Jack Nilssen is

THE
HEALTHY
GAMER

What is Cardiovascular Exercise?

• Training that increases the strength and efficiency of the heart and blood vessels.

The Fundamentals of Cardio

1. Do an activity that raises the heart-rate.
2. Continue until satisfied.

Raising the Heart-Rate

Welcome to the second week of Healthy Gamer! If you’re just joining us, it’s good to have you aboard. I urge you to look back to last week’s articles, as I’m building off foundation principles from those.

I’m introducing cardiovascular training (”cardio”) before strength training as I feel the benefits from establishing a good cardio program outweigh those provided by bodybuilding.

A good, sustainable cardiovascular program is one of the key ingredients to burning excess body fat.

One of the hallmarks of a good cardio program is that it is sustainable, or comfortable enough to continue for the months and years necessary to form a satisfying body and maximize heart-health. It must also be flexible and accommodating. These details will vary from person to person, but again there are some very basic principles we can apply to find a program suitable to our needs.

The first thing is understanding heart-rate and how it relates to fat-melting and strengthening of the cardiovascular system.

Warning! If you have a heart condition, or suspect one, disregard everything in this section and listen to whatever your doctor tells you. I have no experience working with a heart condition or any form of heart disease, and all of my conclusions come based on results from using my own healthy ticker.

As with the Mifflin St-Jeor equation for measuring calorie requirements, the Fox and Haskell formula is widely accepted as a very rough tool for measuring the maximum heart rate, and thus determining how many beats per minute the heart needs to reach for training to occur.

I’m aware that the Fox and Haskell formula is total crap. It was never researched fully, and science has since proven that there are other, more accurate ways to measure the maximum heart rate.

I’m a lazy man, though, and I took the Fox and Haskell result as a basic starting point and worked off of it, determining for myself what my limits were.

Here’s the formula. I like it because it’s simple, not because it’s scientifically accurate:

220 - Age = Maximum Heart Rate

Pretty simple, right? The scientifically accepted “training zone” is 50% to 75% of the heart rate maximum. The results of this formula will not be exact, in fact they can be off by as many as thirty beats per minute. It could be the difference between a ball lying on the fairway and one in the rough, but it’s probably not out of bounds and can still be played with.

For me (at the time of writing) this produces a target zone of 94 to 141 beats per minute.

Measuring the Heart Rate

One of the easiest methods for measuring the heart’s current beats per minute is to take the first two fingers and press them firmly into the carotid artery, just under where the jaw hinges into the skull.

Use a watch to count out a ten-second pulse, then multiply this result by 6 to get, again, a rough idea of the heart rate. There are far more accurate ways to do this, but I’ve never needed that degree of accuracy. A ballpark figure is fine with me.

These days, I take my estimated target heart rate and divide it by six, to save myself the multiplication when I’m on the road training. I get 15 to 23 beats in a 10-second period, and this is the range I generally stay in when doing my cardio.

Getting Satisfaction

I’ll be talking about progressive training in the next article. For now, knowing the basic target heart rate zone, getting the body into that zone, and keeping it there for a period long enough to have some effect are the key points.

Moving the body rhythmically is a fine way to stimulate this. Walking, dancing, swimming, having sex, riding a bicycle, and shadowboxing are all great examples. I do light jogging to get my heart rate going.

When I started, I actually used a treadmill with a heart rate monitor set at a pace that put me in the low range of my target rate. As I was a smoker and hadn’t made any concerted at improving my cardiovascular health, it wasn’t long before I got tired and stopped. And that had been fine. I’d simply set the place where I’d tired as a benchmark (which back then had been a lowly 10 minutes) and set myself a reasonable goal (30 minutes) and tried to get to and maintain a pace that challenged myself.

I also listened to my body closely, and at almost no point in my training career have I exerted myself to a point that I felt was dangerous. In fact, I’ve kept my exertions to a low, almost lazy, amount! I’ll be outlining exactly what I do in a future article, but it’s enough to say that I really haven’t needed much to get personal satisfaction out of my regular cardio program.

I think it’s up to each person to decide just how much is enough, and not to press themselves outside of self-established safe limits. I know, there are a lot of people who disagree and say that real growth and development comes from pushing the boundaries we set for ourselves. I respond by saying that my own boundaries have naturally evolved over time, through careful and safe repetition of work within my pre-established limits.

What are your limits, and how have you established them? They may be lower than what you’re capable of, and only through careful experimentation can new limits be set.

Let’s see if we can’t find those safe limits.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Mindset. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.