This is a really interesting question and one that I am regularly asked by people looking to get in good shape. Unfortunately, like nearly every question about health and fitness the answer I usually give is, it depends. We are all individually unique with our needs and where we are at with our health and fitness journey so the timing of when to really up the intensity with your cardio training efforts will vary significantly from person to person. You have to appreciate that this type of training is very stressful to the body and problems can easily arise if you are not moving correctly to begin with, or if you have significant weaknesses present. I have found that cardio training tends to be highly over-rated in terms of the rewards it provides to the body and as a result it is regularly over-used and even abused often leading to chronic injuries that could have been avoided if a better plan was put in place. In this article, I will explain how I know when the time is right to shift my training focus to higher intensity type of cardiovascular training.
3 Simple Fitness Tests to Measure Your Heart Health & VO2 Max
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.
How To Improve Endurance Without Losing Strength, Speed & Power
Ask anyone who plays in sports like AFL football and basketball how tough it can be to train for speed and power, yet at the same time try to improve your fitness endurance capacity. Many sports demand that you have high levels of strength and power and be able to sustain these repeated bursts in games that last between 2-3 hours. Physiologically the two processes of building strength, power, and speed versus endurance are completely opposed to each other and training both methods at the same time cancels out their effectiveness. This is the equivalent of trying to be a 100m sprinter and a marathon runner at the same time! All good strength coaches and elite athletes are aware of this principle and know that to improve performance these two opposing methods are best trained on their own which is known as periodization. Unfortunately, sporting codes that run for several months of the year do not allow for this perfect recipe to be adopted. Compromises must be made, and usually, it is strength, power, and speed sacrificed for fitness and endurance. But is there a way you can minimize the losses of strength and power by adopting smarter implementation of your fitness training? This is the question we explore in this article and provide you with some simple ideas you can implement into your training that could be a real game changer.
6 Running Workouts To Improve Speed & Acceleration For Sports
We all know that to excel at sports like Football, Basketball and Soccer you will need an incredible amount of fitness. Skills are great to have, but if you gas out quickly due to poor fitness levels you are of no use to your team. This means you need to spend time improving your running fitness, and unfortunately for many sporting athletes and coaches this is where they make the mistake of over-using endurance focused workouts. Sports like football, soccer, and basketball incorporates multiple high-intensity efforts interspersed with periods of lower-intensity exercise. The physiological demands of these sports require players to be competent in several aspects of fitness, which include aerobic and anaerobic power, muscle strength, and agility. Running in a straight line for 10-15 minutes will improve fitness, but not the specific fitness of what these sports demand. In this article, I will discuss how you can design a running workout that meets all of these demands.