Understanding the Benefits of Aerobic Exercise

The benefits of aerobic exercise are many. While there are many different kinds of exercise...from flexibility, to weight training, to anaerobic...aerobic exercises are possibly the best for you and have the most benefits.

Aerobic exercise is also known as cardio and works the heart muscle, making you healthier. When you do cardio, your heart rate is elevated. You breathe harder as a result and you sweat.

Doing this type of exercise, your body’s muscles need a lot of fuel. You get your energy usually from what you eat and your fat stores, and your muscles get fuel from oxygen. The more you work your muscles the more oxygen is needed. Your body will send the message to your heart to pump more oxygen and to pump it faster to meet the need for more oxygen. As your heart pumps faster you need to breathe more to get the oxygen into your blood.
When you do cardio you are working all of your muscles and making them work more efficiently. There are many benefits of aerobic exercise. These benefits include getting into better shape, losing weight, making your heart healthier and warding off heart disease, lowering your blood pressure, warding off osteoporosis and many other benefits.

As explained earlier your muscles will require more oxygen. And the more you work your muscles the better they can handle the work, making you stronger and in better shape.

The common phrase “if you don’t use it you lose it” is true when it comes to working your muscles. If you don’t use your muscles your body has no need to send as many nutrients and as much energy to them. So, over time you may notice that your muscles can’t perform the same as they used to.

But if you start using your muscles through exercise your body recognizes the need to get them into shape. Your body will send your muscles more energy and even more nutrients to keep these used muscles in better shape.

By getting more nutrients sent to your muscles you can ward off a wide array of illnesses and disease. One disease is osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is the degeneration of your bones. By exercising, your body will send more nutrients, like calcium, into your bones to make them stronger.

Once your bones have begun to degenerate due to osteoporosis it is hard to stop it, although you can improve it by exercising. It is best to prevent osteoporosis when you exercise and make your bones stronger and healthier so you don’t have to experience osteoporosis.

Another of the benefits of aerobic exercise is all of the weight that you can lose. It is commonly known that in order to lose a lot of weight the right way you need to exercise. And the exercise of choice for weight loss is aerobic exercise. This is because your body burns the most fat and the most fat calories when doing aerobic exercise.

For every minute that you do aerobic exercise you burn over 2.5 fat calories. Fat calories are different from calories and are harder to burn. And fat calories don’t burn away easily from weight training, or by working on your flexibility. And in order to lose one pound you need to burn at least 3500 calories. It is possible to burn these calories through other means of exercise...it just takes a lot longer and isn’t as effective.

Pay close attention to the benefits of aerobic exercise. You can lose weight, get healthier, prevent diseases and even feel better about yourself. All you have to do is start exercising, get your heart rate to rise, and sweat!