#5 - Cardiovascular Workouts: Types, Tips, and Tricks
No matter what the goal is - reduced risk for disease, body fat reduction, increased energy, and better recovery from workouts, weightlifting - the benefits of cardiovascular training will help achieve the goal.
Your heart muscle (left ventricular cavity) literally increases in size, you increase the number of blood vessels available to transport blood (capillary density) and your cells increase in size (mitochondrial density).
This means your blood (rich in oxygen and nutrients) can be delivered to the muscles faster and more efficiently. Further, your blood can transport metabolic waste products faster and more efficiently.
Improving your plumbing system (cardiovascular system) or your anatomy is a major benefactor. Cardiovascular exercise aids in nutrition, sleep, and stress too. Research shows that aerobic exercise helps buffer stress hormones; it’s no wonder why it has been referred to as physical medicine.
There are three main general types of cardiovascular exercise: aerobic (with oxygen), anaerobic (without oxygen), and peak (maximum exertion). You can think of it as gears 1-2-3 of a manual, stick shift car.
Gear one (aerobic) is for longer duration and lower intensity efforts, like highway driving. Aerobic means with oxygen or that you can complete the activity at a low enough intensity where your breathing (inhaling oxygen) is enough to fuel your cardiovascular system. This is the reason why you can perform aerobic exercise for long, sustained durations.
Gear two (anaerobic) is when the intensity is higher. Your body simply cannot inhale fast enough to provide all the oxygen needed to your muscles. So, it relies on the breakdown of foods in order to produce energy (bioenergetics) to sustain high intensity exercise. Of course, breaking down foods to create energy is not “free.” Metabolic byproducts such as lactic acid, hydrogen ions, and carbon dioxide are all produced. It is the accumulation of these byproducts that lowers our body’s pH level, inducing muscle contraction fatigue. This is why we cannot perform high intensity exercise for a long duration.
Gear Three (peak) is maximal exertion. These are your all out efforts. This is when you are using your creatine phosphagen system (so, again, without oxygen) to produce maximal force (max speed or max acceleration). Think of how many sports and activities that use this system. A lot of sports involve a maximal exertion component: track, football, soccer, hockey, baseball, rugby, lacrosse, tennis, and the list goes on.
Using soccer as an analogy to exemplify all three cardiovascular gears, gear three (peak) is the ability to sprint to the ball, gear two (anaerobic) is the ability to burst up-and-down the field for a back-and-forth play, and gear one (aerobic) is the ability to do this for 90 minutes or the length of a match. Taking this one step further, remember how we talked about the aerobic system increasing the size of your heart and the density of your blood vessels and cells? These adaptations will allow the soccer player to recover from this game quicker and thus be ready to compete again for the next game and the entire season without experiencing as much fatigue. Pretty cool.
For the typical gym-goer, recreational athlete, and corporate executive, these concepts still apply. One soccer match would be one workout, one game, or one long work day. You have lots of soccer matches in a season just as you have many workouts, games, and long days. Improving your cardiovascular system can help with your endurance for life. Now, let’s look at some tips before we get into the tricks.
Aerobic exercise is defined as being done with oxygen. So, you have to be able to identify at what intensity is your zone for aerobic exercise. A general heart rate range could be between 130 - 140 bpm. Another metric is the talk test or your ability to exercise while being able to form sentences but not have a full on conversation. So, power walking during the lunch break is an absolutely fantastic activity but if you can hold a conversation, you are not exercising intensely enough to gain aerobic adaptation. Biking, incline walking, or slowly jogging and being able to form a few sentences while your breathing rate has increased is a good barometer.
I’ll usually start someone off with incline walking for 15 minutes for two - three times weekly, progressing them to one hour for two - three times weekly before even starting to jog. For most people, the act of jogging shoots their heart rate too high to be considered aerobic exercise. As a general rule of thumb for beginners or those who are not conditioned, if you cannot maintain a pace for at least 15 minutes, then there is a good likelihood it is not aerobic.
The great thing about aerobic exercise is that progress is a linear model and is simple. For example, you can start by incline walking at 2.5 - 3.0 mph at an incline of 7.5 - 9.0 for 15 minutes and then just choose one variable to increase at a time. You could keep the speed and incline the same for months and simply increase time. Any prolonged activity where your heart rate is elevated can be aerobic exercise. Weekend bike rides, hikes, kayaking, and swimming are all great examples.
The great thing about anaerobic exercise is that it is a very simple process of elimination. If you are not going all out and you are uncomfortable at the intensity of exercise, you’re likely in the right spot! Heart rate ranges above 140 bpm and especially 150 - 170 bpm are going to be your wheelhouse. The talk test is even more obvious. You should not be able to form sentences at all and only a word or two at a time, “yes” or “no.” You might only be able to hold your pace for 20 seconds - 2 minutes before needing to slow down or rest.
With this time range, intervals are a great way to complete a workout time efficiently and gain adaptation. As a general rule of thumb, as the intensity of exercise increases, the duration of rest time increases. Generally, you will want to use a 3:1 ratio of rest:work. So, 20 seconds of work would be minimally paired with one minute of rest. If you feel you are ready to do another round in less than one minute, you are not working intensely enough. You should feel like you earn and need the rest. In longer intervals of 1-2 minutes, you could definitely need 3-6 minutes rest between intervals. This does not mean sit down on Instagram for 6 minutes between sets. You’re going to want to do something called “active recovery” where you are still moving just at a lighter intensity.
An example would be biking or running. You start off easy by warming-up for 10 minutes. Then, you hit your hard interval; your rest period is where you are still biking easy, walking or slowly jogging before your next round.
Some interval workouts include:
10 rounds of 18 seconds (180 seconds = 3 minutes of work)
8 rounds of 30 seconds (4 minutes of work)
5 rounds of 1 minute
3 rounds of 2 minutes.
You would, of course, warm-up 10-15 minutes and cool down 10-15 minutes to round out a 25-45 minute cardiovascular workout.
Peak cardiovascular exercise can simply be defined as maximum exertion. This could be seeing how fast you can run 100-meters or 1-mile, or competing to finish first in a race. It is a measure of how much oxygen by volume you can consume per minute per body weight (units are mL/kg/min). It is a measurement of how large your cardiovascular engine is. Naturally, performing exercises for faster, longer, and more intense bouts requires the highest consumption of oxygen per minute.
Heart rate ranges for some might be 160 - 170 bpm and certainly for most would be 170 - 180 bpm+. The talk test does not do much use here but we can use a number of other metrics such as distance covered over a time period (ie. 1 mile in 6 minutes), power output (ie. averaged 500 Watts for a 1 mile cycling time trial), or max speed.
Intervals of less than 20 seconds where you are maximally exerting yourself or choosing a distance to perform maximally are two ways to improve your peak. For the latter, you can choose any distance and perform a time trial or TT for short (competing for your fastest time).
Examples include: 200-m TT, 400-m TT, 1-mile TT, or 2-mile TT. This can be done on a bike, treadmill, ice hockey, swimming, or any other method that you can perform at a max intensity.
Interval examples of less than 20 seconds, all of which would be all out, include:
5 rounds of 20 seconds
10 rounds of 10 seconds
15 rounds of 7 seconds
The airdyne bikes or curve treadmills are great for this because they immediately allow for max exertion without having to waste time building-up speed.
Exercise recommendations would be:
Aerobic exercise: two - four times weekly
Pair other recovery activities such as stretching, foam rolling, massage, Pilates or yoga on aerobic days
Anaerobic and peak: one - two times weekly
Pair your anaerobic and peak intervals on lifting days
Enjoy experimenting with the types, tips and tricks of cardiovascular exercise.
Cheers!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5329739/
https://www.medicinenet.com/aerobic_exercise/article.htm
https://training4endurance.co.uk/improve-endurance/high-intensity-interval-training/
