
For strength-related goals, enhancing aerobic capacity can improve blood, oxygen and nutrient flow to working muscles and help with recovery between sets of resistance-training exercises.

Regardless of what your clients’ fitness goals may be, improving aerobic capacity can help move them closer to reaching them. This, in turn, helps burn calories, which an important component of weight loss.

And, because the body burns about 5 calories of energy to consume 1 liter of oxygen, increasing aerobic capacity can help the body become more efficient at using oxygen. The more oxygen that can be consumed, the more physical work an individual will be able to do.
#Building up cardio endurance free
While cardio training is most often associated with fat loss, it is also the best way to improve aerobic capacity, which is the ability to use oxygen to fuel exercise activity.ĭuring low- to moderate-intensity exercise, muscles rely on energy from a combination of oxygen and the substrates of carbohydrates (in the form of glycogen), and fats (called free fatty acids). Cardiorespiratory training can enhance the body’s ability to metabolize fats and carbohydrates into fuel, both with and without oxygen. And if your client is participating in a race or wants to lose weight, you would emphasize cardiorespiratory training. Likewise, if a client’s goals are to improve mobility and movement efficiency, you would focus on flexibility. However, if a client wants to improve definition and/or physical function, for example, you would focus his or her program on strength training. Every person starting a workout program will have a unique goal, but each goal requires a different level of focus on each of these components.Ī well-designed exercise program includes all three components. And finally, cardiorespiratory training improves the ability to both move oxygen and nutrients to working muscles and to remove metabolic waste, which allows muscles to continue to perform a particular activity.

Flexibility or mobility exercises can reduce muscle tension and improve joint range of motion, which are essential for enhancing overall movement efficiency. Resistance-training exercises help improve both muscle strength, which can elevate resting metabolism (the number of calories burned while at rest), and functional performance in a variety of activities. There are three components of exercise: resistance training, flexibility (actually, it’s more appropriate to call it “mobility,” but that’s a subject for another blog on another day) and cardiorespiratory training.
