10 Cardio Routines For VO2 Max And Longevity
Cardiovascular training gets neglected in some corners of the internet. And while I knock it at times as the best weight loss tool, the health benefits for mental stress, the heart and overall fitness are undeniable. Plus, despite being an unsustainable path to weight loss on it’s own, the extra calorie burn does still count. We’ve written in detail about the importance of cardiovascular fitness before.
To sum it up, higher cardiorespiratory fitness (VO2 max) is associated with a lower mortality risk across all ages for men and women of all races. This is outlined here as you can see a clear decline in relative risk going from the lowest fitness level up to the highest in all age categories.
Being considered “unfit” was associated with a 400% higher risk than those in the highest level of fitness.This is higher than any other individual risk factor measured including hypertension, type II diabetes, chronic kidney disease, cardiovascular disease, age and even cancer.1
HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR CARDIO FITNESS LEVEL:
While it’s clearly important, most people don’t know how to efficiently improve their cardiovascular fitness in an efficient and sustainable way.Today we’ll include various examples of cardiovascular exercise sessions to boost your cardiac fitness, metabolic health and burn a few extra calories each week. And when done in the right combination, these can also enhance the benefits of your strength training workouts rather than interfere with recovery.
We’ll start at more entry level fitness options and progress to more challenging variations, but understand what’s “best” for you will come down to a combination of your current fitness level, goals and your preferred method of cardio.We’ve outlined the importance of Zone 2 training here.
If you didn’t read it, we advise that 80% of your cardiovascular exercise be done at Zone 2 and 20% done at a higher level (intervals).For all “steady state” exercises below, you can assume you should be training in zone 2. The simplest way to estimate this intensity using your heart rate range is 180 -your age.
Someone who is 30 years old would train under 150 beats per minute for example.
If you happen to know your actual max heart rate, then train at 75-80% of your max heart heart.
Example: Max Heart Rate of 180 beats per minute during a maximal exertion test.
180 beats per minute x 0.75-0.8 = 135-144 beats per minute for your zone 2 training.
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