C Quadrant - Cardiovascular Exercise

Cardiovascular exercise, also called Cardiopulmonary, Cardiorespiritory and Aerobic exercise is an essential part of the synergy of the program of the fitness quadrant. The intensity is low, and the duration is long. It produces heavier breathing and has the effect of bringing more oxygen into our blood stream. Most importantly it conditions our heart, lungs and blood vessels. When performed at the right time, intensity and duration, it does not use glucose for fuel, and the healthy muscles that were stimulated with anaerobic exercise can provide superior strength to handle the Cardio, so the synergy of both types of exercise enhance one other.

Staying under the Anaerobic Threshold and using The Karvonen heart rate formula makes Cardio extremely effective. 

Exercising in your own individual target heart rate range assures you of safe effective intensity without overtraining by not going over the Anaerobic Threshold. It is explained thoroughly in the chapter "Measuring Cardio Intensity - Staying Below The Anaerobic Threshold" in the book.

Also, performing Cardio at the right time by planning your muscle glycogens and blood glucose levels to be lower will be extremely effective in getting the most out of your time spent performing your Cardio for maximizing fat loss. These strategies and techniques are fully explained  in the chapters "Bring Glucose And Insulin Down To Use Fat As Fuel" and "When To Do Cardio For Fat burning" in the book.;nbsp

The best system to achieve both body fat loss and which would also strengthen the heart, would be  Cardio Vascular exercise, or termed Cardio for short, also termed Aerobic – which basically is low intensity exercise with a long time duration. It can be looked at as low intensity exercise performed within a long time period. The time period is considered long when compared in relation to load bearing Anareobics. With the intensity low, compared again to Anaerobics, to balance out the exercise we perform it for a longer time period. However, it is counter productive to exercise performing Cardio for too long, as our bodies with then cannibalize themselves and consume lean for fuel, not body fat. Therefore, effective time lengths in our Training Heart Rate range are generally best kept at around 20 minutes in our THZ, including a warm up and cool down the time length is of course more. Also, when over training Aerobics, the overall body is weakened, and less energy is available for support of our joints, especially for the alignment and support of our spines. If someone has weakened joints such as knees and hips from injuries and years of inactivity and lean loss, then load bearing anaerobic training is needed first to strengthen the joints to handle the cardio, especially if the aerobics or cardio is to be the type that involves impact such as walking. Exercise bikes and eliptical training devices can help by being easier on the joints, especially when first starting the exercise program, but variety is key as we don’t want to create a repetitive joint action for too long with any one device.

When we improve the efficiency of our heart and lungs, we are more likely to be a better fat burning machine. To strengthen our heart we stimulate the cardiac muscle of the heart, we perform cardio exercise by varying our training heart rates in a pre defined Training Heart Rate Zone (THZ). We are monitoring the time period and Heart Rate and we deliberately manipulate our heart rates within our zone. For Heart and lungs conditioning and to hopefully burn fat and not muscle for fuel we base our heart rate to be beating between 60% and 80% of our heart rate maximum. This can be done regardless of the time of day, but we perform it after bringing glucose down so we can burn fat for fuel, because when the glucose in the blood is high then the insulin is increased to transport it this puts a lock on using body fat for fuel.

To find our age related Target Heart Rate Zone (THZ) to perform our Cardio within, we simply subtract our age from a fetus heart rate of 220, then we multiply that by 60% for the Beats Per Minute of our low end of our THZ and next by 80% for our upper end for the Beats Per Minute of our THZ. Depending on what type of Cardio we are performing, we may have to pause in order to obtain a good reading of our pulse, such as walking on a treadmill for example. However, on an exercise bike, because it is of a non-impact nature, we should be able to get a good pulse reading while pedaling. If the machine has an electrical hand grip pulse reader, check it’s accuracy and calibration by taking your pulse at the carotid or radial artery and compare the results. We check out our THZ manually by taking our pulse at the carotid or radial artery for a count of 10 seconds (looking at the second hand of the clock as we count the pulses) and multiply by 6 to get the number of beats per minute.

220 – age_____X 60% = lower end of  THZ______

220 – age_____X 80% = upper end of  THZ______

Various Types Of Cardio

·         Walking

·         Power Walking

·         Treadmill

·         Bike Riding

·         Stationary Bike Riding

·         Elliptical Cross Trainer

·         Stair Climber Machine

·         Aerobic Dancing

·         Aerobic Classes

·         Aerobic Videos

·         Water Aerobic Classes

·         Swimming

Here is what you will get when you purchaseThe Fitness Quadrant book. Following is a list of the Table Of Contents from this section of The Fitness Quadrant book: