Myths of Cardiovascular Exercises
December 29, 2009
Cardio is one of the best exercises for the body. In addition to improving your general cardio vascular health it helps tone muscles, builds stamina, improves your respiration and increases endurance power.
Cardio exercise need not be limited to just walking or jogging, you can indulge in various activities like swimming, skipping, rowing, basketball, tennis or even dancing. Due to this variety in choice, people are encouraged to take up cardio exercises. Despite there being a large number of people who do cardio, even well informed individuals suffer from misconceptions.
Here are some common misconceptions:
The first misconception is that you tend to burn more calories if you exercise on an empty stomach first thing in the morning. This is actually a very bad idea. Not eating and doing your cardio exercise in the morning is not good as your body temperature would be very low and you will have to spend more time warming up. Your body in reality does not burn more calories if you work out before breakfast. In fact, even when you sleep your body burns fat. There are no actual measurable benefits for working out in the morning without having your breakfast.
Another misconception is that before doing weights of any form, you should do your cardio. This is a misconception that even some fitness instructors suffer from. They tend to schedule a program with cardio before weights, while it is actually beneficial to do your cardio after a session with weights.
It is good especially because cardio exercises tend to draw energy from the stored body fat and you can end up with glycogen to do your weights, thereby making your weight training ineffective. You could however do a little bit of cardio before weights so that it does not lower your strength for weights.
People believe that how much you sweat is an indication of the intensity of the workout. Sweating is actually the body’s way of cooling down when it gets hot and does not indicate in any way the activity done. Even a mild exercise where you do not sweat much can help you burn a lot of calories as compared to an intense sweaty workout.
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