In today’s modern life, where businesses are designed to make us obese and lazy in the name of a comfortable life, staying fit and healthy becomes the biggest challenge, especially for our youth.
Cardio helps you both internally and externally. It keeps your mind fresh, keeps you active, and when you grow old, you won’t have to face joint pain or other health issues.
What is cardio?
In simple words, any movement that increases your heart rate is called cardio. A normal person’s heart beats 70-80 times per minute. When you do any workout that raises your heart rate to around 110 beats per minute, it’s considered cardio. When your heart is pumping between 110-190 beats per minute, you are in the cardio zone. Cardio is essentially an exercise for your heart and lungs.
Our heart is made of muscle, and cardio is important for strengthening this muscle, reducing the chances of a stroke. Additionally, if your goal is to gain muscle, you need to strengthen your heart so it can pump more blood and nutrients to those muscles.
People of all ages can do cardio. It increases strength and endurance, making people internally stronger and externally younger. There are several types of cardio exercises:
• Walking
• Cycling
• Running
• Rope skipping
• Stair climbing
• Hiking
• Swimming
• Burpees
Cardio is a simple yet highly effective form of exercise that many can perform without any equipment, whether at home, outdoors, or in a gym. These simple workouts offer extraordinary benefits.
Increase Hormone Production
Cardio increases your body’s demand for hormones, leading to a boost in their production. Not only that, but it also helps reduce toxic hormones from your body.
Insulin, endorphins, testosterone, and estrogen are some essential hormones for the human body. When we eat food, we get glucose from it. cardio helps to increase the insulin sensitivity in our body which helps us absorb glucose more effectively. This hormone is necessary for diabetic patients. It helps them in controlling their diabetes. This also reduces the chances in the human body of getting type 2 diabetes
Testosterone and estrogen are two essential hormones in the human body, cardio helps to balance these essential hormones also. Testosterone, often referred to as the key hormone for men, is crucial for the overall development of a man’s body. Cardio exercises, especially those involving the lower body, stimulate the production of this hormone. Additionally, it helps women maintain estrogen balance, particularly during menopause.
Cardiovascular Health
Cardio keeps your cardiovascular system healthy and reduces the chances of harmful effects. There are many factors to consider when we talk about cardiovascular health. Let’s start with the most important one:
1. Heart Health
When we perform cardio, it increases our heart rate. This helps the heart pump more blood, which is especially important if you’re gaining more muscle. It ensures proper heart functionality, helps prevent us from getting easily out of breath during physical activity, and reduces the risk of heart diseases like heart attacks or arrhythmias.
2. Blood Vessel Health
If our arteries and veins are not clean and flexible, the chances of experiencing a heart attack, vein blockage, or stroke at an early age are very high. Our blood vessels often develop blockages due to cholesterol and fat buildup. Cardio works as a powerful remedy against this. It helps melt fat and cholesterol, converts them into hormones, and keeps our vessels clear and flexible for proper circulation.
3. Proper Blood Flow
When you have proper blood flow in your body, it ensures that all nutrients, essential vitamins, minerals, and oxygen reach all organs and tissues effectively. This is crucial for maximizing hypertrophy because poor circulation can cause muscle cramps, fatigue, and organ dysfunction. Cardio helps keep your vessels clear and ensures a proper supply of essential elements throughout your body.
4. Maintain Regular Blood Pressure
- If you have hypertension, your risk of heart failure is three times higher than that of a person with normal blood pressure. Therefore, it’s essential to keep your blood pressure under control. While cardio is not the ultimate solution, research has proven that it is one of the factors that helps regulate blood pressure levels.
Maintaining normal blood pressure is crucial for everyone to reduce strain on the heart and blood vessels. High blood pressure affects not only the heart but also the kidneys. In addition to cardio, reduce your salt intake, stay active, and have regular health checkups. These steps will help you maintain normal blood pressure.
Enhance Sleep Quality
When you do cardio regularly, it increases the production and release of a hormone called endorphin, which helps calm your brain quickly so that you fall asleep much faster when you go to bed.
Cardio helps a man sleep faster, and it also helps improve the quality of deep sleep. For that reason, he feels refreshed the next day and can give his full attention to his work.
Regular cardio maintains a man’s circadian rhythm, it is the natural hour of sleep. Studies show that cardiovascular exercise increases the time of slow-wave sleep, which is really helpful for our brain’s ability to process data for the next day.
When someone does cardio, he actually uses a lot of energy, which makes our body physically tired; that’s why his sleep demand goes up, and he can also go for a deep sleep faster.
Enhance Mental Health
Cardio is a powerful tool for improving your mental well-being.
1. Brain Functionality
When you do cardio, blood flow to your brain increases, boosting the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factors, which helps improve brain functionality. This makes your brain work faster, enhances memory, and also boosts productivity, focus, and cognitive function.
2. Reduces Stress, Anxiety, and Depression, and Makes You Happy
As discussed before, cardio helps increase the production of beneficial hormones and reduce the production of toxic ones. Hormones like cortisol are responsible for causing frustration, stress, and anxiety, which negatively impact our brain.
Research shows that regular cardio can reduce cortisol production in the human body by 18%-25% and alleviate depression symptoms by 40%-50%, making it a powerful tool for mental well-being.
Not only that, but cardio also increases the production of hormones like endorphins (natural painkillers), serotonin (which regulates mood and emotions), and dopamine (the “happy” hormone). By releasing these hormones, cardio helps us feel happy, calm, motivated, and disciplined.
Boost Immune System
Immune system means the ability of the human body to fight against germs and disease. Cardio increases the number of white blood cells (WBC), which are a key component of the immune system. As blood circulation increases, WBCs travel through the body more quickly, detecting and destroying germs and bacteria.
Cardio exercise strengthens the lymphatic system, which helps remove toxins and waste from the body and reduces inflammation. During cardio, body tissues receive more oxygen, which increases their strength and contributes to overall health.
Research shows that after a cardio session, a person’s immune system remains elevated for the next 24 hours.
Promotes Gut Health
Our digestion needs to be strong so that we can get 100% of the benefits from the food we eat. Let me break it down for you: our body needs nutrition, and nutrition comes from the food we consume. If our digestive system doesn’t work properly, it won’t digest our food, and we won’t be able to absorb the necessary nutrients.
Our digestion relies on probiotics, which are good bacteria, and cardio helps increase the number of probiotics in the body. This supports a healthy digestion process.
Supports Joint Health
To keep our joints strong, the nerves and ligaments around each joint need to function properly. When we do cardio, blood circulation improves, helping to maintain the proper supply of synovial fluid in the joints. This fluid allows our joints to move more easily during regular activities like walking, running, weightlifting, cycling, etc.
Cardio also strengthens the muscles around the joints, providing additional support for joint movement, especially in older adults.
Faster Recovery
In the recovery process, the most important factor is supplying essential nutrition and oxygen to the affected areas. This is only possible through blood circulation, as all essential nutrients and oxygen are delivered to the body via the bloodstream. The faster our blood circulation, the quicker our recovery will be.
There are also other factors that contribute to faster recovery, such as reduced inflammation, stronger muscles, lower cortisol levels, removal of lactic acid, and a positive mindset, which is supported by the release of the happy hormone endorphins.
Enhance Skin Health and Keep You Younger
There’s a layer of fat beneath our skin, especially on the face, which can lead to pimples and blackheads. As a result, you may appear older than your actual age, even in your youth.
Cardio helps solve this problem in many ways. It improves blood circulation to the skin, delivering essential nutrients, which help scars or marks heal more quickly and removes waste. Additionally, when you do cardio, you sweat a lot, which helps cleanse your skin and remove toxins, aiding in the removal of issues like bruises and blackheads.
Furthermore, cardio increases the production of a protein called collagen, which helps keep your skin firm, balanced, tight, and youthful.
Boost Your Metabolism
After a cardio session, our body consumes more oxygen, which increases the metabolic rate. Additionally, our body has cells called mitochondria, which act as the energy production centers for our muscles. When we do cardio, these cells become more active. As a result, even though we burn calories during cardio, the increased activity of these cells raises the calorie burn rate, leading to greater fat loss. Some studies show that cardio can increase the power of mitochondria by 20%-25%. This process is called basal metabolic rate (BMR).
Moreover, cardio also increases the release of hormones like glucagon and adrenaline, which break down fat and convert it into energy. As a result, it burns more energy. Studies show that the production of these hormones can be elevated by 30%-40% with cardio.
Enhance Flexibility and Ease of Movement
No matter your current condition—whether you are generally fit, obese, or muscular—cardio will eliminate sluggishness in your body and make your joints more flexible, allowing for easier movement. You will feel lighter. It also improves the connection between your brain and body. Research shows that for those who do cardio regularly, their reflex time increases by 15%-20%. This will make your everyday activities feel effortless.
The Ideal Duration for Maximum Benefits
Generally, if you want to keep yourself fit, the American Heart Association recommends 150 minutes of cardio per week for maximum results. This means 30 minutes per day, 5 days a week. If you’re a beginner, or if the duration feels too challenging due to your age, you can divide it into three sessions of 10 minutes each. However, if you’re doing vigorous exercise, 75 minutes per week is ideal. This means either 25 minutes per day, 3 days a week, or 15 minutes per day, 5 days a week, for maximum results. If you’re in a bulking stage, 15-20 minutes per day, 2 days a week, would be ideal.
The Bottom Line
Cardio is vital at every stage of life to lead a healthy life and prevent disease and joint pain in old age. If we summarize the benefits, we can say:
- It increases the production of essential hormones and reduces toxic hormones.
- It improves heart health, blood pressure, blood vessel health, and proper blood flow.
- It helps you sleep deeply and peacefully.
- It enhances mental clarity, reduces anxiety, frustration, and depression, and makes you happy.
- It boosts your immune function, gut health, and joint functionality.
- It helps you live younger and more actively.
