• 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.

So what type of exercise constitutes cardio? Well you have your basic exercises like jogging, rollerbladding, swimming. But cardio could be any type of activity that requires alot of moving. Sports like basketball, football, soccer could be considered cardio. Or you could een get creative, you could take a heavy bag of sand, put it up on a table or anything else, and just pick it up and put it back down several times. It could be hitting a punching bag. Use your imagination.

The most important thing is that you keep cardio fun. Since it’s pretty easy to get bored sitting on a bike in the gym. So taking a ride on a bike in the woods would be alot more fun. Think about that when you think up some type of cardio you’d like to do. “Will I like doing this?”

That’s pretty much it as far as cardio is concerned, It’s a great way to keep healthy. So you’d be an idiot NOT to do some cardio.

JR
http://www.thebestmanyoucanbe.com

Some people talk about the

Being overweight, particularly if you carry the weight around your waist, puts unnecessary strain on the heart. To find out if you have a problem you need to know your height to weight ratio (WHR). To work this out measure round your waist in centimetres and divide it by your hip circumference. The measurements need to be in centimetres, so if your measuring tape is in inches, multiply each measurement by 2.5 before dividing one by the other. If the figure you end up with is greater than 0.9 for men and 0.8 for women then your fat distribution is likely to be associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Research has shown that many overweight people with angina, raised blood cholesterol and high blood pressure found their condition improved greatly, even after losing only some of their excess weight. Many of those who kept their weight off were able to reduce their medication or even stop it entirely.

Exercise is important for your heart too. If you take regular exercise, it will speed up your basal metabolic rate. This means that you will burn more calories, not only when you are exercising but for some time afterwards as well. People often imagine that they have to exercise hard to have an effect, but it

Jogging has its advantages and disadvantages. Time is a big factor to most of us. We don

When it comes to fat loss, you need to be in tune with your body and learn how to listen to it. The idea behind fat loss is to manipulate the body often. As long as you are a step ahead of your body’s actions, you will be on top of the fat loss game.

What exactly does that mean? How do you stay a step ahead of your body? Let’s explore this concept a little further.

Megan is an e-client of mine. When she began her fat loss endeavor she started cardio six days a week for forty-five minutes and saw great results in a matter of weeks. Her new cardio program was exhilarating. It pumped her up mentally and physically and gave her a newfound energy she hadn’t felt in years.

It wasn’t long before she extended her forty-five minute ritual to an entire hour for six days a week. With the extended time, she saw even more results. She was delighted.

Eventually, the daily hour cardio chore was wearing on her. Her changes ceased, she was constantly fatigued, and began to hate cardio with an intense passion.

To combat the plateau, she added yet…more cardio on top of fatigue and hatred for exercise. Her grueling hour sessions turned into an hour and fifteen minutes to even longer, an hour and a half.

Nothing is more aggravating than putting all your time and effort into something that takes you no where.

Her fat loss results stalled dead in their tracks and even seemed to reverse. How could something once so productive now be destroying her weight loss efforts?

What may surprise you is that excess cardio can be counterproductive. Any cardio or weight training session lasting over a continuous hour does more harm than good.

Keep Cardio Productive
Cardio is heart healthy and it’s a great exercise, but if your goal with cardio is to burn fat, you need to take it with a stride and make it fat burning productive.

I come across many ladies who are quite active. This is all fine and dandy, but when they are active and top that with teaching spinning classes, kickboxing, high energy videos, and general cardio machines, this can be a recipe for disaster, setting your further back than when you started.

Don’t go overboard with cardio. Keep it simple, yet effective.

Cardio Intensity
Cardio intensity is a factor to keep fat burning beneficial. This does not mean to do an all out killer cardio routine that leaves you crawling from the gym in a near death status, but to simply shake things up a bit to force the body to respond.

A good way to master cardio is with HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training). There are many variations of HIIT and my favorite is the 2/2 ratio.

Example of 2/2 Ratio HIIT

Minutes 1-2 – Warm up

Minutes 3-4 – Low intensity

Minutes 5-6 – High intensity

Minutes 7-8 – Low intensity

Minutes 9-10 – High Intensity

Minutes 11-12 – Low intensity

Minutes 13-14 – High intensity

Minutes 15-16 – Low intensity

Minutes 17-18 – High Intensity

Minutes 19-20 – Low intensity

Minutes 21-22 – Cool down

With HIIT, your body never falls in a rut because you are constantly changing the intensity to prevent cardio adaptation.

Progressive Cardio

Another successful cardio tactic to use is Progressive Cardio. Your body can adapt to anything in a short amount of time and Progressive Cardio can stop adaptation before it occurs. Progressive Cardio is simply increasing your cardio each week by either the numbers of day or the amount of time to invite change and prevent staleness, provided you don’t overdo it.

Example of Progressive Cardio

Week 1 – 4 times a week for 20 minutes

Week 2 – 4 times a week for 25 minutes

Week 3 – 5 times a week for 25 minutes

Week 4 – 5 times a week for 30 minutes

You will notice how each week is a step advanced from the previous. This is how you make cardio work in your favor to burn fat.

Adopt Weight Training
Have you even seen someone in the gym doing endless hours of cardio and still look soft and unfit? That is because she is lacking lean muscle, which is built from weight training and excessive cardio burns muscle.

Weight training builds lean muscle mass. The more muscle you add to your frame, the less you need to rely on cardio. Muscle is metabolically active and allows you to burn more calories at rest and at play. Of course, this does not mean to kick cardio to the curve, but having a balance of both in your program will keep things interesting and will give much better body transformation results.

Summary

Once you understand how you can manipulate cardio, you will be able to master the fat burning game. Realize that you don’t need three or four different cardio methods stacked on top of one another. Just use cardio wisely and you will have the advantage. Remember, cardio is a fat loss tool, not the determining factor.

Karen Sessions has been in the fitness industry since 1988. She embarked on weight training to overcome an eating disorder, Anorexia Nervosa in its early stages. She overcame the eating disorder, received her personal training certificate, competed in many local bodybuilding contests, and qualified for Nationals. Since then she

1. As much as possible of the training is done outside, year round. Irrespective of weather conditions. We compete outside, so we train outside. We have access to some of the best natural training terrain in the world and use it well. As a side-benefit, if you are used to training in bad weather, you compete better in bad weather. One of the reasons for this “obsession” with outdoor training activities is simply that most citizens from a very young age is taught the joy of being outside, enjoying nature.

2. Cross-training. It is generally more accepted that an endurance athlete can improve his performance by using cross-training. In other words, a cyclist can become better by running, hiking and cross country skiing. He does not necessarily only have to ride his bike. This belief also allows us to train outside year round in a country that might not have 100% optimal conditions for cycling in the winter. In southern Europe the general feeling is that a cyclist can only become better by riding his bike. Running or skiing is a waste of time.

3. Long rides at medium intensity vs. shorter rides at high intensity. Traditionally, endurance training at home has been overwhelmingly dominated by lots and lots of long, relatively easy sessions and very few hard, high intensity sessions. In a nut-shell this would make up the yearly training program for cross country skiers, long distance runners and cyclists. It has become very “hip” recently to discard these long, “easy” rides and label them as a waste of time. Some scientists have gone as far as to say that this type of training is entirely wrong. Instead, they suggest more hard, threshold sessions and intervals. This they say, regardless of the fact that most successful elite endurance athletes, regardless of sport, never trained this way.

I will defend the traditional method and here is why: For an endurance athlete, about 90-98% of the performance is aerobic. The remaining 2-10% are anaerobic. So, in a 4 hour competition, as much as 3.92 hours would be aerobic and 0.08 hours would be anaerobic. In other words, you can train to improve your performance in the 3.92 hours or you can train to improve your performance in the 0.08 hours. Obviously, the potential for improvement is much greater in the 3.92 hours that are performed aerobically. Not to mention that the 0.08 hours of anaerobic performance is not that “trainable / improvable”. So, in short – traditional endurance training with about 90% of the total training volume per year focused on aerobic capacity (long rides with low-medium intensity) and the remaining 10% invested in intervals and tempo rides is more beneficial. The long, easy-moderate intensity rides (called langkjøring in Norwegian) improves certain key physical attributes: increase incellularr mitochondria, improvement of the capillary blood vessel network and an increase in aerobic enzymes. These long rides also improves the body’s ability to utilize fat as an energy, leaving the more fast-burning carbohydrate energy for the short bursts of power in a race.

Even with these facts, many modern coaches are not recommending young athletes to focus on these long rides. A simplified way to look at an effective endurance athlete’s weekly training program, following traditional endurance training is: Hard, easy, easy, Hard, easy, easy. On a weekly basis it would be Hard, Harder, Hardest, Easy, in regards to volume.

4. Athlete vs. coach / team. I think we have been successful in treating each athlete as an individual and listening to the athlete. Just because you have a team of top, elite performers, does not mean that each one will not have specific individual needs. And those needs may vary from week to week or month to month. One training program will only fit one athlete, you cannot design one program and suggest that everyone follows it. Individual variables such as illness, recovery rates etc will throw that whole system off. Eastern European nations on the other hand have notnecessarilyy believed in this. They have required all athletes on the national team to follow the same training program, regardless of individual variables. This has in effect, lead to eastern European countries falling 10-15 years behind the “curve”.

A great example is the old Soviet cross country ski team and their training program. Between May and September everyone on the team had to follow this plan: Monday – 35 km rollerski in the morning and 1.5 hour run in the terrain in the afternoon. Tuesday – 2.5 hour run, uphill in the morning and 1.6 hour rollerski in the afternoon. Wednesday – 2.5 hour rollerski in the morning and 1 hour easy run in the afternoon. Thursday -strengtht-training and easy recovery training. Friday – 2.5 hours hard run in the morning and 1.5 hours rollerski in the afternoon. Saturday – 3 hour run or rollerski Sunday – rest with lots of sleep. In addition, they were forced to sleep at certain times. In other words, no consideration for the individual athlete. This program lead to great success for the athletes that “fit” the program and no success for the individual that needed something different. Many talentedskierss never realized their potential because of this rigidness. I think we have been successful in Norway, due to the concern for the individual.

5. Use of pharmaceuticals. One of the greatstrengthss we have in sports at home is the attitude towards taking any type of drug, legal or not. The use of any drug, pill, drink etc that is not natural is very rare. From bottom to top, we utilize very, very little products that “aid” athletes. In short, top training consists of running, skiing or biking outside combined with an afternoon nap and a good night sleep for recovery. The diet is a simple, sound composition of wheat bread, dairy products, potatoes, fish, lean meat and lots of vegetables and fruit. This is VERY different on the continent where athletes take all sorts of “recovery enhancing” products etc. I’m glad I got that attitude with me now, it makes it easier to make the correct choices in modern cycling where team doctors etc are always trying to give you something to “speed up recovery” etc.

I’m a full-time endurance athlete (cycling), with the 2012 London Olympics as my main goal. I maintain a blog, where I write about my ups and downs in training / racing as I work towards year 2012. http://roadrace1.blogspot.com/

It is not only possible to become addicted to working out, it is probable if you workout every day and get into the rhythm of doing so. Those who jog or run often talk of the runners high they get. That is a real feeling and positive sensation, it is something they feel and others get this same feeling from other types of activities.

Swimmers, dancers and those who just go down to the gym to work out all describe just about the same feeling. So if you like to work out, well, you are not alone, as it is a built in response that people have to the process.

This of course is a very good thing, because if you can feel good while working out and then have more stamina, energy and a positive attitude throughout the day, well what could be better than that? While everyone else is getting fat, you got it all and you deserve it too. Think on these facts next time you work out.

“Lance Winslow” – Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/