3 Main Components Of Exercise For Your Workout Routine
For a complete workout program, you must incorporate all three components of exercise into your routine: cardio, strength, and flexibility.
Exercise is a regular activity we must do to keep fit and build our muscles. For someone who is just starting out exercising, he or she might be a little bit confused about the type of exercise to do.
Watching videos will just show you people engaging in a different form of exercise, but you don’t know why they choose to lift weight rather than jog, or why they are squatting rather than running.
There different types of exercising which are under three components we are going to discuss. Each exercise is made for a different thing.
Of course, you can engage in all three of them, but if you have a goal to build a part of your body, then there are exercises you should focus on.
Let’s have a look at the three components of exercise.
The Main Three Components Of Exercise
Here are three types of exercises that will help you prepare your body for different fitness outcomes:
1. Cardio
Also known as endurance training or aerobic, cardio is a type of exercise that deals mostly with outdoor fitness. Examples of cardio exercises include:
- Walking,
- Running,
- Skipping,
- Jogging,
- Tennis,
- Lacrosse,
- Basketball,
- Hockey,
- Soccer,
- Hiking,
- Skating,
- Cycling,
- Stair climbing,
- Rowing,
- Dance sessions,
- And swimming.
They are the most common type of exercise anyone can engage in.
Exercise beginners should do some cardio before delving into other components to set them in the mood.
Cardio should be done three to four times a week with the timing of about 30 minutes to 1 hour. If you are starting out, you can try 15 minutes before you build it up to 30 minutes or an hour.
The benefit of this type of exercise is, it makes your heart stronger and allows free blood circulation all around the body. When you engage in cardio, your heart rate rises for a long period.
2. Flexibility
This type of exercise works on the muscle and joints to make them more flexible. And the benefits of flexibility exercises include injury prevention, back pain relief, and balance improvement.
Flexibility exercise is divided into two:
- Active short duration flexibility;
- And static flexibility.
The active flexibility can be used as a warm-up at the beginning of your exercise routine.
Flexibility helps you get prepared for the main exercise by stretching your muscles and making sure they are not stiff to reduce the risk of injury during exercise.
The active flexibility workout can take about 30-60 seconds. The static flexibility is one that you can do for a longer period, say 5-10 minutes. That is after your main workout.
Flexibility exercises include stretching, gymnastics, martial arts, dance, and yoga.
3. Resistance Training
This is for increasing your metabolism rate so that your body can burn fat fast as well as build your body mass.
When we try to lose weight by dieting, we do not only lose our muscle mass, our metabolism becomes slow, making it harder to burn more fat when we get to a certain stage.
Moreover, slow metabolism equals decreased strength and sluggishness which prevents us from being productive or even working out.
This is why it is important to incorporate resistance training if you plan on shedding some fat or increasing daily productivity.
Equipment for strength training includes weight machines and free weights. You can also use your body weight in the form of pushups, squats, planks, Pilates, sit-up.
When engaging in resistance training, it is important to remember to always space out the days to avoid tearing of the muscles.
If you concentrated on one muscle group one day, you should give two days interval before coming back to it. You can concentrate on other muscles while the previous ones are still healing.
Knowing your exercise goals is what will determine the number of repetitions you do on resistance training.
For a complete workout program that also keeps long-term fitness in mind, all three components of exercise should be incorporated into your exercise routine.
