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What Is Aerobic Exercise?: Aerobic Exercise (Also Known As Cardio) Is Physical Exercise of Low To High Intensity That

Aerobic exercise includes activities like walking, jogging, cycling or dancing that use large muscle groups and can be maintained continuously for 10 minutes or more. It strengthens the heart and lungs by improving circulation and the body's ability to utilize oxygen. Regular aerobic exercise provides significant health benefits such as reducing risks of heart disease, diabetes and obesity while improving mood, energy levels, endurance and sleep. The body adapts to aerobic training through increases in stroke volume, oxygen consumption in muscles, and mitochondria which allow it to burn fat more efficiently as a fuel. Equipment like treadmills, bikes and rowing machines can be effective for aerobic exercise at home.

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128 views5 pages

What Is Aerobic Exercise?: Aerobic Exercise (Also Known As Cardio) Is Physical Exercise of Low To High Intensity That

Aerobic exercise includes activities like walking, jogging, cycling or dancing that use large muscle groups and can be maintained continuously for 10 minutes or more. It strengthens the heart and lungs by improving circulation and the body's ability to utilize oxygen. Regular aerobic exercise provides significant health benefits such as reducing risks of heart disease, diabetes and obesity while improving mood, energy levels, endurance and sleep. The body adapts to aerobic training through increases in stroke volume, oxygen consumption in muscles, and mitochondria which allow it to burn fat more efficiently as a fuel. Equipment like treadmills, bikes and rowing machines can be effective for aerobic exercise at home.

Uploaded by

Bongskie escalona
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Aerobic exercise 

(also known as cardio) is physical exercise of low to high intensity that


depends primarily on the aerobic energy-generating process. ... Generally, light-to-moderate
intensity activities that are sufficiently supported by aerobic metabolism can be performed for
extended periods of time.

What is Aerobic Exercise?


Picture yourself working out. Are you lifting heavy weights? Stretching your muscles? Or maybe
you're performing an activity that causes you to sweat and breathe hard that makes your blood pump
through your veins as it carries oxygen to your muscles to keep you going. If you're performing this
last activity, then you're engaging in aerobic exercise.
Aerobic exercise is any physical activity that makes you sweat, causes you to breathe harder, and
gets your heart beating faster than at rest. It strengthens your heart and lungs and trains your
cardiovascular system to manage and deliver oxygen more quickly and efficiently throughout your
body. Aerobic exercise uses your large muscle groups, is rhythmic in nature, and can be maintained
continuously for at least 10 minutes.
Before going into the benefits of aerobic exercise, let's break down some key terms we just
mentioned. Cardiovascular system is made up of your heart and blood vessels e.g., arteries, veins,
and capillaries that transports blood throughout the body. Aerobic refers to how your body uses
oxygen to sufficiently meet energy demands during exercise.

Benefits of Aerobic Exercise


In addition to strengthening your heart and cardiovascular system, participation in regular aerobic
exercise has many health benefits. Aerobic exercise:

 Improves your circulation and helps your body use oxygen better
 Increases energy
 Increases endurance, which means you can workout longer without getting tired
 Helps reduce the risk of developing heart disease
 Helps reduce the risk of developing diabetes
 Helps reduce body fat
 Helps you reach and maintain a healthy weight
 Helps reduce stress, tension, anxiety, and depression
 Improves sleep

Examples of Aerobic Exercise


Physical activity such as walking, jogging, indoor cycling, or aerobic dancing are all examples of
aerobic exercise that strengthen the heart and lungs, therefore improving your body's utilization of
oxygen. For general health, aim for a 30-minute workout (or three 10-minute workouts per day) three
to five days a week at moderate intensity. 
How aerobically fit can we be?

The average sedentary adult will reach a level of oxygen consumption close to
35 ml/kg/minute during a maximal treadmill test (where you're asked to walk as
hard as you can). Translated, that means the person is consuming 35 milliliters of
oxygen for every kilogram of body weight per minute. That'll get you through the
day, but elite athletes can reach values as high as 90 ml/kg/minute! How do they
do it? They may have good genes for one, but they also train hard. And when
they do, their bodies adapt. The good news is that the bodies of mere mortals
like the rest of us adapt to training too. Here's how.

What are the fitness benefits of aerobic exercise?

How our bodies adapt

Here's what happens inside your body when you do aerobic exercise regularly:

1. Your heart gets stronger and pumps more blood with each beat

(larger stroke volume). Elite athletes, as I just mentioned, can


have stroke volumes more than twice as high as average individuals. But
it's not just that. Conditioned hearts also have greater diameter and mass
(the heart's a muscle too and gets bigger when you train it), and they pump
efficiently enough to allow for greater filling time, which is a good thing
because it means that more blood fills the chambers of the heart before
they pump so that more blood gets pumped with each beat.
2. Greater stroke volume means the heart doesn't have to pump as fast to

meet the demands of exercise. Fewer beats and more stroke volume


mean greater efficiency. Think about a pump emptying water out of a
flooded basement. The pump works better and lasts longer if it can pump
larger volumes of water with each cycle than if it has to pump faster and
strain to get rid of the water. High stroke volume is why athletes' hearts
don't pump as fast during exercise and why they have such low resting
heart rates; sometimes as low as 40 beats per minute, whereas the
average is 60-80 beats per minutes.
3. Downstream from the heart are your muscles, which get more efficient at
consuming oxygen when you do regular aerobic exercise (remember,
"consuming" oxygen means that the muscles are taking the oxygen out of
the blood). This happens because of an increase in the activity and
number of enzymes that transport oxygen out of the bloodstream and into
the muscle. Imagine 100 oxygen molecules circulating past a muscle.
You're twice as fit if the muscle can consume all 100 molecules than if it
can only consume 50. Another way of saying it is that you're twice as fit as
someone if your VO2 max is 60ml/kg/min. and theirs is 30ml/kg/min. In
terms of performance in this scenario, you'll have more endurance
because your muscles won't run out of oxygen as quickly.
4. Mitochondria inside the muscle increase in number and activity.
Mitochondria are the powerhouses of your cells. They do all the heavy-
duty work to keep you moving. They use the oxygen to burn the fat and
carbohydrate that makes you go. The good news is that they increase in
number and activity, by as much as 50%, in just a matter of days to weeks
in response to regular aerobic exercise in adults of all ages.
Burn, baby, burn

I mentioned that fat and carbohydrate are the fuels our muscles burn. The
difference between them is that fat is high-test; it contains 9 calories per gram
whereas carbohydrate has only 4, and so you get more energy and can go
farther on a gram of fat than on a gram of carbohydrate. You want to burn fat
because it's such an efficient fuel, plus it's nice to lose some of your excess fat!
The catch is that you need more oxygen to burn fat because it's denser than
carbohydrate. The good news is that your body gets better at using oxygen and
burning fat when you do regular aerobic exercise; like I described, your heart
pumps more blood, your muscles consume more oxygen, and you have more
mitochondria.

What aerobic equipment is involved?

Rowers, treadmills, bikes, and cross-country skiers are all effective if you use
them. There is some suggestion that some individuals are more inclined to
exercise at home with equipment than at the gym or a class. The activity you
choose is a personal choice and it varies for everyone, and so you need to
experiment until you find what works best for you. Some individuals prefer to go
to the gym while others are perfectly content to work out at home on their own
equipment in front of their TV. TV can make the time pass quickly, and so can
your favorite movie, music, scholarly courses taught by professors, or books on
tape (see resources for online vendors). Finding something that will distract you
might just make that 30-minute workout bearable, and believe it or not you might
even look forward to it! After all, it could be the only 30 minutes in your day that
you have all to yourself. Indulge! Aerobic exercise videos and DVDs are also
effective if you use them! They are convenient if you prefer to work out at home
instead of taking a class at a studio or a gym, and there are hundreds to choose
from. I suggest that you check out Collage Video (http://www.CollageVideo.com),
or give them a call and ask for a recommendation. Also check if your local library
rents exercise videos on tape or DVD. And by the way, there are videos for all
types of activity; from weight training, to tai-chi, to stretching. Check out all the
possibilities to add flexibility and strength training to your cardio workout.

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