All you need to know about aerobic fitness

All you need to know about aerobic fitness

There are 3 forms of exercise; Aerobic, anaerobic and flexibility. In this blog we will be talking a bit about aerobic exercise and the benefits of it.

Aerobic exercise is generally known as cardio (cardiovascular) and literally means “with oxygen” – exercise that requires pumping of oxygenated blood round your body to the working muscles by your heart. This is done by filling our lungs with air which contains around 20% oxygen. It then travels down our bronchus and then filtered through small branches of tubes that are called bronchioles until it reaches the alveoli (this is what your lung is made up of). The alveoli are tiny sacks covered in blood capillaries where the oxygen is filtered from and into your blood where it heads to the heart. Then the heart will pump the oxygenated blood to the organs and muscles.

Aerobic exercise differs to anaerobic (also known as strength training) by the duration and intensity of muscular contractions involved as well as by how energy is generated within the muscle. Aerobic exercise includes exercise that is usually performed at a low to medium intensity for an extended amount of time that maintains an increased heart rate.

Not only does aerobic exercise improve your fitness but it also has many other great benefits too – such as prevent or reduce the chance of developing some cancers, depression, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis. Aerobic exercise will also help with weight lose or maintaining a healthy weight and will stimulate the immune system too.

The average resting heart will beat around 60-80 beets per minute. When we do any sort of aerobic exercise we want to get our heart rate to around 60-80% of our Maximum Heart Rate (MHR). A simple equation to do this is 220 – your age. That will give you your MHR. So for example, lets say you are 30 years old and want to work to 80% of your maximum heart rate: 220 – 30 = 190. So your MHR is 190. 80% of 190 = 152. This means that when you are doing aerobic exercise you will want to keep your heart rate around 152 beats per minute.

Exercises that are classed as aerobic are swimming, jogging, cycling and some group classes such as indoor cycling and aerobics.

You can check out this aerobic video taken from our YouTube channel below.

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