Working your heart and lungs doesn’t just make you fitter, it helps you lose weight, beat stress, sleep better and have more energy too.
Cardiovascular exercise (often referred to as aerobic exercise) is an essential part of any fitness regime, strengthening the heart, lungs and circulatory system. Your heart is a muscle and will respond to training in the same way as any other muscle, by becoming larger and stronger. Because cardiovascular exercise typically burns a lot of calories, it’s key to weight loss, and the harder you work, the more energy (calories) you’ll burn.
HOW OFTEN TO TRAIN
For general good health you need to do a gentle form of cardiovascular exercise for 30 minutes, five days a week (for example, walking to work every day). If you want to lose weight or enhance your fitness, you’ll need to add a few harder sessions every week (see the sample programme).
To continue getting results, make sure you work hard enough. Your body is amazing, and will quickly adapt to any given task. So, for example, as your 3k run starts to feel easier, you’ll need to increase the challenge by running either longer or faster to get the same benefits.
HOW HARD TO WORK
Training at higher intensities will help you burn calories both during and after exercise. To challenge your body, try applying the principles of interval training (using a variety of intensities) to your exercise. For example:
• Warm up, three minutes.
• Walk fast or jog, five minutes, level 6 on the RPE scale (rate of perceived exertion), right.
• Run fast for one minute, level 8.
• Walk/jog, five minutes, level 6.
• Run one minute, level 8.
• Repeat sequence for 30 minutes.
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