Implementing a regular cardiovascular exercise routine improves your heart health, reduces your chance of getting some diseases, builds your stamina and can help you lose weight or maintain a healthy weight. The American Heart Association's guidelines for healthy women recommend spending a minimum of 150 minutes per week doing moderate aerobic exercise, or 75 minutes of a cardio workout that combines high-intensity and low-intensity moves. Keep your cardiovascular workout effective and interesting by varying it.
Walking
One of the easiest ways to start a cardio fitness plan is by walking. Get active by walking to work, walking your children to school, joining a hiking group or scheduling a family stroll after dinner. Wear a pedometer so you can measure how many steps your walk every day. Gradually add to your total number of steps until you have reached 10,000 steps per day. As you get more fit, add challenges to your walking workout such as climbing hills or doing speed-walking.
Yoga
Gentle or restorative yoga will not raise your heart rate high enough to qualify as a cardio workout. Select more intense styles of yoga such as power yoga, yoga fusion or hot yoga. These styles emphasize a more intense pace and combine floor work, stretches, bends and poses that work all your major muscle groups. Add yoga to an existing cardio workout by doing a 10-minute round of sun salutations as a warm-up. Move through the poses fluidly, and breathe deeply from your belly and chest to maximize the aerobic benefits.
High-Impact Exercises
If your goal is to burn more calories quickly, add some high-impact cardiovascular workouts to your fitness regimen. Depending upon your weight, you lose between 410 and 650 calories per hour doing high-impact aerobics. Burn about 100 calories more per hour doing step aerobics or running cross country. Your most intense aerobic workouts, such as running a seven-minute mile, jumping rope and rollerblading, burn more than 700 calories per hour.
Low-Impact Exercises
Some low-impact exercises also deliver a cardiovascular workout. Swimming laps provides natural resistance while raising your heart rate and strengthening the muscles in your arms, legs and core. Swimming butterfly burns at least 650 calories per hour while swimming freestyle at a vigorous pace burns nearly 600 calories per hour. Other low-impact forms of cardiovascular exercise include climbing a stair treadmill, doing calisthenics, cycling, hiking, backpacking and water aerobics.
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