What is cardiovascular exercise?

Cardiovascular exercise refers to exercise that causes positive adaptations to the heart and lungs. There are many forms of cardiovascular exercise but they can be categorized into 2 groups: aerobic and anaerobic training. The difference between these 2 systems is the type of fuel used during training and the activities that are performed. Aerobic exercises, such as running or cycling for long durations, will use fats and glycogen stores for energy. Anaerobic exercises, such as sprinting and resistance training, will use mostly muscle glycogen for fuel.

The benefits of cardiovascular exercise are numerous. Here are just a few: increased muscular endurance, loss of fat, increased energy, greater well being and a decrease in anxiety and depression. Moreover, aerobic exercise increases the level of HDL cholesterol (the good cholesterol), lowers blood pressure, improves immune system and helps protect the body against many ailments, including cardiovascular disease, stroke, hypertension, diabetes, and osteoporosis.

For more information on cardiovascular exercise seek professional advice from a personal trainer and follow the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) guidelines.

Moderate physical activity for 30 minutes a day, five days per week Or Vigorous physical activity for 20 minutes a day, three days per week

Moderate-intensity physical activity means working hard enough to raise your heart rate and break a sweat, yet still being able to carry on a conversation.

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Cardio - Washington State University

There is no dearth of gizmos and gadgets targeted towards the abdominal muscles. Abdominal exercise routine can help you train your abs to their limits. Your dream body of a flat and trim abdomen is within your reach. Shape up your body with lower abdomen exercise. Get rid of your love handles with exercise. Here's how!

Abdominal exercise

Any good abs exercise program involves high intensity muscular overload and progressive increase in intensity. Abdominal exercises must be undertaken carefully so that the back is adequately supported. The upper and lower abdominal muscles are not separate muscles and abs exercises can help strengthen the entire abdominal region. But some exercises will tend towards developing either the upper or lower abdominal region. Abdominal exercises can help you also gain strong stomach muscles and back muscles. This can reduce the likelihood of back pains and provide protection against injury by efficient response to stress.

Let us examine the muscles in the abdominal region. The Rectus abdominis is the muscle that stretches down the stomach from your ribs to the hips. The external and internal obliques run down the sides of the waist. They aid the rectus abdominis during curling and twisting exercises. Ab exercises need to tone or harden the muscles in that area. In addition, the body fat covering the abdominal muscles must be eliminated. That can only be achieved with a proper eating plan. Increasing protein intake and limiting carbohydrates is said to be one way of tackling flabby abs along with a sensible abs exercise routine and strength training.

Ab exercise must be followed religiously and is all about frequency rather than intensity. No exercise must be continued if it leads to pain or extreme discomfort. The best ab exercise program can also help you achieve a flat and tight stomach. Many an abs exercise is performed on the floor. Abdominal muscles will react to resistance training like bicep curls and crunches.

A simple 'pelvic tilt' performed while sitting in a chair can strengthen your ab muscles and support the back.

Crunch - Lying on your back and knees bent; lift your shoulders off the floor. The emphasis is on moving the ribs towards the hips.

Reverse Curl - Lying on your back, bend your knees towards the chest. Keep the hips on the floor. Contract your abdominal muscles at the same time. Your lower abdominal exercise program must include reverse curls.

Leg raise - Single leg raise involves raising one leg from the floor. The double leg raise involves raising both legs from the floor at the same time and this works as an abdominal muscle exercise. Lying leg raises are ideal lower abdominal exercise

Ab exercise with the ball - The stability ball is an effective training device for the abs and lower back. Due to the curve of the exercise ball, the lower abdominal muscles get trained better on account of the greater range of motion.

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Abdominal Exercise - TargetWoman Informative Women Portal

Theres a saying, Use it or lose it. Thats pretty much why exercise is good for you. But thats just the short answer. The details of what actually happens in your body are truly amazing and, I think, super motivating. Heres the the rest of the story you wont want to miss!

[This article is going to motivate you to exercise more. So here's the obligatory, but important, cautionary note. If you are going to start an exercise program, you should have the OK from your doctor first to make sure that you don't have any potential heart or other health issues.]

The very first day that you start your exercise program, you will be healthier than you were yesterday. Why? Because your body immediately responds to the exercise by building new cells and tissues to support that exercise. It gets ready to better handle the exercise you will do tomorrow. Isnt that amazing!?

There are several marvelous ways that your body changes when you begin a consistent aerobic exercise program. All of the improvements your body makes increases your VO2 Max, which is a measurement of of your fitness level. Specifically, VO2 Max measures the volume of oxygen a person can consume in one minute exercising at maximum exertion.

Here are the incredible changes youll see in your body:

When you train over a period of time your heart will grow in size, allowing it to pump a larger volume of blood with each stroke (or pump). This allows more oxygen to be delivered to all the cells in your body. At the same time, your heart also becomes stronger and more efficient at pumping blood.

In response to your muscles needing more oxygen, your body will grow more capillaries to deliver more oxygen faster going forward. Isnt that cool?! In addition, over time, regular exercise will make your blood vessels become more flexible allowing them to deliver more oxygen rich blood more efficiently. And if that wasnt enough, the increased blood flow in your blood vessels serves to clean out excess cholesterol, keeping you free of clogs which can cause strokes and heart attacks.

As you exercise each day, your body says, OK, I get it. You need more oxygen. Alright, turn up the red blood cell production! As your red blood cell count increases so does your ability to receive more oxygen more efficiently.

This improvement is very cool too. In each of the cells in your body there are these little power machines called mitochondria. What they do is produce energy by combining oxygen and glucose (or other fuel molecules). This combination produces ATP which is the molecule that gives your cells the energy they need to do their cellular work. When you exercise regularly, guess what happens? Yup, your body creates more and stronger mitochondria in each of your cells, making you more powerful and giving you more endurance for everything in your life! Wow! How exciting is that!?

See the article here:
Why Is Exercise Good for You? | Life Learning Today

Bodylastics - designed to be the most effective exercise tubing!

Welcome! Eight years ago we set out to improve an affordable and convenient exercise tool - exercise tubing. Although exercise tubing at the time was good - it wasn't great. We were on a mission to change all that. After 1.5 years of designing and many many prototypes we launched the Bodylastics exercise tubing system in 1998. Since then we have sold over 80,000 units and are used by some of the toughest critics, personal trainers nationwide and the US military.

What you are going to see on this website is truly a revolution in fitness. Our exercise tubing is so effective that we actually compete with some of the best home gyms, like Bowflex rather than other exercise tubing products. Click here to compare our exercise tubing to Bowflex

If you cannot adjust the resistance you are wasting your time and money

This is a biggie here. I will try to simplify the explanation. Well, first let me ask you a question: do you think that you could make positive changes in your whole body with one pair of 5 lb weights? The answer is absolutely not! Each of your muscle groups is a different size and a different strength. The only way that you will effectively work and improve each muscle is by adjusting the resistance (tension) so that each muscle group is challenged. Challenging each muscle with resistance is considered resistance training. More and more doctors, diet Gurus, even Dr Phil are recommending this type of exercise because it adds muscle to your body. When you add muscle to your body you naturally raise your metabolism. In essence you become a calorie and fat burning machine.

The majority of the exercise tubing products on the market have only one level of resistance, so you cannot perform effective resistance training. Bodylastics exercise tubing is designed with an amazing clip system. This makes it fully scalable and adjustable, so that you can add or subtract resistance in a snap.

Exercise tubing comes in many forms - what are the pros and cons?

Here is a quick review of the several types of exercise tubing:

Exercise Tubing Loop Pros: Inexpensive Cons: One level of resistance, limited exercises, does not easily attach to the door Bottom Line: This type of exercise tubing is okay for a couple of exercises. The truth is - we really don't understand it. It is too short to provide full range of motion for just about every exercise. This would be like having one 5 lb dumbbell to exercise your whole body - and with limited range of motion.

How does exercise tubing work?

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EXERCISE TUBING for full body workouts!

This was the time when Americans renew their hatred of Washington and Washington wallows in a bittersweet cocktail of self-love and self-loathing.

Which is to say, it was White House Correspondents Association weekend, with the dinner Saturday night amid a galaxy of pre- and after-parties. Attendant to these events is the also-annual handwringing about the dinners value.

Those questioning, of course, are the media, who create the problem, then examine the problem, then suggest ways to solve the problem (that we dont really believe is a problem) and then go on to repeat the problem.

The rest of the world couldnt care less about the dinner except perhaps to note Washington is out of touch with regular Americans and that journalists are too schmoozy with officialdom. Most journalists would agree, but who would want to miss the scholarship awards? Oh, you didnt know about those?

What we all hate most is the attendance of so many celebrities, who undermine the noble purpose of this convocation. Moreover, they tend to make journalists, who have spent considerable time looking their red-carpet best, feel like last weeks tulips.

The buzz-killer crowd, however, is quickly forgotten once inside, where an avenue of cameras and lights awaits stars passing along the red carpet. Note to future newbies: Your entrance is upstairs. Otherwise, you risk a probable humiliation that the lights will suddenly go dark and your grand entrance becomes a soul-killing walk of shame past a gantlet of fish-eyed fans of other people.

This experience can be helpful, on the other hand, as you summon the requisite pose of perpetual self-awareness. Your thinking should follow this vein: Its not that you want to go to the dinner. Its your job to go. Whither goes the president, so go the media. And of course, the media did invite him, as well as all those celebrities we find so disruptive. Theres a circularity to all of this that suggests an apt metaphor.

Almost no one present fails to note his or her ambiguity toward the dinner and the parties that most are dying to attend. There are exceptions to this club-think, notably The New York Times and Tom Brokaw. The Times stopped sending its staffers several years ago, saying the media shouldnt be partying with people it covers.

Brokaw made headlines when he protested the celebrity-driven nature of the evening, specifically following Lindsay Lohans overshadowing presence the year before last. He lamented that the purpose of the evening to allow journalists and politicians to mingle in a lighthearted, relaxed environment had been hijacked.

He was right about the Lohan spectacle. I was standing nearby visiting with Lohans hostess, Greta Van Susteren, when none other than Rick Santorum brought his daughters for a snapshot with the starlet. Brokaw is also right about the superficiality and misplaced emphasis of the evening. For this reason, many of us swear well never go again. But since most of us do attend again, I hoped Brokaw might relent and asked him to be my date this year.

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Kathleen Parker: White House Correspondents Dinner an excercise in self-loathing