	Article Directory		Article Submission Service		Article Marketing Blog		Publishers		Member Log In

Article Directory :: Health & Fitness Articles

Skip "Cardio" to Lose Fat and Build Up Your Heart

By Al Stevens

Republish: EasyPublish™
Published: 19Mar2010
Word count: 669
Viewed: 268 time(s)

Get Free Content For Your Site

"Cardio" exercise, which refers to endurance exercise, such as jogging, is not only not the best type of exercise to get you in shape and lose fat, it is actually harmful to your health.

Obviously, many experts will scoff at this idea but it is a concept which is rapidly gaining credibility in the fitness world. More and more true fitness experts are pushing the concept of conditioning your heart by doing short burst of intense exercise rather than doing long, boring cardio.

Your body wasn't designed for long, repetitive exercise. Worse, it can make you more vulnerable to disease. This type of long continuous, strenuous workout, without rest, mimics stress and causes your body to adapt in a way that is counterproductive to your health and longevity.

Our ancestors didn't run marathons or jump around for an hour doing aerobics. And they didn't sit in front of computers or the television the entire day. They moved around a lot at a low level of exertion. And then every once in a while they exerted themselves at nearly 100% of their capacity - hunting prey or escaping from it. This pattern of brief intense movement, followed by rest, and lots of low level activity is hardwired in your genes. Your muscles, bones and organ systems are reflections of this genetic design. The way they work together is the formula for strength, vitality and long life.

Your body is not a machine - it's an adaptive organism that has its own intelligence. Nature has designed your body to adapt to whatever environment it encounters. If you ask it to perform an activity repeatedly and routinely, it will gradually change the systems involved to meet the challenge more effectively.

Endurance exercise causes your heart and lungs to adapt for endurance. But these organs are already endurance machines. Your heart beats continuously and your lungs expand and contract with every breath you take. Forced, continuous, endurance exercise prompts your heart and lungs to "downsize." Reducing to smaller capacity allows you to go further, more efficiently, and with less rest and less fuel.

But shrinking the output of your heart and lungs means you've traded reserve capacity - which you might need in an emergency - for overall efficiency. Heart attacks don't occur because you lack endurance. They occur when there is a sudden increase in cardiac demand that exceeds your heart's capacity. That's why you need some output to spare.

As far as losing fat, specifically belly fat, short intense bursts of energy is the way to go. While the long cardio workout may burn more calories while you are jogging the workout that incorporates short bursts of energy will increase your metabolism so that you are burning those excess calories long after the workout.

An additional benefit of not doing the cardio but instead exercising with in short intense bursts is that it is less time intensive and far less boring.

An example of this kind of workout would be running sprints, but don't let that scare you off. It can be adapted to any form of exercise. You could swim intensely, as hard as you can for 30 seconds and then take a break for 2 minutes and the repeat it 5 more times and you get a fantastic fat burning, heart building exercise.

You could also adapt this type of exercise to whatever gradient is needed. If you aren't able to walk around the block once without keeling over you have to scale it back to start out. In that case, you may only walk rapidly for 15 second and then stop to catch your breath and repeat. The important thing to concentrate on is to gradually do a little more in each of your workouts even if it's only a few steps.

If you can adjust your thinking away from long, boring cardio and start to do the type of workout I've described here you will start losing fat and get a much stronger heart.

If you're interested in taking your proper diet, fat-loss and fitness efforts to an entirely new level, go to the following site and download a FREE e-book that will give you methods for boosting your metabolism, losing belly fat and getting into the best physical condition of your entire life- http://LosetheBelly-Fat.com

EasyPublish™ this article - publishers click here