Maximize Your Cardio Workout for Aerobic Fitness

Cardiovascular exercise is an important part of any exercise program.  It is good for the heart, helps to keep the body's metabolism revved, and is great for stress relief.  Here, we will review some tips for different forms of cardio as it relates to aerobic fitness.

• First, always stretch your muscles before performing any cardio exercise.  This is an important point, because a pulled muscle will derail your fitness efforts. 
• Try to choose a cardio exercise that you will enjoy at least a little bit. 
• To shed fat, cardiovascular exercise needs to be done a minimum of 3 times per week, 5 times for optimal aerobic fitness, so it is important to your program to enjoy the exercise. 
• Some different forms of cardio are the stationary bike, treadmill, elliptical machine, and stairmaster.  These are the machines that are staples in most every gym.

A popular form of cardio training is interval training.  This means the intensity would vary every 2 -4 minutes.  An example of this is a treadmill workout like:  2 mph for 4 mins, increase to 4 mph for 2 min, decrease to 3 mph for 6 min, and so on for 30 - 40 minutes.  This kind of training helps to maximize the benefits of a cardio workout for aerobic fitness by keeping the body guessing, therefore, the body is less likely to adapt to that kind of exercise too quickly.

A really popular form of cardio exercise is Zumba.  This is a class that has different dance moves set to Latin music, this class is taught by a certified Zumba instructor, and is usually around one hour long.  If you like music, this would be a great choice, it is a lot of fun. The boot camp style classes are available at most gyms today and are great forms of cardio exercise, because they require you to move from one exercise to the other very quickly, keeping your heart rate elevated for the whole class.

Changing up your cardio routine is also a key to sticking with your exercise program.  Swimming on Monday, treadmill on Wednesday, and stairmaster on Friday is an example of a routine that won't get boring.  Another good idea is to do 10 minutes each on three different machines.

These are just a few tips on getting the cardio you need for optimal aerobic fitness.  You will work hard, sweat a lot, and if you're not careful, you'll have some fun.