Traditionally people tended to lean towards long distance cardio exercises like running, cycling, rowing and swimming to boost their stamina and endurance. The problem with this thought process is that cardio exercises only help the athlete when it comes to endurance, and leaves them vulnerable when it comes to their strength.
When you focus on both cardio and strength training, you reap the benefits from both and improving on one can greatly affect the other. For example if you focus more on weight training when it comes to your legs, you will be able to achieve more burst and a quicker release than you would from cardio training alone.
Adding this muscle tissue through weight training shows that it positively affects performance in endurance exercise as well. In addition to that, the extra muscle added from weight training acts as padding for your bones and joints, reducing the wear and tear of these joints allowing you a better quality of life.
Combine Strength and Cardio Training
If you didn’t catch on before, we suggest that you combine your cardio program with a weight training program, again because of the benefits that each provide. The best way to approach this is to start out your workout routine by lifting weights, and finishing up your weight lifting routine by adding in some cardio.
Getting a full body workout from both the strength training and cardio will only challenge your heart and cardiovascular system further, pushing your body to make those adaptations and changes even faster.
Reduce Breaks In Between Sets
When trying to push your body to adapt and change as quickly as possible to see the results you want quickly, it is important to keep your heart rate in mind. Maintaining your heart rate high, at almost maximum consistently throughout your routine is the key to seeing this change happen fast.
Maintaining that high heart rate is a result of this stress you are putting on your body, forcing it to change. One of the most important aspects of your workout routine is to find that sweet spot, or proper balance of just how hard you can push yourself to see these results. Push too hard and you can over exert yourself, but pushing just hard enough keeps your progression steady.
Use Compound Exercises to Your Advantage
Unless you are specifically trying to define a very particular muscle or muscle group, you can eliminate isolation exercises from your routine for the most part. They are more time consuming and do not work multiple muscle groups simultaneously like your compound exercises.
Compound exercises like pull-ups, push-ups, and lunges work more than one muscle group, requires more energy and thus taxes you more overall. Doing these exercises is more work for you heart since it has to supply a larger area of tissue with an adequate blood supply than it has to for isolation exercises.
Performing compound exercises cause more stress on your heart and body causing your body to adapt and adjust more quickly. This is the main reason behind why combination exercises are more beneficial here than isolation, as you can do more work in the same time through compound exercises rather than isolation.
Change Up Your Routine Every So Often
In case you haven’t noticed as of yet, the common theme here with all of these suggestions is to keep your body stressed. Once your body adapts to the stress and adjusts, you will no longer see any further results from the exercise, making it important to vary them up.
This doesn’t mean that you have to always think up new exercises and entire routines though. Something as simple as increasing the weight, number of sets, or number of repetitions within sets are easy effective ways to vary up your routine.
The easiest way to tell whether or not you are getting the most out of your routine is determining how taxed your body is from a particular exercise. If you aren’t getting gassed from your exercise than you probably aren’t exerting yourself enough, and should look to kick up the intensity levels a notch.
If you notice that you are having no troubles completing the exercise, you should increase the repetitions to ensure that you continue to see results and improvement.
