The best way to improve your heart and lung health is via exercise in combination with healthy eating and keeping your stress levels in check. However, before you start pounding the pavement it is wise to have a baseline measurement of your current fitness levels. This is critical to do before you get started with any exercise program as it achieves two things. Firstly it will also give you a way to measure your improvement as you progress with your program, but more importantly it helps you to understand the different exercise intensities to find what level is best for you. Exercising too intensely too soon can cause more harm than good and having a clear understanding of what intensity is right for you will help to keep your exercise efforts safe, but effective. In this article I show you three different tests I use that vary in difficulty so I can pick the best test for people of different ages and needs.
Is Interval Training Your Missing Ingredient To Achieving Great Health & Fitness?
Most people believe that the key to losing fat and getting in shape is to spend lots of time doing long slow cardio sessions. If you don’t get a sweat then it is not a good workout! There are several problems with this type of thinking. Firstly if you are just starting out the chance of suffering an injury with this approach is very high for the body is not ready for this type of demand and you also need to be certain you move well enough to handle this type of stress. Plus you are going to need a lot of time to devote to this type of training and most people are time poor already. Secondly, this type of exercise may burn calories at the time but it is not only the calories that is important. This does not mean all cardio exercise is bad for there is a better way and one that does not take that long to do and more importantly provides the body with positive adaptations that are very similar to the effects of strength training. That method is called INTERVAL TRAINING! In this article, I discuss how this works and how you can implement it into your weekly schedule no matter what age or ability you are.