The Little Known Risks of Cardio Exercise!
Many studies confirm the benefits of cardiovascular conditioning, popularly known as aerobics or cardio. Numerous peer-reviewed studies show that aerobics prevents high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease, as well as reducing the risk for some cancers. The benefits of aerobics are not limited to physical health. Studies also indicate mental health benefits such as reduced depression and improved brain function.
Aerobics is one of three distinct kinds of exercise that studies show are absolutely essential to our health, the other two being strength training and stretching. And here is where the danger of aerobics lies – your body needs all three of these exercises regularly, and any one of them alone will NOT keep you healthy!
Muscle Loss
So what happens if you do aerobic exercise and nothing else? There are a couple ill effects. Let’s explore them. First, aerobics does not build muscle tissue. Aerobics burns calories but does nothing to restore the muscle that we lose all over the body after about age 30. Muscle is critical to balance and the prevention of falls which are the leading cause of injury-related death among seniors. Muscle is also essential for protecting our joints from injury. Thus doing only cardio exercise can give us a false sense of health.
This is not to say aerobics is less important than the other two. Aerobics strengthens your heart and improves your stamina like no other exercise.
Weight Gain
There’s another danger in doing ONLY aerobic exercise. This danger pertains to those who use aerobics to lose weight. Fitness research found that cardio workouts cause food cravings. We all know how difficult it is to ignore food cravings – nearly impossible. The best solution is to add strength training to your workout which decreases our craving for food.
Oh, and one more thing. Pilates is one of the few methods that includes all three kinds of exercise that the body needs – stretching, strength training, and cardio. You get both stretching and strength training from the every Pilates exercise. Cardio is added later when you reach the intermediate and advanced levels and remove pauses between each exercise. Thus, with Pilates you avoid both cardio problems mentioned here.