Heart strength has got to be your most vital reading whether you exercise regularly or not.
If you do not exercise in any way, your heart rate and strength is likely to be weaker than it could be and this is a negative factor when it comes to assessing overall health.
If you DO exercise, then you should know all about the massive benefits of having a strong and healthy heart.
Your heart is a muscle that needs to be trained and conditioned like every other muscle on your body.
If you do exercises that require larger amounts of oxygen, this is called “aerobic” types of exercise, or “cardio” as is often mentioned by people who go to the gym.
Aerobic by definition is defined as “with oxygen”, which shows how important this type of work is.
Running, power walking, swimming, cycling just to name a few could be described as the best examples of aerobic training or cardio as is much more trendy a term to use these days.
These types of exercises should be included prominently in anyone’s programme, and are highly beneficial.
Most people are unaware that you can achieve this state of training that requires high amounts of oxygen by weight training/strength training.
The trick is to keep the tempo of the workout quite high and this will get you working harder and you will need to take in deep gulps of oxygen throughout.
This is achieved usually through cutting your rest periods in between sets right down. For example, if you usually rest 3-5 minutes in between everything you do, then cutting it down to one minute would be a start and immediately get you working harder.
When you get to a decent level of fitness, try getting to a stage of picking 6-8 exercises in a row, and having NO rest in between. You will need to cut your weights down in terms of kilos/poundage, but the effect will be dramatic and terms of heart benefits.
I train most people using this philosophy now, and have done for many, many years. The benefits across the board are huge, and will make sure your heart will be very strong and in tremendous health ready for anything!
