Put some Heart into your Workout

What exactly does Cardio Workout & HIIT do for me!

© Copyright 2021 Artwork by Cordi Neckermann

Let’s be honest. We all know that Cardio workout is good for us. But that doesn’t make it any easier to actually get off the couch and do it. Isn’t it enough to just go for a brisk walk or a light jog?

Here is a little insight into the finer details. Just doing light exercises lasting 20 minutes or more with continuous low intensity, meaning you can still talk during exercising are aerobic exercise. This means your muscles have enough oxygen to produce the energy they need to do the work. Your body doesn’t need any extra oxygen. In anaerobic exercise your body needs extra oxygen. Here not only your muscles are being worked but also your heart and your lungs. Our whole cardiovascular system is being challenged, hence the name Cardio Workout.

High intensity interval training (HIIT) is a type of cardio workout that involves repeated bursts of intense activity. Intense activity as in you can’t talk during your workout. Yup, that intense.

But let’s take a better look at what challenging our cardiovascular system or cardiovascular endurance actually means. Cardiovascular endurance is the ability to exercise for a long time without getting tired. Our muscles use the Oxygen that is transported around the body to do the work so the more oxygen we take in the better!

Three things you will gain from doing regular Cardio Workout

Stronger heart muscle

When we do a high intensity workout we breathe harder and our heart rate goes up. More blood is pumped through all the muscles that are at work. The heart is a muscle similar to all the other muscles we have in our body. We can train the heart muscles the same way we can train all the other muscles in our body. When the heart gets more efficient at pumping blood over time your resting heart rate slows down and the stress on the heart muscle is reduced.

Increase lung capacity

The lungs are the organ we use to take in oxygen. Oxygen is fuel that keeps our body running. It is used in our cells, the most basic building blocks of our body, to burn food for the release of energy stored in it. So the more oxygen we can take in through our lungs the better. Exercising can help us improve our lung capacity which is the amount of oxygen we take in with every breath. The bigger the better!

Better waste clearance

Our body is a fascinating machine converting fuel into energy. During this process it also produces some waste. Carbon dioxide is one type of waste that the body needs to get rid of. When our cells convert food to energy, carbon dioxide is produced and this needs to be cleared away. Doing high intensity workout helps our body to remove carbon dioxide faster with every exhalation we take.

There is more!

Of course there are many good reasons to get off the couch and find a fun cardio workout. Weight loss is one of them for sure. I just don’t like to put it as my first choice among all the benefits because I find it much more motivating to think about something we can gain from all that hard workout. Yes, it’s good to loose extra weight and it will happen when you add Cardio Workout to a healthy diet. But a watched cattle doesn’t boil so I find it better focus on the things we can gain through cardio workout than the weight we should be loosing.

The most difficult bit

Again the hardest part in all of this is getting started with cardio workout and sticking with it. We humans don’t tend to come back and do things we don’t enjoy so it is important to find a type of cardio workout that is BIG FUN for YOU.

For me the most fun Cardio Workout is dancing and because I get bored quickly I poke my nose in all different types of dancing and dance fitness. Zumba, Belly Dance, Ballroom and my all time favourite: Bollywood dance fitness. I fell in love with it so much that I became an instructor. Now I not only get to dance at least three times a week but also share it with a whole bunch of lovely people who love dancing as much as I do. I’ve taught BollyX - The Bollywood Workout, which is based on HIIT for three years now and can feel all those benefits mentioned above. I’m 43 years old and never felt and looked healthier.

Does that sound awesome or what? If you want to give it a go and rake in all these Cardio Workout benefits then book a BollyX with Cordi here.

I loooooove meeting new dance friends :-)

Keep moving and shaking,

Cordi

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