Cardio exercises can help you in maintaining a healthy heart and also tone your body to lose weight.

The most popular cardio exercise is running. This is one of the most inexpensive and simple cardio exercise that can be done anywhere without special equipments. You just need good running shoes and also appropriate clothing to match the weather. Running helps you to burn a lot of calories especially on hills and sprinting landscapes. You need to warm up with a 5 – 10 minute stretching exercise followed by a 5 minute walk and then jog for 10 minutes before you start your run. You can avail special marathon training to run for long distances. You can also choose short distance running where you can maintain better speed. While you end the run, you jog for the last 2 – 3 minutes, then walk slowly and stop.

Boxing is one of the best cardio exercises, concentrating on various important muscle groups. You need to perform warm up exercises for 5 – 10 minutes. This is followed by basic resistance endurance exercises for another 10 minutes. Then, you perform 5 minute drilling exercises where you do punches and defense exercises. While you do the boxing workout, slowly increase the boxing intensity by punching different weight bags. You may need to take 5-minute breaks in between to stabilize heart beat. Make sure you wear good boxing shoes and also heavily padded gloves while performing this workout.

Swimming is another excellent cardio exercise where you can concentrate on various part of the body and muscle groups by performing the different strokes like freestyle, breaststroke and backstroke. You start swimming with a warm up exercise of 250 – 400m. Then you do a balancing drill. You can pause every 25m to improve your balance inside water. A typical beginner workout involves swimming for about 2000 – 2500m. At the end of the swimming workout you can do a combination of the three strokes mentioned above, rest for a minute and again do some easy swim strokes for the last 150m to end your exercise routine for the day. A good swimsuit with goggles will make your workout routine comfortable. It is better that you start slowly in the beginning and do good warm up exercises before increasing the intensity of the workout. Swimming reduces the risk of various diseases like strokes and diabetes. A 30 – 60 minute workout is a good start for beginners.

Power walking is one of the best cardio exercises recommended for people including senior citizens. You are advised to wear good rubber shoes when you do this workout. This workout helps in maintaining good pulse rate and also burns excess fat in the body. You need to warm up by easy walking for 5 – 10 minutes and perform stretching exercises for another 5 minutes. Then you can increase the pace of walking and reach a heart rate up to 70% of your maximum recommended heart rate.

Ashtanga Yoga is another popular cardio exercise involving traditional yoga postures with aerobic moves. This cardio routine involves breathing exercises, increasing the body energy by awareness and strengthening the abdomen.

Click here to learn how to burn you body fat and build your muscle

Popularity: 37% [?]

Bonus:

Discover 10 idiot proof rules of dieting and fat loss