There’s a lot of important reasons to raise your heart rate in your next cardio workout.
We love helping our members find their favorite workouts and learning more about how to strengthen their bodies and themselves. We know lots of you love to focus on strengthening and toning, which is why we’ve carefully crafted our classes like Hot Tone & Sculpt, Hot Absolutely Burning Butts, and Hot Amazing Arms & Shoulders. We also know that one of the main reasons many people workout is to stay fit for their everyday lives. To achieve this goal, it’s important to focus not only on strength, but also cardio training.
What is Cardio?
Cardio, simply put, is exercise that depends primarily on aerobic exercise or, in the words of VeryWell Fit “exercise that gets your heart rate up”. Some examples of cardio training include cycling, running, rowing, swimming, hiking, and skiing.
Why Cardio Training is Important?
If you have kids to keep up with or a dog that loves to hike, you’ve likely considered how important keeping up with your cardio is before. But no matter how active or sedentary your day to day lifestyle is, cardio is important. In fact, if you work a desk job or don’t get the chance to move much in the day it could be even more important to devote some time to cardio, because you aren’t getting the chance to move as much throughout the rest of the day.
One of the main benefits that has been associated with cardio is health heart. Your heart health can be improved through cardio because, as explained by Hopkins Medicine, “improves circulation, which results in lowered blood pressure and heart rate”. These benefits can have important health impacts, but they are far from the only way cardio can improve your body. Cardio, also known as aerobic exercise, has been linked to improving our memory and ability to learn. Cardio training has a multitude of benefits including for your brain, joints, skin, muscles, digestion, and lungs as explained by Cleveland Clinic.
How Cardio Helps Your Strength Training
Even if your main fitness focus right now isn’t cardio based, you may want to incorporate cardio workouts into your schedule. For one, cardio increases oxygen supply to our bodies including all of our muscles, which in turn affects all of our workouts. Cardio also helps fight osteoporosis and manage arthritis discomfort, which helps you “maintain range of motion” as explained by Cleveland Clinic. So even if targeting muscles is your goal, cardio may help you facilitate these goals.
Cardio Classes You Can Take at OYF
If you are looking to add some cardio to your workout schedule, Hot Fast & Furious Fusion may be a good choice for you. The class is high energy, mixes athletic yoga and endurance, and aims to challenge, shape your body, and detox your system. Likewise, Hot Box Fusion is a high intensity class combining shadow boxing, kickboxing, Fusion, core, and cardio where you can learn a new skill while getting in your cardio workout. Or, if you’d still like to fit some yoga in with your cardio, try Hot Fit Flow to combine athletics yoga with endurance.
Watch out for our upcoming blogs to learn about other aspects you may want to incorporate into your workout routine, or check our full class listing schedule to find the right cardio option for you.