Aerobic Resistance Exercises

One of the most important aspects of staying healthy is proper and consistent exercise. Aerobic training, which helps improve your cardiovascular fitness level, is a great way to lose weight as well as reduce health risks such as heart disease, osteoporosis, and high cholesterol. In addition to aerobic training, resistance exercises also plays an important role in overall fitness by increasing lean muscle mass, which increases the metabolic rate and promotes healthy blood flow. As a result, the best way to train is through a mixture of aerobic and resistance exercises.

  1. Aerobic Exercise

    • Aerobic exercise is the most common and basic form of cardiovascular training. It consists of training at a static pace for a prolonged period of time. Thus, you will be working your heart and lungs by elevating your heart rate to a fixed rate for the duration of your workout. Start with a 5-minute warmup phase, where you lightly jog or perform dynamic stretches, in order to prevent injury. Then begin your workout at a difficult, yet sustainable, pace. Finally, end your workout with a 5-minute cool-down phase that is similar to your warmup. Although running, biking, and swimming are the most common methods of aerobic training, some sports such as ice hockey and basketball can be used as well. The key to good aerobic training is finding the right pace for yourself. When you first begin to train, start with only a 15-minute workout. Then as you improve your fitness, begin to increase your pace and increase your workout length by 5 minutes at a time. However, do not compromise your pace in order to work out longer. For best results, do some sort of aerobic training three to four times a week.

    Resistance Training

    • A great way to increase muscle mass and improve your overall health is through resistance training. It involves training your muscles by creating small tears in them that get rebuilt and grown after your workouts. You can use any form of resistance, including free weights, exercise bands, or even gravity to help you build your muscles. Although you should work on every muscle group in your body, the large muscle groups, such as the legs, back, and pectoral muscles are the most important to focus on. Squats, bench press, and lat pulldowns are all great exercises that train both the major muscle groups as well as some secondary muscles. When first starting out, use as little resistance as possible and try to perform as many repetitions as you can. Once you start to develop more muscle mass, than you can increase your resistance and reduce your repetitions in order to grow bigger. The ideal workout will include a three to four sets of eight to 12 repetitions at difficult level of resistance. For best results, do resistance training three to four times a week, but make sure you allow your body at least a day of rest to rebuild your muscles in between workouts.

    Aerobic Training with Resistance

    • In addition to mixing aerobic and resistance training as part of your workout regimen, you may want to include a few exercises that incorporate both. Although there are not many variations of aerobic training with resistance, there are a few easy ways to include resistance during your cardio exercises to make them harder.

      The easiest way to add resistance to aerobic training is to use a machine. Most stationary bikes, ellipticals and step climbers have an option to add resistance to your workouts. This will make it more difficult on your movement since you will have to push harder to keep up the same pace. Although it does work your muscles on a cardiovascular level, the amount of resistance is not enough to help build lean muscles the weight training can.

      If you do not have access to workout machines and do not want to spend so much money and a stationary bike or gym membership, there are other ways to add resistance to your aerobic exercises. Wearing ankle weights or a chest weight on your body while performing cardiovascular training is a great way to make your workouts more difficult as well as build muscle. Make sure you start with light weights before adding more resistance because you do not want to overtrain your legs.