Exercise is work performed against resistance to achieve physical fitness. Most exercise pits your muscles against the resistance such as gravity or water. While much of the popularity of exercise revolves around muscle-building and improving your physique, the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports places special emphasis on exercises for heart and lung endurance. You need those to supply your hard-working body with enough oxygen rich blood to support your other exercises and daily activities.
Running
The United States Army requires proficiency in running for both male and female soldiers as a mandatory form of heart and lung endurance training. Cardio-respiratory endurance is built by progressive increases in both running speed and duration to assure their lower extremity strength increases at a rate to prevent injuries. This is intended to improve a soldier's ability to use large muscle groups during extended periods of intense activity for combat readiness. In the standard Walk-to-Run Program, the endurance goals require males to run 1 mile in 7 minutes or less and females between 8 1/2 and 9 minutes. After achieving these benchmarks endurance is further increased with interval training at alternating fast and slow paces.
Swimming
Swimming is reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the No. 2 most popular form of aerobic, or heart and lung endurance exercise in the United States. Two and a half hours per week of swimming is documented to reduce your risk of death to about half that of an inactive person with no regular exercise program. An advantage of swimming over land-based exercise is the absence of gravity-induced stress on joints and muscles in the relative weightlessness of buoyancy. This allows a longer duration of exercise to develop endurance and stamina.
Cycling
Bicycle riding is a low impact activity that you can do with great intensity over a long duration and distance-as much as a "century," or 100 miles in one day. This type of aerobic endurance training is often called "base building" by cyclists. Interval training for aerobic endurance calls for 15 seconds of fast pedaling alternating with 5 minutes at a moderate pace for five repetitions. Weekly rides much longer than usual and intervals of riding hard enough to achieve 85 percent of your maximum heart rate also improve cardiovascular endurance.
Physiology
Any exercise that raises your heart rate and breathing to between 50 and 100 percent of your maximum ability 20 to 30 minutes a day, three to five days a week plus eight to 12 reps of 10 strength-training exercises twice a week will increase your cardiovascular endurance, according to exercise physiologists at Eastern Michigan University and the American College of Sports Medicine. The physiological results include increased volume of blood pumped per heart beat, lower resting heart rate, higher cardiac output during exercise and stronger breathing muscles with greater oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange during exercise Taken together, these result in greater aerobic fitness and endurance.
Member Comments