The Cardio Activities Missing From Your Fitness Routine
Doing cardio exercise is the best way to stay fit, boost your emotional wellbeing, and ultimately help you to feel faster and stronger in the long run. Indeed, working on a cardio activity hand in hand with a strength building activity is always going to be the best way to maintain your physique!
However, many people tend to skip over the most effective cardio exercises. They don’t meet their fitness goals, and they can simply give up in the long run. But before you reach the stage where you get frustrated with your own fitness and throw it out of the window, here are some good cardio activities to add into your regime.
Cycling
Cycling is one of the best cardio activities to undertake, simply because it engages your whole body at once. You get on a bike, make sure you’re riding safe, and then take a good half hour to cycle around the block or up and down through a nearby park. In doing so you’ll raise your heartrate, improve your breathing, and make your heart healthier in the long term.
Indeed, cycling is one of the best exercises for protecting your heart against disease later on in life. Even just cycling to work once or twice a week lessens your chances by half, and it certainly prevents you from getting locked into traffic as much!
Hiking
Walking is a great activity simply because it’s something we do every single day. We have to walk to get around, and it engages all the muscles in our lower body to keep us upright. So take this to the next level here and focus on upping the cardio factor of the walking lifestyle. In other words, it’s time to go on a hike!
Hiking gets us outside in the great outdoors, making it a great activity for your mental health as well. The more time we spend surrounded by nature and clean air, the more likely it is to have good serotonin levels, and that’s perfect for a world that recently went through multiple lockdowns. If you’re a cyclist you can take your bike with you for double the impact, and even to just make the ride home a lot easier on you too!
Jumping
Jumping is a great way to raise your heart rate and get your muscles pumping. As a kid, jumping around was a lot of fun and always left you breathless, and the same principle applies as an adult. So why not incorporate a few more jumping related activities into your fitness routine? Whether you do some jumping jacks, get a trampoline for your backyard, or you buy a jump-rope to indulge your inner child, jumping can do great things for your body.
Indeed, using a jumping rope alone is a very simple way to help you lose weight, thanks to the high intensity nature of the exercise itself. If you’re serious about weight loss goals, you might not have to turn to something like weightloss injection wegovy if you do around 20 minutes of ‘skipping’ each day. You’ll tighten those core muscles and reduce the amount of fat around your belly in the long run.
Boxing
This is a great activity for people who don’t quite get along with running or jogging. Boxing is a lot of fun and it can help you to really focus on building those arm and shoulder muscles. But it’s also a good way to focus on your cardio health – you have to move around a lot more than you think when you’re boxing on your toes!
Boxing is good for the heart and lungs, it’s good for shedding a few pounds in a hurry, and it’s also a great way to help you improve your balance. You have to be coordinated, and constantly aware of where your feet are and how to move them, and that can make your muscles incredibly firm and strong.
Swimming
Swimming is the last cardio activity on our list, but it’s still a very effective form of exercise! It’s a low impact sport by its very definition, but it has the added benefit of carrying some very high impact results. After all, water is far harder to move on than the normal air you’re walking against, and you have to get your whole body involved to remain afloat!
Does your fitness routine feel a little stale? If you want to try out a new activity, make sure it’s cardio in nature.
