Ep. 037 - Making the Most of Cardio: Strategies for Health, Focus, and Longevity

SHOW NOTES

Elevate your health, weight management and mental clarity with the transformative power of cardio. In my latest podcast episode, I unveil the secrets of heart rate training, spotlighting the benefits of zone two training—a low-intensity approach that supercharges mitochondrial health.

I also dive  into the nuances of each heart rate zone, discover exercises tailored for each, and uncover strategies to diversify your workouts for maximum impact. 

In doing so, I hope you understand the pivotal role of cardio in longevity and holistic health, and find out how to customize it to fit your lifestyle.

Ready to elevate your wellness journey? Tune in and discover the path to optimal health. Don't just listen—act. Your heart and health await.

TRANSCRIPT

Do you want to know how to effectively add cardio exercise for your best health and weight loss, then keep listening.

Welcome to man in the Arena, your go-to podcast for all things related to health and weight loss for men over 40. Here we discuss strategies that will get you off the sidelines and into the game so you can achieve your optimal health. It's time to lead a legacy of longevity.

Hello and welcome. Welcome, welcome to the arena. I've been meeting and wanting to do this episode for quite a long time now and, with all the running I've been doing, I was inspired to share what I know about cardio vascular exercise and heart rate beast training, which I think is really, really important for men's health and weight loss.

So maybe you're overweight and you're sedentary and you want to start exercising, but you have this real concern that you're going to have a heart-related incident if you do. Or maybe you've heard many different ideas about what you should be doing, but you're a little confused because there's so much information out there and this just kind of keeps you stuck. Or maybe you're already active and you're already doing lots of aerobic activity, but you want to start to optimize what you're doing. Or maybe you're thinking of starting a weight loss journey of your own and you're curious about the role cardio vascular exercise plays in weight loss. If you don't fall into any of these categories, that's okay, because today I'm going to share a ton of great ideas and insights and, most importantly, I'm going to keep it simple. So, no doubt, no matter where you fall on this kind of spectrum, you're going to get something out of listening today. So with that, here's what I'm going to cover.

I'm going to talk about four things. Number one I want to talk about how do you define cardio vascular exercise, and I also want to kind of talk about my take on why and how to incorporate cardio into your lifestyle, including the benefits. Then I'm going to talk about the different heart rate zones all right, the different heart rate zones that we want to train in. Number three, I'm going to go over why each of these zones is important. And lastly, number four, I'm going to offer different thoughts about cardio and heart rate training overall. So that's what we're going to cover in the next 15 or 20 minutes. Before I do all that, I want to be very clear Please check with your doctor and get the okay from them before you start any kind of exercise program, let alone a cardio vascular based program. I want you to be better safe than sorry. Now, as we get into our forties and beyond, the associative risks, whether they're genetic or lifestyle related, they go higher and higher. So I just want to make sure you're taking all the precautions. Good deal, okay, let's jump in.

So cardio vascular exercise is also known as aerobic or endurance based exercise and it's defined by any form of activity that uses aerobic metabolism, meaning oxygen is involved in the cellular reactions that are necessary to produce the energy you need to sustain that activity. So it's continuous in nature and it causes your heart rate to increase, your respiration rate to increase, increase in blood flow to the working muscles and tissues. So think of walking, running, rowing, cycling, jumping rope, on and on and on. You get the idea. It's continuous in nature and, believe it or not, housework, lifting weights these can also be considered cardio vascular exercise, as long as you're working above 50% of your maximum heart rate for at least 10 minutes. Just for context, you may have heard the term anaerobic exercise and that refers to movement where it's usually more intense but it's shorter in nature and therefore it doesn't require oxygen for the energy requirements.

So if you walk up a flight of stairs or you're running to get the bus, this is usually considered an anaerobic activity because they're very high in intensity but they don't last long. Now, oftentimes you don't notice the exertion of an anaerobic activity until you stop and then you start to breathe heavily because your body is trying to suck in more oxygen to deal with the energy demands that you have. So at the same time, your heart rate spikes once you stop, you get to the top of the stairs or when you stop running for that bus. So essentially you're in this catch-up mode. Now, sometimes trainers or coaches, they'll define cardio based on the impact. So we have high impact cardio and this is where both feet leave the ground during the activity, so think running and jumping rope. Then we have low impact cardio. Low impact cardio and this is based on where you have at least one foot on the ground, so think walking. And then, last, we have no impact cardio where our feet are on the ground at all. We're kind of supported by. You know, if we're riding a bike, then we're cycling and our weight is supported by the tires in the frame of the bike. Or if we're swimming, this is no impact cardio because our bodies are supported by the water.

So it's important to note that cardio exercise plays a vital role in our overall well-being and there's so many benefits. So some of the benefits obviously, we have improved heart health, improved blood pressure, enhanced HDL cholesterol. We see decreased blood proteins, fats and sugars. We see reduced blood clots. We have way better diabetes management. Cardio also enhances your brain health. You have way more positivity. You have way better memory, cognitive function. Your overall mental health is improved. We have reduced stress, increased focus and energy, and then, of course, as you know, you see this release of endorphins. We have improved immunity.

So the list is so long, guys, and I could go on and on and on describing all the benefits of cardiovascular exercise, to the point where we could bottle up cardio and prescribe it in a pill form. There would be millions to be made because everyone would want to take this drug. So I'm not telling you anything you don't know already. Cardiovascular exercise is essential. So if you're not regularly engaged in some someric cardio exercise, I want you to ask yourself why that is, and if you don't know, I'm here today to help you answer that. So something I want you to understand about cardio is the importance of using your heart rate to determine your intensity and the amount that you should do. When it comes to cardio, your heart rate does not lie. So, as we know, your heart rate has this natural rhythm. When you're at rest, your heart beats anywhere between 40 and 70 beats per minute, and there's a variety of factors that impact this, mostly your age, your gender, your lifestyle and, of course, any medications. These all go into determining what your resting heart rate is.

So, naturally, endurance athletes they will have a lower resting heart rate because they have a really strong aerobic system, cardiovascular system, and once you become a more fit and trained individual, you will notice your resting heart rate lower. Now, as we engage in activity, our heart rate increases because we need to pump more blood and oxygen to our working muscles. So we have our resting heart rate and then we have our sort of our beats per minute, our active beats per minute, and a lot of times we want to know what our maximum heart rate is in order to determine where we should be exercising at a certain intensity. So this is this maximum heart rate the number of beats per minute that your heart's going to beat is based on a theoretical formula, and it's theoretical because it's not 100% accurate, but it's accurate enough to give us the information we need.

So here is the formula and I want you to pull out a pen and paper and I want you to identify, based on this formula, what your maximum heart rate is, because this will then give us the information we need to determine your sort of zones, your heart rate zones. So formula is very simple it's 220 minus your age. If you're 40 years old, then your maximum heart rate is 220 minus 40, equals 100 and beats per minute. So, theoretically, your heart will never beat more than 100 beats per minute, even at a maximum sprint. Okay, why is this important? Well, I just said, because now we can use our maximum heart rate to determine the different heart rate zones we'll work in during our workouts, and there's different ways to structure and formulate cardio workouts, so we need to know what our zones are. You might have heard of HIIT workouts, so high intensity interval training.

High intensity interval training is work designed for a mountain of time where, say, you're all out for 30 seconds or a minute and then that's followed by a period of rest, usually active rest or just complete rest, where you wait before the next interval and then you repeat this over a designated number of intervals. Okay, the opposite of HIIT is LIS, l-i-s-s low intensity, steady state, and this is where you stay at a consistent pace for a long period of time. If you're a runner or you're a cyclist, you may be familiar with another sort of training like temple runs or hill training. There are lots of different types of cardio workouts and each one is designed to train a certain energy system in the body, so we need to know, a what your heart rate is during your workouts and, b what zone are we in and what zone do we want to be in. That means getting a heart rate monitor. If you have an Apple watch or a smartwatch or a Fitbit, there's a built-in heart rate monitor in that. I want you to start using it when you work out and if you're gonna start doing more cardio after this episode, use your heart rate monitor. If you don't have one of those devices, you can go and get a much cheaper sort of tracker heart rate tracker. One, for example, is one called the Amaze Fit A-M-A-Z-E-F-I-T. You can get that on Amazon, but there's a lot of different devices you can get that will help you measure your heart rate while you exercise. The old fashioned way of sort of putting your hand on your pulse, just not effective enough. We want real time data. There's also a chest strap that you can get on Amazon I think of my company called Wahoo W-A-H-O-O, or there's another company as well called Polar, which will also. You can get heart rate monitor strap from Polar and basically these can connect to an app on your phone. You get real life or real time data on your heart rate that way. Now one more thing when you set up whatever device you're using, be sure to enter in your gender and your age, because that's going to populate in the device and give you a much more accurate reading.

Otherwise it's gonna be defaulted to the program setting and then you're not gonna get a completely accurate reading. All right, heart rate zones. So there's five zones that we want to focus on when it comes to heart rate training. Zone one this means you're working between 55% and 65% of your max heart rate. So for a 40 year old male, zone one ranges between 99 beats per minute and 117 beats per minute. When you're in zone one, you're at the lowest end of your range, and this is often associated with recovery or active recovery. It's minimal stress and exertion and it's used for easy training days, recovery, active recovery days, as well as your warmup and your cool down. So zone one has a really important purpose. Zone two this is between 65% and 75% of your maximum heart rate and this is considered the aerobic zone. So for a 40 year old male, zone two ranges between 117 beats per minute and 135 beats per minute. Now, zone two directly impacts your aerobic fitness and it's characterized by longer exercise sessions I consider it 40 minutes or more where you can sustain the effort for miles and miles, and most people will use a talk test to determine if they're in this zone, meaning you can hold a conversation while you're in this zone.

But again, I recommend using a heart rate monitor instead. Sometimes zone two is referred to as the fat burning zone, because when you're exercising for longer periods of time more than 40 minutes, as I mentioned earlier this is the zone where your body's gonna utilize stored fat as its primary energy source, and the key here is that the intensity is low enough for your body to do this. In my opinion and research backs this up zone two training is the holy grail because there's so many health benefits associated with it, why it all comes down to mitochondria. So I want you to remember back to eighth grade science, where you learned about mitochondria. What I need you to remember and what I need you to know is the mitochondria loves zone two training, it loves aerobic training, and when we don't do enough of it, we enter into what's called mitochondrial dysfunction, and we know that this is one of the main causes of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, alzheimer's and other dementia related illnesses, not to mention weight management. So what does a zone two workout look like? It's very simple. It's as simple as going for a walk. You're gonna get into zone two unless you're very fit individual.

If you're more fit, then a walk isn't gonna get you there. You might have to add a little jog, but here's what happens when you start to add in that jog, your heart rate might start to skyrocket into zone three and four, and that's okay. Just go back to a walk and then keep this pattern up and over time you're gonna be able to keep your heart rate lower and consistent in zone two, even with a jog or a run. So a zone two workout is really simple. It's staying within this heart rate range for an extended period of time again 30 minutes, 40 minutes. Now the downside of LIS low intensity, steady state, zone two is it's time consuming, because workouts are often 40 minutes or longer.

The other downside of zone 2 training is you won't burn a ton of calories. Now you guys know, personally I don't prescribe any exercise as a way to burn calories and lose weight, because I believe that exercise is not an isolated weight loss tool. So I focus on the importance of exercise from a holistic health standpoint. Why? Because I don't want my clients having thoughts like well, I have this party tonight and I know I'm going to overeat, so I better burn a bunch of calories through exercise before I go, or vice versa. I don't want them to use exercise as a form of punishment. So they might say something like last night I made a ton of bad eating decisions or drinking decisions and I need to go work this off. Because this relationship with exercise is rooted in punishment and it most likely leads to less adherence over time. So exercise is not a tool, it's more of a lifestyle.

So that kind of talks about zone 2. Zone 3 is what we consider tempo pace, where you're working between 75% and 85% of your max heart rate. And we know we were in this range because now holding a conversation becomes very difficult. And so, for a 40 year old male, zone 3 ranges from 135 beats per minute to 153 beats per minute. Ironically enough, when most people go for a run as a workout, they often go for zone 3 because this feels the most comfortable, it feels the most rewarding. This is where your body releases the most endorphins and it's an effort that's hard enough, but it's sustainable. Now, the downside of zone 3 is you don't receive the same mitochondrial and aerobic benefits, plus, your risk of injury goes up because you're working at too high an intensity. So we don't really want to train too much in zone 3. Zone 4, this is where we're working between 85% and 90%, and it's often referred to at the lactate threshold zone. So this is the point and about of exercise, at which point you start to accumulate lactic acid in your muscles.

So instead of aerobic respiration, your body switches to anaerobic respiration and that's where we get this lactate that builds up in our muscle. So, for a 40 year old male, zone 4 ranges from 153 beats per minute to 162 beats per minute. Now, lastly, zone 5, this is 90% plus and it's an anaerobic max effort. So for a 40 year old male, that means 162 beats per minute and above. Now, zone 4 and zone 5 are often characterized by hit interval workouts or really high intensity type movements, and this is where we had that max effort, followed by rest and recovery, and then we repeat In these zones you're going to burn the most amount of calories, but the intensity is high and that means a higher risk of injury. There's also this boom phenomenon that happens in zone 4 and zone 5, where your metabolism sort of increases to a higher degree in the 24 to 48 hours after a solid cardio workout.

Okay, so you know how do you get your max heart rate. You know how to determine the zones you should be in. You know the importance of wearing a heart rate monitor while you work out so that you can accurately say which zone you are in. We don't want to base it on feel anymore, right? Because, as I said earlier, a lot of us are just going to naturally go towards zone 3 and that's where we get the least amount of benefit. Here's what I want you to know. If your goal is overall health and weight loss, you're going to want to structure your program differently than if you have a goal to run a fast 5k or if you want to run a marathon. If your goal is general health and wellness and perhaps some weight loss, here's where I want you to start. I want you to start just really easy Two to three zone 2 workouts a week, want you to aim for 30 minutes and then progress by five minutes each week until you reach maybe 60 minutes per workout, three days a week. These are focused on zone 2 aerobic workouts. Now, once you start to get into a really good routine, you notice your cardiovascular fitness improving. Then you'll want to optimize your workouts. That means targeting all these different zones throughout each week.

What you might want to do is you might want to still get in two 60 minute zone 2 workouts but then add in a third workout that's hit in nature, or maybe it's tempo in nature If it's hit. I recommend the following when you do a hit workout, you're always going to want to warm up again Warm up in zone 1, warm up a little bit in zone 2 and do this for anywhere between 5 and 10 minutes. Then what you want to do is you get into your high intensity interval training. You'll do a minute at 85% of your max heart rate or higher for a minute. Then what you want to do is follow that hard minute by an easy one minute. We go a minute hard and a minute easy. Your heart rate's not going to drop down to zone 1 or 2 during the recovery, but that's okay. You're getting enough recovery so that you can go back into zone 4 or 5 for the next minute. Basically, you're just going to repeat this pattern for 20 total minutes.

Once you've done that now you can finish with a zone 1 cool down. Let your heart rate come right back down as your aerobic fitness level improves. I want you to mix in workouts in different zones and I want you to also mix in weight training and cross training that get your heart rate into the different zones. And I also want you to remember that playing unstructured sports like hockey or baseball you go out and play shinny, you go out and play a pickup game. These are great ways to get in additional cardio that's not in a structured way, so it brings more fun into your workouts. Just try to remember to keep track of your heart rate so you know the level of strain that you're putting on your system. If you're a runner and you want to improve your performance, then you're probably already running four to five times per week, with 50% of your training in zone two, 25% of your training in zone one, 10% in zone three, 10% in zone four and about 5% of your overall training in zone five.

So if you've come this far in this episode, just let me recap. We talked about cardio, why it's important. We talked about how cardio is the pharmacist in your body that's going to tell your body to release all these amazing compounds needed for improved heart health, improved brain health, improved mood and energy. It's amazing, and we know that when we add cardio to our workouts, we need to measure our heart rate and, most importantly, we need to focus on zone two training. The last thing I want to talk to you about is your mindset around cardio. So I wanted you to ask yourself do you think that cardio is a chore? Is it something that sucks? What's your attitude around it? Do you judge yourself for being out of shape? Do you judge yourself for not having a lot of stamina? And I want you to be very mindful about what you're telling yourself, because this is going to heavily influence the actions you take next, and instead I want you to try new thoughts. I want you to start to think about cardio differently. So some things you might be able to think are cardio has way more benefits and it's going to greatly enhance the quality of my life. Zone two is a walk and talk pace, and I know how important that is and it's not that hard to do. So these are just some thoughts I want you to kind of repeat and think about. Another thought you might have is I don't have to start at a high intensity. In fact I shouldn't. I can start at a lower intensity. Okay, you can think I get to start easy. I can do other things while I get in my cardio. This last thought reminds me I often encourage clients to habit stack their cardio.

So while you're getting in that workout, watch the game. All right, do it at the same time. But remember, most importantly, this all starts with your mindset. I want you to start to think differently about cardiovascular exercise. It's not a negotiation anymore, it's a necessity.

Cardiovascular exercise is essential for your longevity and your health, and it doesn't have to be running. It could be walking, rowing, boxing, jump, rope, cycling. Just make sure you start small and slow and then plan it into your week, at least three times per week. I promise you your life is dramatically going to change when you focus on this area of your health and wellness. As always, if you want to develop a specific plan to your needs, please do not hesitate to contact me. I want you to head on over to thespearmethodcom and schedule a free consultation with me.

That's all I have for you this week. I look forward to seeing you again next week in our next episode. In the meantime, keep living a legacy of longevity and good health. If you're ready to step inside the arena and change the trajectory of your health, head on over to thespearmethod.com and download my free guide to learn simple and effective strategies on how to optimize your health today.