Aerobic exercise is essential for having a healthy weight, preventing chronic diseases and improving your overall health. While the benefits of exercise may seem obvious, you might not be clear on how often you should participate in aerobic exercise. If you are a healthy adult, you should try to be active every day and vary the activities you perform. If you are looking to lose weight, you need to perform more aerobic exercise to see results.
Features
Aerobic exercise, which is also known as cardiovascular exercise, engages your whole body and elevates your heart rate. Your respiratory rate also increases as your muscles begin to work harder. Aerobic exercise causes you to burn calories, which can lead to body fat loss and maintaining a healthy weight. You also strengthen and tone your muscles during aerobic exercise. This can improve your athletic performance, stamina and endurance.
Types
There are seemingly endless ways that you can perform aerobic exercise. You can vary your intensity and work at a slow pace or ramp up your intensity and work as fast and as hard as you can. There are low-impact exercises that protect your joints, like swimming and cycling, or high-impact exercises that can cause strain on your body while burning a high rate of calories, such as running. You can perform steady-state aerobic exercise and work at the same pace for the entire session. You can also change the speed you work at every minute or two and perform interval training.
Frequency
Your fitness goals will determine the amount of aerobic exercise you should perform each week. If you are trying to maintain your current weight, you don't need as much exercise as someone who is trying to lose excess weight. According to the American College of Sports Medicine, healthy adults should get 30 minutes of moderate exercise five days a week, or 20 minutes of vigorous exercise three days a week. To lose 1 pound of weight you need to burn 3,500 calories. If you perform enough aerobic exercise every day to burn 500 calories you can lose up to 1 pound per week.
Considerations
Aerobic exercise should be supplemented with strength-based exercises each week. Although aerobic exercise can help tone and condition your muscles, it does not provide the same benefits as strength training. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that you perform at least two days of strength training per week. Be sure to work your legs, arms, stomach, back and chest. Choose at least one exercise for each major muscle group and complete 12 to 15 repetitions. Use weights that challenge your muscles during the last two to three repetitions.
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