Types of Cardio Workouts

Cardio workouts are essential to overall health. Not only do they get your heart rate up which aids in weight loss, but they also strengthen your body. It can be hard to know which cardio routine you should be doing — especially if you have zero knowledge of exercise. That’s why we’re here to give you some options that will get your heart pumping and help you feel healthier.

An aerobic exercise is an important form of cardio. It builds endurance. This type of exercise uses oxygen for energy, so it burns calories. It helps to keep you warm at night, provides some muscle tone, and has benefits for your heart health. You don’t need special equipment or fancy knowledge or much skill. Distance running, walking, and swimming is all forms of aerobic exercise. Each burns calories at a different rate. If you run at a low intensity for long distances, your body will have to sustain this expenditure for a long time. To do that, it needs to burn fat. As the name suggests, it is an aerobic activity because it uses oxygen to fuel the process.

The other type of exercise is anaerobic. It builds power. This is an exercise that causes lactic acid to accumulate in your muscles. The reason it’s called anaerobic is that lactic acid is produced without the presence of oxygen. Anaerobic exercise feels harder than aerobic exercise because you can’t keep it up as long before you have to stop. It turns out that anaerobic training is better for burning fat than aerobic exercise. The reason for this is a little complicated, but the basic idea is that lactic acid builds up in your muscles and makes them burn energy very rapidly. That means they burn more fat during the recovery period after your workout, and for a few hours after you’ve finished working out.

Interval training — alternating intense activity with recovery periods — is the most efficient way to improve cardiovascular fitness. Research has shown that to achieve the same result, interval training is more effective than steady-state cardio at a lower energy cost. This is because both the recovery and intense portions of the interval take less time, resulting in less total time spent exercising. Interval training is also more effective for fat burning. 

Interval training can be done in three different ways: by performing exercises at a fast pace with short recovery periods between them (examples are sprints and jumping rope), by performing exercises at a slow pace with long recovery periods between them (walking lunges or squats), or by alternating between exercises of different intensity levels (such as pedaling on a stationary bike at a moderate pace one minute and pedaling as fast as possible the next). If you’re using this method of interval training, you’ll need to alternate between exercise stations of different intensities for each interval, such as going from a high-intensity exercise to a low-intensity exercise, or from a low-intensity exercise to a high-intensity one.