Myths About Cardiovascular Fitness

1. Increasing your cardiovascular fitness alone will ward off heart disease.

Although increasing your cardiovascular fitness will help in keeping your heart strong and help to control your weight, eating right and lowering stress levels in your life—in conjunction with proper exercise—is the best approach.

2. You have to do aerobic exercise for at least an hour to get results.

This is not all together true, slow, steady aerobic activity does have its place, but who has time to do that? You can replace it with high intensity interval training (HITT) or some high intensity circuit training and do it for half the time, and the great thing is your body will be burning fat for a couple of hour after your workout.

3. The more intense your cardiovascular training the more junk food you can eat.

FALSE! This myth about cardiovascular fitness is one that many people believe. A lot of times when people first start training they actually end up gaining weight. What?! Look, again, and I can’t stress this enough, it’s about what you eat and not so much how much you eat. The sad truth is if you continue to eat poorly even though you’re training, you’re going to put the pounds on.

"Training stimulates your appetite and if you’re eating crap you’ll just eat more crap. There is no substitute for eating healthy."

4. Aerobic training is all the same so I can just keep doing the same exercises.

This really isn’t the best frame of mind to go into your cardiovascular training with. The body has an incredible capacity to adapt so it’s our job to keep our bodies guessing. This is when you achieve the best results.

5. Don’t eat before your cardiovascular fitness training to ensure that you burn fat.

If you don’t have enough fat or carbohydrates in your system before you train your body will find another source of energy and the last thing you want is your body using muscle tissue as fuel to get you through your workout; it kinda defeats the purpose.

6. If you only have a limited amount of time skip the cardiovascular fitness.

Don’t skip it, if you only have 10 minutes that’s fine, it’s better than nothing, so high intensity is the way to go. Put together 4-5 exercises in a circuit and blast through them 3-4 times.

7. I can perform aerobic exercises every day- No, you can become over-trained performing cardio conditioning every day.Of course every individual is different but the body does need time to recuperate and replenish itself, if not, everything that you’ve worked so hard to achieve will reverse itself when you’re over-trained.

8. Cardiovascular exercise is the best way to burn fat.

Cardiovascular exercise isn’t the best or the worst, it’s just a piece of the puzzle. Along with good eating habits and other forms of exercise—put it all together—and you’re on your way to living a healthier life.

So there you have 8 myths about cardiovascular fitness anyone who's serious about becoming fit should know, train hard and train safe.



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