strength building exercises or cardio exercises. Both are very good for the body but wake up to the difference in what they offer and how you can use them together to get maximum benefit from exercise. In this article, we will review the differences between Cardiopulmonary’s exercise and anaerobic exercise and how we can provide you with the solution to which type you should concentrate on.
What is Cardio Training?
Aerobic exercise or cardio workout type is meant to enhance the exercise of the heart, lungs and blood vessels. It runs from running to cycling to swimming to dancing and many more. Cardio exercises will enhance your endurance, decrease the probability of cardiovascular diseases and stroke, lower your blood pressure and assist in your weight regulation.
Benefits of Cardio Training:
- Improved cardiovascular health: One of the heart diseases a person can prevent is high blood pressure, stroke as well as heart disease and the best way is to take some cardio training exercises that will help the heart work well and make your blood circulate well and thus reducing one’s risks of getting heart disease, stroke, and high blood pressure.
- Weight management: Cardio exercises help in calorie burning and reduction of body fats which are important mechanisms responsible to enable one to loose weight and maintain his or her weight even after having achieved it.
- Increased endurance: Including aerobic activities in your activities will improve the circulation in your body and lessen the difficulty of performing other activities such as jogging, walking and lifting objects.
- Mental health: Cardio exercises also promote hormonal secretion, especially endorphins which are happy hormones, it also aids in stress relief, and fight depression.
What is Strength Training?
Strength training or resistance training is the lifting of weights or a resistance band, or any body weight exercise with the intention of creating a resistance force within the muscle to build strength and muscles. Such type of exercise helps to strengthen our bones, combat osteoporosis, have proper posture and how else, build muscles, which in turn may help you drop some pounds more effectively.
Benefits of Strength Training:
- Increased muscle mass: Specifically, aerobic exercise and resistance training improve lean muscle mass, and increasing lean muscle mass increases your basal metabolic rate or BMR.
- Enhanced bone density: Weight or resistance training is most crucial for reducing the risk of chronic disorders like osteoporosis, as it improves the density of our bones and thus, mass of the bones, and prevents diseases like the chronic bone disease osteoporosis.
- Improved posture: Plus, strengthening the muscles around the abdomen, back and back of the legs helps improve posture and prevent back injuries caused by falls or exertion on the back.
- Increased metabolic rate: They also burn calories faster than people who have less muscle mass, therefore, people with more muscle mass actually need less calories to keep their weight under check.
Cardio vs. Strength Training: Which One Should You Pursue?
Any fitness regime includes both cardiovascular exercises and strength exercises. But the focus you give each kind of exercise may vary depending on your fitness objectives, your choices, and available hours. Here are some factors to consider when deciding whether to focus on cardio or strength training:
- Weight loss goals: A training program should be for people who want to lose weight and that includes cardio and strength training. Here, the cardiovascular and strength training activities are also important because they will help lose calories and minimize the body fat while strength training helps to build lean muscles that will help you consume more calories throughout the day.
- Strength and power goals: And if we’re talking about a general increase of strength or power, strength training has to be the option. It is such kind of exercise which helps you in doing many activities with more power and efficiency for making your muscles more endurance.
- Time constraints: Before you go for exercising, you need to make sure the exercises you’re doing are effective and fast enough. If you are going against your strength training towards the cardio during a workout, in a sense, then strength training is the better choice, because it targets more areas at once and you can do it in a shorter period of time than a cardio.
- Personal preferences: While different reasons, cardio and strength workouts are preferred. Longer and less anaerobic in general nature, low impact cardio exercises are generally appropriate for those doing vigorous exercise such as running, biking or swimming. But in case of other peoples, fat loss is more suitable since they are comfortable with the strength training exercises and will prefer to develop muscles.
are complementary or mutually exclusive?
Ideally, the practitioner should choose to integrate the cardio exercise as well as the weight training regime in his fitness regime. By turning this around you are able to do both endurance and power exercises and end up with a well balanced fitness schedule. Here are some ways to incorporate both cardio and strength training into your workout plan:
- Split workouts: So yes, you should divide your training week into a few cardio and strength days, meaning only one cardio or strength exercise per day. Thus, for example, you can do cardio Monday and then strength training Wednesday.
- Circuit training: Do intense cardio and strength training styles and techniques in a session. Perform both cardio and strength exercising, taking a short pause between the done exercises and having no pause between the end of one circuit and the start of the next one.
- High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT): HIIT consists of exercising either at an optimal level for a short time period and resting, or exercising at a lower intensity. Not only the heart, but also fat and muscles are trained in such a type of workout.
Both cardio and strength training give you both benefits, and although there are only so many ways to improve your quality of life as a whole, they can do a lot. One may choose one type of exercise over the other depending on your objectives and tastes. The best way to exercise is a combination of cardiovascular and strength exercises, but they aren’t mutually exclusive. Without one or the other, you won’t see the best results. It is important to stay as active as you can and any exercise is good over none. That being said, there is no reason for you to wait longer, so start exercising now and take advantage of cardio and strength training.
