Cardio or weight training?

When it comes to getting that exercise you know you need, what form of working out do you use? Cardiovascular workouts and weight training are two types of exercise that can both be beneficial in keeping you and your heart healthy.  Just what is cardiovascular exercise? 

Cardiovascular exercise, also called aerobic exercise (which means ‘something that needs oxygen’) or cardio is exercise that involves muscles and helps to make your heart and lungs stronger.  Aerobics, such as running, spinning, and dancing gets necessary oxygen into your body’s cells.

While you're doing aerobic exercises, you're burning excess calories.  If you are walking slowly, shopping, or strength training with weights, this is called anaerobic exercise.  Some benefits that come with cardiovascular exercise are lower blood pressure, weight maintenance, regulation or prevention of diabetes, increasing metabolism, burning fat and calories, decreasing cholesterol, and heart disease prevention.

During aerobic exercise, your body including muscles, your heart, and your lungs get oxygen.  To give your body and your heart a great workout, make sure that you do your cardiovascular exercise with intensity.  Be sure to have this approved by your doctor prior to exercise.

Weight training or anaerobic exercise is another form of exercise that can go hand-in-hand with cardiovascular exercise.  When you are weight training, you are losing fat and changing the way your body looks and reacts.  If you are looking to change the way your body looks or how it is shaped, you need some weight training.   Weight training helps the body get stronger and helps overall mobility.  There are so many advantages to weight training such as: improving your coordination and balance, strengthening your bones and your joints, helps to avoid injuries, helping you sleep better, and helps to increase muscle endurance, confidence and self-esteem.

The benefits of all forms of exercise are contained within your body if you just let it out.  Once you get up and start to incorporate these forms of exercise you will notice your confidence building, your anger diffusing easily, the ability to deal with stress is so much easier – which in turn helps boost your self-esteem, lessens your anxiety, stabilizes your moods, and you will find that you are encouraging other positive lifestyle changes not only within yourself but also with others.

You’re probably thinking that’s all great but how can it really help you – the normal every day person trying to lose weight, be healthy, or strengthen your bones and muscles.  It helps you by being able to live your life the way you truly want to live.  Incorporating these two forms of exercise into your lifestyle will lengthen your life, even if only exercising thirty minutes a day three times a week.  Everyone wants to live a long life.  While you’re sitting in your house, watching television, why not get up and start walking in place for fifteen minutes while watching your favorite television show.  Do that every other day and see how much better you feel just from walking in place and doing the things you love.   Once you see the results of that, you will see the benefits you get from good health.