Sunday 23 October 2016

Heart: How to strengthen?



How to strengthen your heart?

In earlier article we have introduced you to the topic heart rate. Now we know the basics of heart rate and what it signifies. Heart rate signifies the health of your cardiovascular system. Lower the heart rate(above a threshold), healthy your heart is.

In this and upcoming articles we will learn how we can improve the health of our heart, circulatory and respiratory systems via exercise. Heart rate can be used as a measure to evaluate your results post exercising for a few weeks.

At some point of time every one of us might have heard of this statement "Perform cardio to improve your heart health". We might have heard this from either Doctors or fitness instructors, news articles or some other source. Activities such as running, walking, cycling, swimming etc are termed as cardio exercises. In most of the fitness centers we find thread mills, ellipticals, bikes etc which helps us in performing the cardio exercises. In most of the fitness centers we find a sticker attached to these machines that use this machine for a maximum of 20 mins. Is working out for a maximum of 20 minutes helps us in improving our heart health? What is the intensity that we need to workout in order to get the cardiovascular benefits? How many workout sessions a week one should practice to get the cardiovascular benefits? What all activities that one can practice to improve their cardio vascular health? These are the main questions for which one should know the answers in order to improve his/her cardio vascular system. This and subsequent articles answer exactly the above questions and guides you in practicing a proper workout routine to improve the cardiovascular fitness.

The development of cardiovascular fitness has an immediate and long term effect on health of the heart, circulatory and respiratory systems. It is important to recognize that each one of us has a different level of fitness goals. When practicing a plan for improving cardiovascular fitness ones level of fitness should be considered.


Let us start answering the questions that were posted above. To change the current physical health status, an individual needs to introduce activity at least 3 times per week. As we become more physically active, the progression of frequency should go to five to seven exercise sessions per week depending on exercise goals to continue to develop and improve cardiovascular benefits. We will get to know the answers for the queries "What is the intensity that we need to workout in order to get the cardiovascular benefits? How one can measure the intensity? What all activities that one can practice to improve their cardio vascular health?" in future article Stay tuned.​

3 comments:

  1. we play badminton doubts for 2 hrs or single for one hour. Singles is usually much more intense. Which one do you recommend.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Unless we are preparing for some competition, playing either doubles or singles for one hour will be a great workout. You will have your glycogen stores depleted post 90 minutes and need assistance from glucose drinks to prong the activity till 2 hrs.

      Delete
  2. Hey Gowtham, Can you share your research on how to improve on your running abilities.

    Thanks,
    rajat

    ReplyDelete