Full body toning and cardiovascular exercise ensures your body stays healthy, strong and lean. Full body toning exercises are performed with weights, resistance bands or body weight. Cardiovascular exercise increases heart rate and helps burn calories. Combining total body toning and cardiovascular exercise is helpful for individuals who are short on time and tend to get bored with monotonous workout routines.
Compound and Hybrid Exercises Movements
Choosing multi-joint exercises -- also known as compound exercises -- ensures you include several muscle groups in one movement. For example, exercises such as push-ups or the seated chest press machine incorporates several muscles including chest, triceps and shoulders. Taking it one step further, you can include hybrid exercises, which may morph two exercises together into one movement. For example, combining a squat and a shoulder press into one movement -- the squat press -- involves several muscle groups and therefore burns more calories. While these types of exercises are not recommended for beginners, they are ideal for full body toning for progression from novice to intermediate exercise enthusiast. Strength training exercises such as compound and hybrid exercises are ideal for total body toning. According to MayoClinic.com, the endless benefits of full body toning exercises include: strong bones, reduced body fat, reduced risk for injury and increased stamina.
Plyometrics
Plyometric training -- also known as jump training -- involves stretching of the muscles prior to contracting them. Typical plyometric exercises such as vertical jump, horizontal jump, jump lunges and box jumps can be incorporated into full body toning and cardiovascular exercise workouts. Plyometrics improve strength, agility and power in addition to burning calories. Plyometrics, however, should not be attempted until cleared by a physician and are generally not recommended for beginners or individuals with joint problems.
Full Body Cardiovascular Exercises
Cardiovascular exercise is important in keeping your heart strong, assisting in improving your cholesterol profile and burning calories. While some cardio exercises -- such as biking -- only utilizes the lower body to get the heart rate up, full body exercises such as swimming, rowing, running and kickboxing include your entire body. Cardiovascular exercise should be performed either for 30 minutes, five days a week for moderate exercise or three days a week for 20 minutes for vigorous exercise.
Putting It All Together
An easy and effective way to get your full body toning and cardiovascular workouts is to combine them into one session. This type of training is also known as circuit training and can be performed three to four times per week. Circuit training alternates between performing resistance training exercises with cardiovascular exercises in a cyclical fashion for one to two minutes for each pair of exercises. The exercises may be repeated two to three times and then changed to a new set.
Member Comments