Other Benefits of Cardiovascular Exercises

Probably the most convenient exercise of all. There are people who cringe at the idea of doing it and there are others who get excited just at the thought of it. Whether you like it or not, cardiovascular is essential to your overall workout plan. I personally feel lazy exercising sometimes but if I know it is important, I always get it done. Cardiovascular exercise is any kind of exercise that increases your heart rate therefore stimulating the blood circulation in your body as one of its result. There are actually a large variety of cardio exercises, each one have their specific benefits and procedure of execution. Most individuals do cardiovascular workouts primarily to lose fat. Well, all types of cardio exercises can make you burn fat since they help you burn calories. Burning calories is equal to burning fat. However, if your primary goal for cardio is to shred off some fat, you are better off with other exercises. This is not to bring down doing cardio, this is just to clear it up that there are other benefits that you can get from cardiovascular exercises aside from losing fat.

One of the obvious benefits that you can get from cardiovascular exercises is improvement of your heart condition. Cardio stimulates the activity of your heart therefore increasing its overall capacity when done regularly. Your heart is a muscle, the more you work it out the more it becomes stronger and healthier. Aside from increase in heart rate, you also increase your overall body metabolism when you do cardio exercises regularly. As you exercise, you increase the rate of the energy consumption in your body therefore increasing various processes in your body called your metabolism. The more intense your cardio exercise is, the more increase in metabolism you will get. Even if you cannot lose much weight, you can at least get the benefit of increase heart and metabolic rate.

Another benefit you can get from cardiovascular activity, this is not well-known among people, is increase in recovery rate of your body. Since cardio increases your heart rate, it also increase the flow of oxygen in your body helping your body recover quickly especially after lifting weights in the gym. Now that you know a thing or two about other benefits you can get from cardio exercises, I hope that you would put more value into it and do them regularly.

Abdominal Crunches

I've mentioned on one of my posts that if you cannot lose weight, work on your abs and I would like to add a few more information about training your abdominals. For an abdominal training to produce effective results for your body, it should put emphasize on crunching movement of your torso. Therefore, the easiest accessible exercise for you is traditional crunches. To do a basic abdominal crunch, you have to lie down on your back with your feet either on a bench or just put them up in the air for more abdominal resistance and then roll up your upper body my tensing your abdominal muscles. By simply doing the very basic abdominal crunch, you can increase and define the mass of your abdominal muscles. As you develop your abdominal strength through doing ab crunches, you will want to add more intensity into it by putting your feet up on a bench or on a concrete wall. While the upper portion of your abs tend to do most of the work while crunching, the lower portion of your abs does its work by maintaining the stability of your trunk by contracting.

So much for the basic crunch, and let's move on to reverse crunches. The reverse crunch unlike the normal abdominal crunch emphasizes the work on the lower part of the abdominals. This crunch also utilizes the weight of the legs to put resistance on the movement. To perform this exercise, start off by lying on your back with your arms lying on the side of your body. While lying, bend your knees then raise your thighs contracting the lower part of your abdominal muscles. Inhale as you tense your muscles then hold them up for a few seconds then release your breath as you release the tensing on your abs. As you do this, make sure that you keep your knees close to your chest and your pelvis should come off the floor every time your raise your legs. This exercise also help shred off the belly hanging on the lower part of your abs which is usually the cause why most people cannot lose weight efficiently.

Another variation for reverse crunch is the hanging leg raise, the movement is very similar to reverse crunch, the only difference is that you do it while hanging on to a pull bar. To start doing this exercise, simply hang on to a pull bar then raise your legs contracting the lower part of your abdominal muslces similar to how you would execute a reverse crunch.

Get Some Motivation In Case You Cannot Move To Lose Weight

On your journey to losing weight, you might find yourself losing all that motivation you have to become successful along the way. Once emotional motivation becomes weak, losing physical energy is out of the question. Once you are out of energy and motivation, it is possible that your frontier to lose weight cannot go on. But fortunately, there are a few things you can do to keep the fire burning and keep you away from the perspective that you cannot lose weight:

Put it into action

Most of us know what we have to do in order to achieve every goal we want to put ourselves into. But we just cannot go forward because we hold ourselves back with gazillion excuses that is why majority of us cannot lose weight even if we want to. Excuses we put on ourselves can range from being busy up to not having enough money, not having the talent, not having the patience and the list could go on and on. What most of us don't notice is that, these little but many excuses sucks energy out of us that holds us back in being successful at losing weight. So get rid of those excuses and focus on all the things you have to do to achieve your weight loss goal. And if you can write down all those tasks you need to do to get closer towards your goal.

Look at what you want to change

Want to change your weight? Look at it everyday, and hate it to the very best. The reason for this is to keep yourself from slacking of on your journey to losing weight. If you find yourself becoming lazy for your workout, look at yourself in the mirror and look at what you want to change until you get yourself psyched up for exercising. You can even get an ugly picture of yourself and then look at it every time you find yourself slacking off during exercise sessions.

Listen To Audio Clips that Motivate You

Listen to motivational materials whenever you can. If your a fan of Bruce Lee, you can record snippets of interviews about his workout and then listen to it regularly especially before working out so you always feel inspired and motivated. You can even listen to audio clips shouting at you for being lazy just so can have something reminding you to work hard.

Use these motivations above everytime you feel tired or feel like wanting to slack off. Motivate yourself and you'll be closer to your goal in no time.