Cardiovascular Ability

The ability of your heart, blood vessels, and lungs to supply oxygen to your muscles is improved through aerobic activity. The harder your body works, the more oxygen it needs and the harder your heart, lungs, and blood vessels need to work.

Cardiovascular fitness can reduce your chances of getting heart disease and make you feel stronger, healthier, and less tired.

How to Improve Your Cardiovascular Ability

You can increase your cardiovascular fitness through regular aerobic exercise. Good aerobic activities train your heart to work harder while keeping your heart rate within safe limits.

For an activity to be aerobic, it must be intense enough to elevate your heart rate to 60% to 90% of your maximum heart rate. When choosing an aerobic activity, try activities that use the large muscle groups, are rhythmic, and can be maintained continuously. Examples of good aerobic activities are walking, hiking, running or jogging, cycling, cross-country, dancing, skipping rope, rowing, swimming, and stair climbing.

Typically, an activity that trains your cardiovascular system will also be an excellent calorie-burning activity. But if you are not able to sustain the activity long enough or hard enough to experience cardiovascular improvement, doing the activity anyway can help you lose weight. Remember, any exercise is better than no exercise!

If your primary objective is to lose weight, click here to learn how physical activity may help you.

If you are interested in getting the benefits of cardiovascular training, you should know some specifics about your target heart rate.