lifts your booty. You can increase the intensity of the workout by raising the platform or by wearing a weighted vest. Start by having the platform flat then raise the platform as your fitness level increases. If you have arthritis, this might be a good option because its low impact .

Trampoline

Jumping on a trampoline has to be one of the most fun things you can do. And guess what, you can also enjoy this activity with your kids. Trampoline parks are popping up all over my city and most offer fitness classes. However, if you have space at home you can buy one for yourself . This way you can bounce off all the fat and have fun.

Weighted Hula Hooping

Hooping, if done with the right amount of intensity can increase your heart rate, burn calories and is a good exercise that is comparable to brisk walking. This activity also helps to improve flexibility and stability in your hips and back. It takes time to get use to the motion of the tube around your waste but with practice and time you will be a master hooper.

Whether it’s boxing, jumping, sprinting, or any other type of activity that elevates your heart rate, there are many ways to get cardiovascular exercise that don’t involve jogging or biking. Try some of these methods for your next cardiovascular workout. 30mins per day for 5 days a week is all you need. You can even split up the sessions. Have fun and get creative. The goal is to get your heart rate up by all means necessary.