When it comes to exercise and burning calories cardio is the most preferred form. It’s the most happening form of exercise and brings a lot of excitement and stimulation within oneself, and the credit goes to the endorphin. Many a times we focus so much on cardio exercises that we forget the need to strengthen the muscles as well, which we realize until the muscles start giving up.
I personally love cardio because I am a restless and hyper person and anything that is slow just doesn’t interest me. It’s true that cardio facilitates more weight loss and in my case it helped me in shedding loads of weight but recently I didn’t find myself physically very strong especially the way I would like to see myself. This sudden realization got me into a lot of thinking and research.
After weeks of research and understanding I introduced strength training along with weights into my workout routine. After a month’s time I felt stronger and saw my weighing scale moving on the lower side as well and my plateau weight was also taken care of.
My personal workout routine consists of:
Jogging for an hour – 5 days a week.
Elliptical training for 30 minutes – 2-3 days a week (mostly when I am not jogging or short of time).
Strength training along with weights for 20-25 minutes – 3-4 days a week.
Rest days 1-2 days depending on my energy levels and time constraints.
With this routine I came to a conclusion that a balance of both cardio and strength training is important for a complete workout and to have a strong healthy body and not to forget that a healthy mind comes with a healthy body.
To begin with, I started with 5 pounds dumbbell, but it depends on your personal choice of how far you can stretch yourself in the beginning and then gradually increase your weights.
For beginners, walking at a pace of 3-3.5 mph with 3-5 pounds of hand weight is a good combination of cardio and strength. You burn quite a bit of calories and strengthen your muscles along with exercising your upper body. This way in a short period of time you work out your whole body and achieve more.
There are many forms of strength training and it is totally on your personal choice as to what you would be interested in adding to your workout routine. I personally do various forms of planks, ab crunches and some dumbbell exercises for abs like seated russian twist, plank and rotate, dumbbell cross over punch, reverse lunge with twist and some more.
For strength training you can also do resistance band, kettle ball or just regular strength training without weights. The idea behind strength training is to build strong muscles and burn fat, boost your metabolism and shape up your body. Strength training may not show great variation on the weighing scale but it does have a great effect on our physic.
So, what are you thinking… get started with your workout routine and balance your exercises with cardio and strength and see a better you soon.
Health tip of the week
“A balanced workout routine is a complete fitness requirement”.
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